BTW, I'm not the m$ hater. I like that company at least for one of the greatest operating systems (I mean their NT series). Some ignorant people (it's just a generalization, so I'm not pointing to anyone in this thread) are still believe that Win XP was a next generation of Win'98. They have no idea what Win XP has nothing common with Win'98 and all the Win'9x/Millennium series. These are 2 absolutely different things! Win'98 was just an improved version of Win'95 - a piece of shit but nothing else (very lame and unstable OS). On the other hand, Win XP was a direct successor of professional Win NT series (NT 3/4, Win2k, Win2003). These are the greatest operating system I was working on!

Actually, Vista is also the NT successor, because it's just the same XP, but with some new motley design and built-in DRM shit. Thus I don't see any reason to change my fast and stable XP on overloaded and sluggish Vista which is also trying to decrease the playing quality of licensed media content in order to "protect it form illegal copying".

You have the content producers to thank for DRM, not microsoft. It's same that's already in every dvd/hddvd/blueray player on the market. The problem is trying to get the same protection capabilities from a closed system(dvd player) into an open system(pc).

Though I do wish there was a version without it, there's no reason to assume 'business' version of an OS needs to same HD/media capabilities as a home version.

On topic with the thread, I'm currently running vista x64 ultimate with no issues.

and linux even longer :)

You didn't get it... I meant this:

"Decreased Playback Quality

Alongside the all-or-nothing approach of disabling output, Vista requires that any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal quality that passes through it if premium content is present. This is done through a “constrictor” that downgrades the signal to a much lower-quality one, then up-scales it again back to the original spec, but with a significant loss in quality. So if you're using an expensive new LCD display fed from a high-quality DVI signal on your video card and there's protected content present, the picture you're going to see will be, as the spec puts it, “slightly fuzzy”, a bit like a 10-year-old CRT monitor that you picked up for $2 at a yard sale (see the Quotes for real-world examples of this). In fact the specification specifically still allows for old VGA analog outputs, but even that's only because disallowing them would upset too many existing owners of analog monitors. In the future even analog VGA output will probably have to be disabled. The only thing that seems to be explicitly allowed is the extremely low-quality TV-out, provided that Macrovision is applied to it.

The same deliberate degrading of playback quality applies to audio, with the audio being downgraded to sound (from the spec) “fuzzy with less detail” [Note G].

Amusingly, the Vista content protection docs say that it'll be left to graphics chip manufacturers to differentiate their product based on (deliberately degraded) video quality. This seems a bit like breaking the legs of Olympic athletes and then rating them based on how fast they can hobble on crutches.

The Microsoft specs say that only display devices with more than 520K pixels will have their images degraded (there's even a special status code for this, STATUS_GRAPHICS_OPM_RESOLUTION_TOO_HIGH), but conveniently omit to mention that this resolution, roughly 800x600, covers pretty much every output device that will ever be used with Vista. The abolute minimum requirement for Vista Basic are listed as 800x600 resolution (and an 800MHz Pentium III CPU with 512MB of RAM, which seems, well, “wildly optimistic” is one term that springs to mind). However that won't get you the Vista Aero interface, which makes a move to Vista from XP more or less pointless. The minimum requirements for running Aero on a Vista Premium PC are “a DX9 GPU, 128 MB of VRAM, Pixel Shader 2.0, and minimum resolution 1024x768x32”, and for Aero Glass it's even higher than that. In addition the minimum resolution supported by a standard LCD panel is 1024x768 for a 15" LCD, and to get 800x600 you'd have to go back to a 10-year-old 14" CRT monitor or something similar. So in practice the 520K pixel requirement means that everything will fall into the degraded-image category.

(A lot of this OPM stuff seems to come straight from the twilight zone. It's normal to have error codes indicating that there was a disk error or that a network packet got garbled, but I'm sure Windows Vista must be the first OS in history to have error codes for things like “display quality too high”).

Beyond the obvious playback-quality implications of deliberately degraded output, this measure can have serious repercussions in applications where high-quality reproduction of content is vital. Vista's content-protection means that video images of premium content can be subtly altered, and there's no safe way around this — Vista will silently modify displayed content under certain (almost impossible-to-predict in advance) situations discernable only to Vista's built-in content-protection subsystem (Philip Dorrell has created a neat cartoon that illustrates this problem). Microsoft claim that this hidden image manipulation will only affect the portions of the display that contain the protected content, but since no known devices currently implement this “feature” it's hard to say how it'll work out in practice (what happens currently is that Vista just refuses to play premium content rather than downgrading it).

