How workable is Vista?

I might be mixing this up a little between Vista Home vs. Business, and XP Home vs. Pro, but here are a few points:

Support for domains is going to be a big point for many businesses, along with remote management, profiles, etc.

I believe there are licence issues regarding use of virtual machines (either as guest or host) on the Home versions, but I don't know the details. Remote access to the desktop is another issue (that applies more to desktops than laptops, but I find it an important convenience to be able to (technically and legally) connect to my desktop via VNC.

Business laptop users may want to use encrypted file systems (though they are probably better off keeping critical files on a USB device which they keep more securely than the laptop).

On XP Home (don't know about Vista), you have no way of setting and controlling ACLs in Explorer. But the system still has ACLs support on NTFS, so it's possible to lock yourself out of your own files.

Of course, the disadvantage of Vista Business is that it doesn't come with solitaire.

Reply to
David Brown
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...or eBay...

Every PC that own has a power supply from PC Power and Cooling, the only exceptions being where PCP&C doesn't make a PS that fits. Cooler running, better built, better regulation, less noise, more reserve power, better resistance to surges/spikes on the power line...

Reply to
Guy Macon

I will look into it. But I often also perform a lot of work _before_ making a backup copy of where I'm at. Sometimes, if I'm just plain "in the zone" and making good progress I might take several days before I come up for air. And if I were to stop long enough to make a complete copy earlier, it would nearly completely deflate the state of mind. What bothers me about emulation, at all, is that there is a LOT more software present and I consider that usually to be "more risk" for something someone wrote long before Virtual Box existed to go wrong. It might be virtual box, itself; its interaction with the host software; its interaction with the guest... or who knows? But it is more risk. And why go to all the trouble of setting it up, at all? Two copies of DOS, or two copies of Win98SE on top of DOS, on two different drives, one the working disk and the other a backup isn't at all hard to do.

I'm still wanting to know why I should care about Virtual Box for work. For personal use, I can definitely see the value. But for work, I am having a hard time knowing why I'd even want to set up a Win2000 system, let's say, as the host so that I can run Virtual Box and add Win98SE and DOS as a guest where I'm developing code... When I can just set up Win98SE, itself?

Right now, I can and do run WinXP and Win2000 for some development where the cross-tools may require it. But with Win2000, I can continue my business model okay. WinXP leads to some pain, but so far that pain with Microsoft has been... manageable. Vista, on the other hand, is the final straw for me. If nothing ever could have before, the new concerns of Microsoft with Vista have departed now so far away from my own that there is no remaining possibility of a meeting of the minds, anymore. I'm not even going to attempt it. They are simply too concerned about things I care nothing about and I'm no longer willing to put up with the trouble they create in the process. I will find other alternatives... and Virtual Box, assuming it allows a Vista host at all, won't be the remedy for my problem. At least, that's how it looks to me -- not because of Virtual Box, but because of Vista.

Now, if Vista can be a guest O/S under Virtual Box... that might be interesting for me, personally.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

Do you work 24/7 without ever stopping to eat, sleep, take a phone call or go to the bathroom? If you do any of the above, it sounds like your problem is not that making a backup would deflate your state of mind, but rather that your backup method is more complex than executing a one-word command that does a fast unattended incremental backup while you are out of the room.

--
Guy Macon
Reply to
Guy Macon

Inside the virtual machine, the hard disk image looks like a normal c:\ (or whatever) drive, with files and directories in whatever format the guest OS likes. From the host machine's viewpoint, the image is just a big file on its disk. You don't need to "come up for air" to make a copy - it's just a single file-copy operation on the host. You can even write a script to copy it automatically once and hour if you want.

Virtualisation software is pretty much perfect when it comes to emulating the cpu (when doing a pure software emulation, such as qemu can do, it's no different from a simulator for an embedded processor). The difficult bit is emulating the hardware. This is where particular virtualisation software might have problems with particular OS's that interact with hardware (such as interrupt controllers, MMUs, etc.) in different ways. That's why I recommend trying a few different types of virtualisation software - start with the fastest and easiest to use (virtual box and dosbox), then perhaps the heavier but fuller-featured VMWare (at a price), then the slow but sure qemu.

What have you got to lose? A bit of time, certainly - at a minimum you'll have to read up a bit on the virtualisation software. But we are talking about testing out on images of the original hard disk, not the originals themselves - you don't have any risks.

The main difference is that you can have one PC connected to one screen and one keyboard. When you want to work on a different virtual PC, you just boot it up in a window on your main PC. When you want to make a backup of the machine, you just make a copy of the image file using whatever backup system you prefer.

