Double post

What in the world are you talking about? Taking advantage of multiple CPUs is more about how the application software is designed, not how the OS is designed. XP and Vista are both aware of multiple CPU systems and can control which threads go to which CPUs. How do they not take advantage of multiple CPUs?



Only if you want all of the cool Aero transparency effects. Vista works fine without the effects. If you don't care about the cool effects, you don't need to spend a dime on a video card.

Not to mention that the vast majority of video cards, even the cheapest ones, can handle the transparency stuff. My old GeForce 6800 had zero troubles with Aero's effects. You can buy a video card that handles it for $20.

I've been using Vista on two systems so far, and while yes it initially had troubles, I don't think the problems are anywhere near as bad as people are saying they are, especially after the first service pack. It's running quite smoothly on my system at the moment.

I really don't see that it's so bad that anybody needs to downgrade a system. Especially systems that have it already installed! As far as I know systems with it already installed have zero troubles with it, so there's no reason to downgrade them except for pure emotional hatred of the OS.

Especially after SP1 of Vista there's really no need to downgrade. I don't think there's any killer bugs left after SP1. I think this is mostly left over anger from Vista's rocky start.

Precisely!! To be blunt, I think anyone (not talking businesses here) who downgrades their Vista PC to XP is a bloody idiot... given most driver/software incompatibilities have been resolved, that nowadays propriety brands are Vista built and hardware compliant/compatible.

After having paid for Vista, it makes no sense at all to wipe it entirely off the machine to favour an older OS that's gonna get the manufacturing/support death nell from its creator sooner rather than later. Hello, dual boot, anyone???



That and the fear of change... having to learn how to navigate/use a new OS when the last one took an eternity to get accustomed to.

Well, you can't exactly blame Microsoft for driver issues - it's the hardware manufacturers that make the drivers, not Microsoft. The only drivers Microsoft makes are a few generic drivers and drivers for their own hardware. All of which currently work great.

Sorry, but that's just not Microsoft's fault. They've been pushing hard for the hardware manufacturers to release new drivers. Problem is, they have no direct control over the situation.

But I am curious: Which hardware are currently having problems?

XP's uptake percentage had to have been helped by the windows ME situation. It got to move in when every one hated the last windows release. Vista doesn't have that.

As for having the correct hardware to run Vista - for the love of God does anyone remember when XP came out? How many computers came with it and only 128MB ram with some of that shared to the video card? Or 256mb and an entry level Celeron CPU?

For the record I support Vista and XP computers daily for work. As a general rule any printer or camera made in the last 4 years will work with no problem with Vista and the same can be said for most software (although sometimes it can take a bit of effort for the more obscure). The catch is in the unique software coded for a very small percentage of the pc community and this is where I can understand corporate hesitation (not to mention IT support for the large % of people who would freak out at an OS change)

I also find it odd that people never mention the positive sides to Vista - how many people have used "instant search"? Its an amazing search utility that takes very little time to do a search of the entire drive. Much much better than XPs search (for those of you in IT it vastly reduces they "It didn't save (when they just don't know where it was saved)" or "I don't know where it was saved" complaints)

Also, there is the built in support for flash memory (The new super fast SSDs). XP can, but only with a decent amount of 'tweaking'
Better multi core CPU support
Improved network-ability (Vista to Vista networks always seem easier to set up than XP to XP - esp in regards to printers. Vista to XP can be a crap shoot although thats usually XPs fault)
And there are the versions of Vista that are 64bit

I had the good fortune to win a HDD and a Vista 64 Ultimate disk in April of last year. At first I ran into a fair bit of problems with programs (no driver issues for me though). Some of my games would crash and a lot of free programs I got for XP didn't work so I spent a lot of time dual booting.

I took a couple of months but now I rarely use XP as even with the 64bit version, I encounter next to no issues and am a very happy Vista user

Actually, properly configured, XP's search rocks quite nicely - I concede that it never occurred to me to properly configure it until i had a program that made use of it (Pixvue IIRC, a nice little IPTC search/editing program that I *do* wish had a linux equivalent), but it wasn't hard to do.

For myself - for anything but games, I like Ubuntu, 32 *or* 64 bit, better than either XP or Vista - it only takes slightly more power than XP, but it's as powerful or more powerful than Vista in almost any metric. Prettier too - {Grin}.

As for WinMe? Actually, just doing some searches now, it looks like Me never broke single digits in market share (I'm seeing 3.78% in 2004, not finding earlier data - but Me was only out for a year when XP was introduced), people got it with their PC's for that year, but nobody really upgraded to Me. Then of course XP took a lot of the good features of Me and put them in a much more robust package. So XP was primarily competing with Windows 98, and Windows 2000, both of which were not hated, but XP was a definite improvement.