An interesting potential security threat, suggested by Karl Siegemund, occurs when Vista is being used to run a security monitoring system such as a video surveillance system. If it's possible to convince Vista that what it's communicating is premium content, the video (and/or audio) surveillance content will become unavailable, since it's unlikely that a surveillance center will be using DRM-enabled recording devices or monitors. I can just see this as a plot element in Ocean's Fifteen or Mission Impossible Six, “It's OK, their surveillance system is running Vista, we can shut it down with spoofed premium content”.

(The silly thing about the industry's obsession with image quality is that repeated studies have shown that what really matters to viewers (rather than what they think matters) is image size and not quality. Sure, if you take the average consumer into a store and put them in front of the latest plasma panel they'll be impressed by the fact that they can count each individual hair in Gandalf's beard, but once he's leaping about wrestling with the balrog this detail becomes lost and the only differentiator is image size. You can find a good discussion of this in The Media Equation by Stanford professors Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass. In one experiment on visual fidelity they showed a film using the best equipment they could get their hands on, and again using a fifth-generation copy on bad tape and poor equipment. There were no differences in users' responses to the two types of images (see the book for more details on this). You can see an example of this effect yourself if you can set up a machine with a CRT and an LCD monitor. Use the CRT monitor for awhile, then switch to the LCD monitor for a minute or two. When you go back to the CRT monitor, does it seem faulty? Did you notice this before you looked over at the LCD monitor?

Conversely, image size is a huge differentiator: The bigger the better. So in practice a degraded image on a huge VGA monitor (or by extension anything with a lower-quality analog input) will rate better than a non-degraded image on a much smaller LCD monitor, assuming you can find an example of the latter that Vista will actually output an HD image to. Of course convincing consumers of this is another matter)."

Just a quote for the same article: Personally I don't want the operating system that regarding the S/PDIF link to the amplifier/speakers. If I paid the money for a good album, I want to listen it in a highest quality. Don't you?

i'll stick to WinXP till my computer is so out dated that i have to buy a new one, and XP won't run on that one because its so out dated...



which means, my next computer will be a Mac

I do get it, you however don't.

Everything he is referring to is with DRM protected content. Non protected content, rather it be your typical web videos or 720/1080 encoded divx/wmv/xvid/qt, etc... works fine. I know, I tested it this morning.


And the sacd disk example is a piss poor one. Find me a dvda/sacd player that will output a protected stream via spdif without downgrading to 16-bit, 44.1-kHz? Guess what, you wont find one.

IM going to be waiting a long time

Will I be able to buy the upgrade version and still do a fresh install? Or do I need to buy the full version to install it fresh?

Fuck MS. Fuck Vista. And fuck you Billy Gates, you are the world's biggest monopolist.

:mad:

my upgrade version gave me the choice of upgrade or clean install

fiddy.......

c'mon, be smarter then the chair your sitting on.

149$ is cheap, especially for a business related expense. Some of us have customers who sometimes have problems because they are running the latest and greatest or what ever and do not have a setting correct.
The only way to know what he is doing or maybe experiencing is to also have the same thing, its like having copies of firefox, netscape and IE on your computer so you can try to duplicate problems that customers may be having.

If your 159$ doodad is being used by 90% of my customers then bring it over, I will probably need it... if not and you are just trying to be smart then your 159$ doodad is about as useful as your remark.

Another nice thing about Vista are the games, they have a new game called "Ink Ball" which is pretty damn addicting :)

As far as installing Vista fresh, I know for a fact that both the upgrade and full version of Vista are identical, it's just the Windows key that determines which is an upgrade or full install in Microsoft's eyes.

I think that you could do a fresh install from the upgrade disk IF you have a previous version of Windows on the system before you install it.

I just bought the full version because I didn't know that there was an option to do a fresh install on the upgrade disk. I wish I knew that now.

You might want to check around to be sure, but my thinking is that they wouldn't have put the fresh install option on the upgrade disk if they didn't want you doing it.

Thanks a lot for explaining that. I'd much rather buy the upgrade version and do a fresh install. I will ask around!

if you dont need a new os..why go out and buy one just because?