A second difference is that you can transfer files between the virtual machine and your host. Details vary between virtualisation software and between guests, but there are always solutions. So this means that you can, for example, use a convenient Windows/Linux host environment for editing files, source code control, and so on, and then transfer them to the guest running DOS.

I'm not suggesting running Vista as the host OS - run whatever host you like best (recent Virtual Box editions won't run on W2K, but earlier versions will - and there are plenty of cries from users wanting W2K host support brought back).

And apparently Vista will run fine as a guest in virtual box, if you really want.

Reply to
David Brown

No, but perhaps unlike some when my mind is focused well there are some things that "take me away" from it. Experience shows me this is one of them. However, I won't pretend that my experience includes all of the various software tools. So it's possible that I just haven't encountered the right arrangements.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

Thanks for the comments. I'll take some time to learn more. It may turn out to be worth the effort.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

OTOH look at what a regular business user does: Run some apps, connect to a corporate files server, print on some hallway printer, email, Internet. I can do all of that with XP Pro and with XP home.

I have yet to find an airport where people in fancy dark suits are not playing solitaire on their high-faluting $2500+ laptops. So it seems none is running Vista Business. Or maybe none is running Vista at all ...

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Reply to
Joerg

A friend used to work like that. Until one fine day an ear-piercing screech was heard. That was his hard disk saying Sayonara. Afterwards he came rather close to a nervous breakdown. A whole day's worth of work, poof, gone.

[...]
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Reply to
Joerg

You may be closer to the truth than you think on that (noone running Vista at all, that is). Until recently, vistasized laptops in the shops here (Sofia, Bulgaria) used to cost $100 to $200 more than their similar equivalent coming with linux. The cheaper laptops are around 900 to 1000 BGN (1BGN=1DM= apr. $0.80 ), that if they are with linux or some free DOS or whatever. To my bewilderment I saw a few days ago a Toshiba of similar specs with vista at well below 800 BGN... (760 IIRC). They must be desperate to make people buy that vista thing, clearly they have a problem.

Dimiter

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Reply to
Didi

hehe. Yes, been there done that. However, it turns out that I can usually replace a day's work in a half day or less, because one I did it all the first time the second go is much easier. However, I think it's happened to me perhaps three times in thirty years. I'm willing to accept some risk.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

A problem as in "one" problem? AFAICT they've got a barrage of problems, mostly related to compatibility. IMHO they really blew it this time.

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Reply to
Joerg

Well I mean it as in "one" problem because this one relates to sales, this is news to me. May be they have had such problems in the past and solved them, I am not following them closely, but if they feel the public is not accepting vista and they may have to scrap it - and it looks increasingly that way to me - then this will be the "one" problem they will have to deal with.

Didi

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Reply to
Didi

From the article: "A few years ago, cell phones are even fight looks pegged to the Xiangjin-time, I have Apple China and the people say that your design so strong, and done quickly phone ah."

Since you seem to have understood the text, maybe you can translate the article for those of us not familiar with machine-translated Chinese.

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Reply to
Boudewijn Dijkstra

Indeed! Imagine what horrible things would happen if we were to direct this energy towards futile projects such as the Bulk Matter Transmitter, Clinical Immortality, the Human Genome Project, the Neural Amplifier, the Space Elevator, the Universal Translator, or any such non-sense.

¿Que?

Little as in: oil mining operations, an oil refinery, a plastics factory, a paper mill, a chemical plant (for paper bleaching), ink- and dye-making facilities, a printing press, and not to mention the infrastructure an facilities needed to build and maintain these plants?

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Reply to
Boudewijn Dijkstra

Op Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:34:32 +0200 schreef The Real Andy :

This may sound strange, but with cheaper hardware I expect to need less hardware or get more things done with my money.

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Reply to
Boudewijn Dijkstra

One of our clients uses VMWare to encapsulate and archive their embedded development environments and we have just started exploring using it ourselves for future projects. Have you found any gotchas? I'm particularly concerned about problems with license managers and hardware debuggers. Chuck Cox SynchroSystems - embedded computer design -

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Reply to
Chuck Cox

Which is precisely where you'll hit the problems. Unfortunately the bottom line is that even with "perfect" emulation software you'll be subject to the whims and vagaries of the underlying OS and the real hardware on which you're running it.

I have found several h/w debuggers that don't run at all inside emulation (USB-based, mostly).

Reply to
larwe

Don't know. I stored my copy back as PDF which got it down to around

10MB. Still a lot, but less. Now I can't edit it anymore but I am not supposed to anyhow.

How can I reverse anything on the *.doc file to make it smaller?

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Reply to
Joerg

Can you save it as *.rtf then as *.doc again?

Reply to
Lanarcam

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