My First Day With Vista

Sounds like a pretty good review.

I have a computer I have to upgrade soon so I have my fingers crossed and we'll hope for the best.

Matt

I'm actually ghosting a hard drive right now, and then installing it to try out my programs on

I'm not going to bother with vista till maybe next year.

same here. i won`t install it right now because i can`t find the right drives.i`ll wait 4-5 months.there`s no rush...

good review but i'll wait
6-12 months.

no beta testing for me.

New interface? Gadgets you say? Haven't these been part of OSX for years?

I will buy a new computer with Vista on it already in the future.

Yeah...I think that is what I will do!

wow, took 7 posts for someone to bring up mac into the discussion... you guys are slacking...

I'm pretty happy with it too. I wanted the full version cuz I hate upgrades normally, but your right with the fact that it archives your old OS in windows.old and is really a great feature. Ultimately, there's really no reason to buy the full version at all. (saved me an extra 100$!)

I am a bit disappointed in the Nvidia 8800 drivers though. In XP, I was gettin 150-250 fps in counter-strike source, everything maxed out in 1680x1050 - but in vista, i'm only gettin 80-120 max. =( I know i know, but still - that's a major difference just in the overhead alone. Not sure if its the DX10 backward compat, or shitty nvidia drivers, but it made me a bit bleh. Other than that it runs pretty nice on my system, at times though- dragging windows, resizing them - you can see it get a little sluggish. Considering i have an e6600 2.4 oc to 3.6 - I can't imagine how shitty it might run on lesser computers. I did build this box for vista though =)

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut00...ista_cost.html
http://youtube.com/watch?v=IkeC7HpsHxo

Added July 28, 2006

what are you posting this link in every discussion about vista?
I would prefer to try it myself and did, so far its not to bad.

im still going to wait a yeah before i touch it

Old? So why don't you read the 1st link I gave you in another thread? Are you afraid to overload your brain by reading?

agreed lol - although i do have a bone to pick with ms and agree with one key thing from that link... the HD drm and all the components around it are pretty shitty. I can't for the life of me get an HD movie to play even though I have an HDCP compliant vid card, HD dvd drive, enough cpu power, monitors over DVI, etc. It's really starting to piss me off now =)

lol Dude this happens with EVERY new OS release. Just cause you were in 3rd grade when XP came out Ill let it pass that you dont see any sort of pattern. The Youtube link that I highlighted by making the font large was posted back in July. About 7 months or so ago.

Hey Albert long time no talk to? How are things going?

Because everyone have to read it. Peter Gutmann is not a noob, so I trust him.

First of all you have to buy it right? But isn't it obvious that you have estimate all pros and cons BEFORE you spend the money?

Isn't there a 30% restocking fee on returned software?

Happens what??? Did you even open the fuckin' link??? I gues the only link you was able to understand was the youtube video, but it's just a fun but nothing else. The serious info was on the FIRST LINK.

its only 159$ for the upgrade, your acting like it expensive or something.

That's why I'm waiting..I've heard it doesn't support many drivers

3rd grade of what??? Boy, do you know how old I'm? Also it could be a big surprise for you, but I was working as a senior software developer (system programming for DOS real and protected modes, OS/2 and Win32 operating systems) years before XP was even announced.

Doin good bro, thanks for asking - Same old, working away =) You?

Yes I read the page some college kid put together. And for the last time all this scare crap happens with EVERY new OS. EVERY TIME! Happened with XP too. DONT INSTALL IT IT WILL FUXOR YOUR STUFF!! BAD NO STOP!! MS IS AN EVIL CORPORATION!!!

Ditto worky worky.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=sTeP_eh8XAA

oh so sad.

Ok, I have nice stuff for you as well. The price is only $149 (even cheaper than Vista). Would you like to buy it? but please don't ask me what kind of stuff I'm gonna sell you because it's only $149 - just buy it and see if you need it or not. C'mon, don't act like it expensive or something!

P.S. Is epass ok with you, or you'd like to pay by wire/credit card?

Answer this do you have a Linux or Mac box within 5 feet of you right now....

[duplicated message]

Wow! Is Peter Gutmann just a college kid for you? You must be a guru of coding then. What's your real name? let me guess.. John Carmack? Michael Abrash? Peter Norton? Tell me the last software project you were working on?

Some people are so funny in their ignorance...

No, I'm using Windows XP and consider it very useful OS for the tacks I'm working on.

He's a Republican and he shoots content. Of course he knows all...

That explains everything

http://youtube.com/watch?v=lr-ku2R97hY


http://youtube.com/watch?v=zNoOom8wn...elated&search=

http://youtube.com/watch?v=CcO1TUM96...elated&search=

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Cw3HBUqOO...elated&search=

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MVwbhsqEy...elated&search=

http://youtube.com/watch?v=BQECwm3er...elated&search=

http://youtube.com/watch?v=t-L-0s-7-...elated&search=

http://youtube.com/watch?v=gFAJDbV9V...elated&search=

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ygG5rWF5z3s

http://youtube.com/watch?v=xvDkfXJcjsk

This is actually a good thing. It means he's not an idiot.

"not an idiot" is not equal to "the outstanding IT specialist". There are two opinions: the republican/content producer says: "Vista has sooooo nice windows and icons, I'm in love!", and the Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Auckland says: "Beware, Vista has some serious problems (they all are well-described in his article I gave a link to)". So who's opinion about Vista is more significant? I believe the content producer will be more informed, but... only in case if we'll be discussing the adult content-related things instead of a new operating system. Am I wrong?

Yeah, but MAC sucks!

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.

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