Vista on the other hand, I just don't see a good reason to use. Linux is now a viable desktop OS, my games will run on XP, and no one has made a case for me to go from XP to Vista. The only genuinely powerful improvement was the new filesystem, and that got killed off the year before release.

Jonnan

Ah - No. Vista doesn't really compete with Linux on security issues. Don't get me wrong, it has some genuine improvements, but as someone that has to support it for people, it's security methodology is simply an improved implementation of a philosophy that goes back to Windows being a single person OS.

That is not BTW, something I think MS is particularly at fault for - it *does* have an evolutionary history there that is reflected in coding practices, while Linux/Unix evolution is very much based on multiple accounts with differing privileges, but it does mean that the NSA can produce a Security Enhanced Linux kernel, and it doesn't mean altering my practices after it's been adapted into the baseline kernel. The same features aren't implementable under Windows, because the coding practices have a great deal of momentum - they still expect access to privileged areas of the OS, and having a new user click an "okay" doesn't mean they aren't going to compromise their OS - that is after all the same protection scheme MS tried to use to get people to not click on virii in their email, writ large.

(I am also personally aware of some network weaknesses in Vista that are obscure, but go back years, and MS seemingly has no intent to fix. There is stuff that bypasses *way* too much security that I don't understand why MS has allowed to stand - they *don't* seem to connected to any good reason I can come up with. I'm bamboozled by the fact that there hasn't been a major security breach based on it - it's obscure, but fairly powerful.)

All that said - in the hands of a computer literate user, XP and Vista are both "Good enuff", and if it were based just on program availability - well, almost everything on Linux is either ported, or port-able to Windows - Gimp and Blender are good examples. The only feature that I think isn't going to get ported (Because of the different security models, and the risks it would create under Windows that just aren't there under Linux) would be apt-get/synaptic.

But frankly, that's enough - Imagine a combination of windows update and stardock that automatically updates every program - Game, browser, word processor, security holes, *everything*, everyday. You want to install a program for looking at stars, search synaptic for astronomy, it tells you five programs, pick which one you want to install - if it needs something else installed first, it gives you a heads up and if you still want it downloads everything the program needs. And it's all installed. Almost never needs to reboot (Which doesn't bug me like it does the hardcore linux junkies, but is nice. If you don't shut it down, linux only reboots when the kernel updates - that's it.)

For Games - I will keep my dual-booting XP Partition. But for day to day work? Having everything up to date, every day, Ubuntu is so much better than Vista it's not funny, and I have it running, and running well, both on brand new hardware (My Moms PC actually - works better than the Vista it came with. At least, according to my Mom.) older hardware that Vista would laugh at (my 3200+ AMD 32 bit PC), and on old 700 Mhz hardware (My music/tv/file server is a 700 mhz processor, with 256 Meg of Memory)

So, why exactly would I want Vista again?

{G} - Jonnan

Yes, NT supports multiple user security, but it tacked it onto a system that did not have that originally, either codewise, or culturally, and both of those make a vast difference. Codewise, because there are internal systems in windows that were designed without it - items have been upgraded in layers, patched and so forth, and it has improved vastly over the years, but beneath the surface, even on Vista, there is not a cohesive philosophy. Imagine a building, a skyscraper, built with multiple doors and windows in an undeveloped area - you trusted your mailman, the back door was never locked, but as more people moved into this rural area, you needed to lock doors, except the mailman had a mailroom, so he needed keys, and then sometime in the nineties you hooked your Integrated Echoing system through everything because the government said it was illegal, but you thought if you could present it as a fait accompli they'd leave it be, but it has airducts so large as to only make sense in a spy movie, the mailman has retired . . . and on and on.

Culturally of course because all the engineers that work in this building are *used* to having keys to all the doors, they know all the shortcuts, there's a maintence stairwell nobody else uses that goes from level four to level 22 so you can ignore the keycard check-in in securities floor on five . . . Shut up or they'll LOCK it! Then you'll have to wait in line with the peons!

So Code and Culture both act against securing Windows. And of course, there's the simple fact that all too often you actually *do* need admin access for some specific thing. If you're at work, IT may modify permissions properly, toggle things around. Or they may just say the heck with it and give you admin rights.

The flip side of which is that Unix/Linux was built this way from the ground up. Culturally - yes, I do see people coming over from Windows that set themselves up as root, but if you convince them not to, they find out - they really *don't* need root access on a regular basis, because Unix and Linux *assume* you don't have admin rights - why would you? Thus on Windows you have to learn to code specifically to avoid invoking something that requires admin rights - On Linux, you have to code specifically to take advantage of admin rights if you're going to need them. In both cases, most people don't.

