OT: Yet Another Unhappy Customer for Vista

I heard a few grumbles about Vista. I heard a few praises. I decided to try it. So we istalled it on one machine. Just one, as a trial. About 3 weeks ago.

Every few hours someone will go and try to get it going again. These are real techies and engineers, some degreed, some self taught, some ex programmers, so we have a good range of ability. No luck so far. I think it sucks.

Bits of it work, most bits don't. Most drivers that didn't *completely* follow XP programming guidelines simply lock the thing up. Oh and it's so slow.

On May 27, 11:39 am, Rich Grise wrote: [.....]

I find that Qcad works ok. I have a DWG to DXF converter. When I need to open a DWG, I do it with a script that first makes the DXF and then fires up Qad.

The results have been better than people using differing versions of Autocad have reported.

So because the user does not know what they are doing then the OS is to blame.

On May 28, 12:43 pm, PeteS wrote: [...]

Vista is easy to use, if you are only doing those things that Bill Gates thinks you should be allowed to do. You can easlily fire up the MS windows explorer to go online and order the Microsoft pizza with only a couple more clicks you can also order Microsoft cola to go with it.

If on the other hand, you want an Apple turnover with your dinner, Windows will fight you at every step.

If a techie has issues with it, I don't think it

If the user has a hard time learning it because it's unnecessarily complicated or bloated, yes, then the OS would be to blame.

Well, that's a point, but M$ has always indicated that their OSs are simple and easy to use. If a techie has issues with it, I don't think it can be called 'easy to use'. The OS may be ok (there's a difference of opinion about that) but if it doesn't do what the software house says, then it *is* faulty, and that goes for any OS.

I have my own reasons for avoiding Vista, not least because it was written for the content industry, not the consumer; I also don't like doing business with outfits that distrust me and insist their software must call home now and then to report on my system - and cease to operate if I block such 'tard' behaviour. It's possibly the most bloated piece of software in existence, too - early reviews showed 800 MBytes RAM just to load the OS, which might be called 'excessive'. Perhaps a principle that was missed here is 'just because we can does not mean we should' ;)

Cheers

PeteS

That's pretty stupid. The OS works fine. If you try to run it on your

Just like Linux USED to run on nearly anything, but as the x-window front ends got more and more complicated, it too required more powerful hardware as a baseline system.

Your assessments are what are "complicated, and bloated", and it is you that doesn't know the first thing about that which you speak.

Those single function applications used "a few" cycles of the CPU every second. They run a hundred times faster than they did then in emulation on modern gear. That should tell you something about what you are running on, not what you are trying to run under.

Modern GUI front ends, INCLUDING LINUX use tens of millions of cycles per second of the CPU's time, and there is STILL tens of millions left for applications.

You have to have a pretty sad, old, tired piece of crap base hardware to make Vista or a modern Linux distro puke. Mine does not on either, and it is over two years old. If yours does, it's the hardware, stupid!

Remember "It's the economy, stupid"?

In this case... It's the hardware, stupid.

Then again, he could merely be claiming to be a techie, and not really know very much about what is going on at all.

Except that it DOES do what the software house says. It just simply wont do it on the back of a slug. It needs to be, at the very least, a turtle, and a nice Cheetah would be ideal.

Nothing has changed through the years really.

Baloney. My system show 28% of 2GB, with applications running, and that is a mere 574MB, and that, again, is with applications and several sidebar gadgets up and running.

Linux is not a GUI front end. But what you mean is true; the most popular GUI environments (Gnome and especially KDE) are extreme ressource hogs. Linux is just the OS kernel.

But there are dozens of lean and fast GUIs to choose from, and of course there are thousands of high-productivity applications that use no GUI at all.

I recently retired a 400MHz/64MB PC. With Latex, it handled a 400-page complex document a lot faster and better than a modern PC with MS Office.

robert

You still can use the more old-fashioned X environments like you used to. The bigger problem is that Linux also suffers from serious kernel bloat because it supports more and more drivers (including ancient legacy ones).

And the package management systems of modern distros eat ressources too. Although they are only used during installation or removal of software they can make a distro uninstallable because they are (of course) required for the installation itself.

There are special distros out there that target new software for old hardware.

The biggest problem of Linux is that it has so many faces that people don't really know what it actually is. People will look at my desktop and say, ah, this is what Linux looks like! Last time I saw it it looked completely different. What they don't realize is that what they see is just the GUI environment that the particular user chose to install on top of his Linux kernel (or the one that he decided to run in that session).

robert

I never said it was. MOST current, in use by the typical consume distros are heavy x-window GUI driven, however.

Jeez. Learn to get what is meant from what is written. Had you read the thread, you would have noted where I was explicitly talking about x-windows. I know the difference between an OS, and the overlying GUI.

The current most common xwindow systems are big resource hogs, just as you state, and I have already stated.

I don't need a primer on it.

No shit. That's not what was mentioned though. Even bare bones Linux no longer runs on a 386 though. I think a PIII is about the minimum.

Not everyone is one of your "they" people.

Yeah, I mentioned that in a different post. You could probably custom-compile a modern kernel that will run on a 386, but you won't be able to bootstrap the kernel on that 386 from a modern distro. You'd need a modern build system. Back when a 40MHz 386DX (they didn't come faster than that) was state of the art, compiling a Linux kernel would take hours. Today it would probably be more like a week.

robert

Hehe.

The worst thing one could do back then in the DOS days was to enter "Chkdsk C:" on one's 32MB drive on an XT or 286. Might as well come back at the end of the day.

That would be funny to see on a 100GB drive. Might as well come back next month!

The fact is, however, that Vista is an all out screamer on my machine, and the new Office suite is as well, and it has MANY really cool features and capabilities that the older suites just don't have.

I pity all those that cry about MS being big bad and bloated. Their shit works, and so does Linux products.

I can't wait to see how well Open Solaris runs, as I'll be checking that out too. I hope they have NVidia drivers!

Exactly. Except that I haven't retired it yet because it is equipped with a nice big Trinitron monitor and does CAD just fine.

If a "modern" OS requires north of half a Gigabyte to write "Hello World" I am not going to use it. Why should I?