VISTA

The *finding out* thing should be the easiest part of this. This guy

see

out

at?

I considered going with a 64 bit OS, because of the larger addressable memory, but I'm glad I didn't. There are a number of programs that are not supported under the 64 bit OS and that is a show stopper for me. Maybe this will change by the time Win 7 is out, but until it does I can't use 64 bit Windows professionally.

Rick

The biggest issue with Vista is the built-in DRM which has hooks into nearly every subsystem. You personally might not be into downloading music or movies but the DRM system can bite you anyway. If you unwittingly open a DRM'd file - news video or audio, an E-book, etc. pretty much any protected web content - DRM can force the memory and bus traffic associated with the file to be encrypted. At the request of the copyright owner, Vista's DRM system is able to degrade video and/or audio to prevent making high fidelity analog copies, prevent copying the files to removable media, delete files after you play them or after a period of time, request that you pay a fee, etc. DRM'd files can also be imprinted on your computer so they won't work if you copy them elsewhere (even with the keys).

And if you do pay to download DRM'd files - which you to view content rom a number of online science, medical and legal libraries - you'd better religiously back up the keys (which are encrypted and kept in hidden directories in your user directory tree) else you may find your valuable files unusable.

Aside from that, Vista's security is very intrusive, interrupting you constantly whenever you install a program or try to run it for the first time. You can turn off the idiotic interruptions - you almost have to if you want to get anything done - but then you forfeit much of Vista's application security.

George

I hope the discussions about BIOS, division of labor responsibilities, and decisions about organization and relationship changed a whole lot since the ones I attended with Phoenix and Intel, years ago, when talking about the 64bit Intel family. If they held to what was the seeming consensus then, the two are essentially incompatible at the BIOS level (no shared understanding of "the world") and the explanation I got by way of excusing all this was that people would either "boot 64 or boot 32, so it's not an issue."

Yeah, right.

Of course, Microsoft has no problem replacing BIOS functioning with a raft of specialized drivers for various machines. So I suppose Win 7 might make it all work fine.

Jon

I will second the suggestion to turn off UAC. I had already done that to solve some other issues, but it was required to properly install and run the FPGA design tools from Lattice.

As to the Prolific USB serial port driver, I have two of those adapters and there is a Vista version of the driver available. It seems to work just fine although there is one program that I have not been able to get to work with it. But that may well be the program as it was written to work with hardware ports and seems to be rather finicky.

I don't think Vista is inevitable. At least not if you aren't buying new hardware.

I will say it seems odd that with every new release we find out how much we had been working in the dark ages. How did we ever get by without all the improvements?

Rick

"Application security" ????? I hope that this is sarcastic.

Read that completely :

Now for the OT : Don't EVER let a Windows machine access a network. Oh, and the USB keys are evil too :-/ And even some music CD will brick your drivers with their hidden DRM !

That's how I can still use several win boxes and laptops that are used only for electronics & development. The rest is Debian and Slackware (try the 12.2, it blows Ubuntu).

Hoping this helps,

yg

I should add that if a Windows program must write somewhere it's not supposed to, it is very easy to change the permissions on the folder and let it. But that's a bridge I crossed with Windows 2000, not Vista.

I repeat my question. A lot of people act as if they were brainwashed against Vista.

Interesting. Why did you go back to XP? I have some machines that dual-boot XP and Vista, and it seems fairly clear that performance is better under Vista. (Of course, I cut back the graphical eye candy.) Vista certainly boots up faster and is genuinely responsive sooner after boot-up. Windows 7 is better yet.

...

Hmmm... I develop Windows software. If I wanted to write a program that wouldn't run under Vista, I don't know how I'd do it (short of deliberately making egregious security-related errors, or actually checking the OS version number!).

My experience has been that lab equipment often CLAIMS not to support the latest Windows, just because they haven't tested it, but actually it works, or works after you make a trivial change such as giving universal write permission to the directory that the program resides in. (I've done this MANY times with eprom programmers and the like.) Programs that actually want to write in their own directories should set permissions appropriately during installation. That is of course how programmers work when they don't know about the Application Data space.

Useful to know that USB serial ports seem to be a trouble spot. They are probably very common among the readers of this newsgroup, but I happen never to have used one. That may be why I still like Vista :)

That is very much toned down in Windows 7. My biggest gripe with Vista (as also with XP SP2) is that many of the security warnings are needlessly alarming to beginners.

This will run on a fast 64-bit machine with lots of RAM dedicated to a few exceptionally memory and computationally intensive (and graphics intensive) tasks, so I really don't expect to have the plethora of problems that we'd have if we tried to run *every* program that we use on it.

OTOH, I'd be really disappointed if the basic stuff didn't work and work well (browser, MS Office, OpenOffice, etc). I'll leave good old win2K behind at about the same time so there are only two Windows O/S's to maintain at any given time.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I wanted to wipe the machine prior to passing it along, and I didn't particularly want to maintain Vista for someone else (enough effort for myself). Getting XP installed was a real hassle (for example the network hardware was not recognized so I had to find the drivers using another working machine and install them from a USB stick). This wa a laptop. There was no driver available for the SD card reader hardware, but that one Vista driver didn't refuse to install under XP (every other Vista driver did). Took hours of actual work. By contrast, a freshly built desktop I can usually have up in maybe 30 minutes.

I think XP is a bit better, but I've got things fairly well cropped back in that too. It's always a bit decieving-- when you install craploads of programs and the registry gets huge, they all slow down.

Win7 apparently takes a LONG time to install (hours) but at least it's automated.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Hours? Each of the two that I did this weekend took about 45 minutes, or maybe less. No user interaction required during the install process.

I have to agree with you.

The problems cited by other posters (like temporary file difficulties) can be rectified by turning off user access controls.

If you turn off UAC, it works as well as XP.

I've found it to be stable.

And it works fine even on my iMac with Grand Theft Auto IV.

The Lizard

Sounds more reasonable. I only have one data point (on an inexpensive laptop on which a colleague installed the beta). Maybe it was wanting for RAM or something.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

So Vista is more a virus than an OS and it behaves as such.

Even MS would not bloat it up to its huge size had they not needed room to locate the virus features.

I would ask anyone defending MS bloats to explicitly mention whether he is associated in some commercial way with MS.

Dimiter

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Original message:

From what I've read about Vista as a serious professional tool, and from the fact that my one regular in-town client has (a) a really hot-shot IT team, and (b) also shuns Vista. If _those_ guys are going to stick with XP, then _I'll_ stick with it (or Ubuntu).

Having said that, my wife and kid both have Vista machines, and largely shun the Ubuntu machine that I've set up.

But no, I haven't tried it myself. I figure that if I'm going to struggle with pointless compatibility problems, I can just as well do it while learning my way around Linux.