As for the other - Microsoft has chosen security through obscurity on this. Yes you need basic network access - but given that, if you can access shared data at all, you can access all shared data regardless of permissions through a non-trivial but easy to implement 'feature' of explorer. From what I've tried to find on it, there's not a lot you can do to stop it on a network, and I have not gone to the effort to find the ultimate limits of the access, but it's considerable. 'nuff said.

Jonnan

Yea, it is a terrible loss not to be able to type a string of lengthy lines into your command prompt in order to install the programs. And then to search the internet for a couple of hours in order to find out which programs you have to install (more command prompt -lines) as well, just to be able to run the one you wanted to install originally. Double-clicking on an *.exe-file is soooo much harder after all.

Yes, I am aware that the newest Ubuntu flavours handle the dependencies for the user, and even provide a graphical UI for installation. But I can still vividly remember the days of the command prompt, of compiling and of giving up totally frustrated after trying for two days making a little proggie work on your linux-system.

Linux is an excellent OS, and I have been double-booting since I built my first machine. But I would never go as far and praise the apt-get system over the Windows 'double-click on the file and it installs itself completely' approach.

Win98 BSOD' and froze much more frequent than WindowsXP. A lot of smaller businesses had used Win98 rather than Win2000 because of its cheaper price, so upgrading to WinXP would have been a definitive advantage.

Vista always had the problem that it had to follow the most successful MS-OS released to date. Besides buying a new computer, people just don't have a reason to upgrade to Vista as XP is still as rock-solid and still runs most of the programs released.

I have the feeling Windows7 will have an easier start as it will be released at a time when a lot of those old XP-machines out there will start to die. Not just in the private homes, but also in all those businesses that had waited until 2005 to upgrade their fleet of computers and with it their OS to XP.

Vista is a good OS, but the market was just not quite there right from the beginning.

Short answer - That's *really* out of date for Ubuntu - synaptic under Ubuntu is *nothing* like that.

Truth in advertising: I'll confess - before this apt-get synaptic system was introduced, I was never willing to deal with linux because of exactly that - I could install a good OS, but Good God - updating anything was a nightmare, and I, quite frankly, was unwilling to deal with it. It was sometimes easier to compile the &*^%*% thing than it was to do what should be a simple install.

Under synaptic - it is (IMO) *easier* than installing a windows executable. Not *much* easier - it doesn't get a lot easier than doubleclicking a file. But, if you had to go to all the ah 'trouble' of actually downloading it from a familiar website when you knew exactly where it was, then you've actually gone to more trouble than synaptic will give you.

The hardest thing I've done with synaptic so far was add a third party repository (Because my Mom loves Picassa, and wanted it on her machine), and if the site has a repository on it (Google does btw) then it's just add the repository, add the signature key, and tell synaptic to install it.

For basic use - that's *it*. No compiling, no RPM's or deb files - you are done.

There *are* things you can do with apt-get using it directly that you can't do with Synaptic - I think they're a tad quick on the trigger linking some packages together (ex. I found you can't install just 1 KDE game from Synaptic, without it considering a bunch of other games as a package deal) but for anything that's already in the repository? Search, select the package, click apply - go make a sandwich while it downloads and installs the files. Wanna install 20 programs - Search, select the 20 packages, click apply, make a somewhat bigger sandwich.

And of course, once you've installed it via Synaptic/apt-get, it updates automatically.

So I *am* an unapologetic Synaptic fan-boy. I think, if repositories really get rolling on this where it becomes common practice to just give someone a signature file and a repository URL, synaptic will the the 'Killer App' that kills windows off. It is *the* primary reason I am on Ubuntu rather than windows. Security and stability are nice, but not worth giving up the selection of windows software for, same with eye candy (Pretty as Ubuntu is.)

But putting my mom on a computer and *knowing* that her copy of evolution and staroffice and her drivers and everything else she uses is up to date - *that* is *so* worth it. At this point she's comfortable installing stuff herself, she may ask me for an opinion, but last month she downloaded four astronomy programs for my niece and nephew, decided she only liked two of them, and uninstalled those two.

She's 60, She started on Linux in February, and she is *that* comfortable with it.

Jonnan

Sorry - it sounded like you were peripherally aware that it had gotten better since the bad old days, but weren't aware of how much.

As far as I am concerned, Ubuntu has gone in a very short period from being lightyears behind Windows in ease of use to lightyears ahead - I was shocked at the difference in such a very short period, and assuming that anyone familiar with Linux would 'Just know' how much it has changed seems unwarranted - {G}.

Again, with apologies - Jonnan