Giving Vista what it deserves...

[DGhost]

Just fair warning... Vista SP1 is not the holy grail like people thing it is going to be... it has a few nice features tossed in, but mostly it is just a roll up of previous patches. An end user that is already up to date with patches is far less likely to notice any sort of improvement in SP1 than one would think.

Think NT4/Win2k SP's. Of course, I could make the same arguement about XP SP1.

Now, XP SP3 on the other hand... it's interesting, because there are a couple of features that have been back ported from Vista for it...

[Nowhere]

...Erik prefers running Ubuntu to Windows and I cant blame him; his rig runs like a racehorse under it. No PC games, internet gaming and Oo2 for schoolwork and his writing, but he has an X360 and PS2 for that.

X360? Hmm...so who did he kill? ( http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?t=54859 )

Just fair warning... Vista SP1 is not the holy grail like people thing it is going to be... it has a few nice features tossed in, but mostly it is just a roll up of previous patches. An end user that is already up to date with patches is far less likely to notice any sort of improvement in SP1 than one would think.

Think NT4/Win2k SP's. Of course, I could make the same arguement about XP SP1.

Now, XP SP3 on the other hand... it's interesting, because there are a couple of features that have been back ported from Vista for it...

I actually heard that Vista SP1 is very rushed (that's why it's mostly it's a collection of patches? Anyway, doesn't matter much). Somebody wants to capitalise on the meme "I'll wait till SP1"?

Must be also hard for them not to break something "accidentally" in XP SP3...

[Claymonkey]

If they are rushing SP1 they only get to play that card once before ruining what has been a tried and true adage. I was hoping this would be the service pack that would put back some of the stuff the tore out to get Vista out the door and reasonably stable….

[Dr Mordrid]

X360? Hmm...so who did he kill? ( http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?t=54859 )

For hammering every achievement test he's taken into the ground, that's "who".

That and taking college classes again next summer. For credits. He'll be 10.

[Nowhere]

And I guess playing yourself when Erik/nobody else is wathcing is a nice bonus, huh?

[Dr Mordrid]

Nope, I don't play the game systems. No interest.

[Gurm]

Come to think of it...that's very convienient for OS vendors...


BTW Gurm, I understand that majority of laptopos sold in the States now don't have Celerons with 512-1024 MBs of RAM?...
(yep, and they put Vista on them...)

I'm not saying they aren't selling silly setups...

[Technoid]

DGhost, I don’t think the ”prosumer” knee-jerk about vista is because of the ”vista sucks raw sewage” claims….

Because it’s not like it’s a hard thing to get a copy and test it out yourself….

Hell, the oem hack is so ridiculously easy it’s like MS wants vista to spread like wildfire…

When xp was released, everyone and his dog pirated xp! I have yet to see a pirated vista on a customers computer

All of the people that has wanted to buy an xp licence to get rid of vista has been rather vocal on how they initially tried it and after a while started to dislike it and in the end wanted out.

My collegue and I had so much discussions about vista, he was all over it and couldn’t wait to test out the RTM, I had tested the RC and come away feeling burned. When the rtm got release he was all over it, the day after I asked him how it worked on his computer (we have almost the same computer same mobo, cpu mem, etc etc) and his answer was

“its sooo slow!” he’s using xp again. (His computer is a c2d 6400, 2gb ram, nvgf7900gtx, 70gb wd raptor)

[DGhost]

X360? Hmm...so who did he kill? ( http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?t=54859 )



I actually heard that Vista SP1 is very rushed (that's why it's mostly it's a collection of patches? Anyway, doesn't matter much). Somebody wants to capitalise on the meme "I'll wait till SP1"?

Must be also hard for them not to break something "accidentally" in XP SP3...

gotta love the conspiracy theories.

no, SP1 is not being rushed. that is literally what a service pack is - a collection of patches and maybe a couple new features. Microsoft is just getting back to their normal Service Pack philosophy after XP SP2.

Why? to help developers for one. to help consumers, for another. Microsoft fragmented their own market way too much with XP and there are way too many different versions with significant technical differences - but they all look identical or extremely similar to consumers (not talking about home/home premium/business sort of differences... that is a different topic entirely as it has little to no technical differences between them)...

people think of XP SP1 and SP2 as the "holy grails" of XP, when in reality they are not.

SP1 for instance. To the average consumer, it was nothing more than a collection of post RTM updates and patches, with a few new pieces of software sprinkled in for good measure (the "Set Programs Access and Defaults" UI, for one. USB 2.0 support out of box was another). The biggest changes that SP1 enabled was support for Tablet PC's and Media Center PC's - which were still entirely seperate releases of Windows and all that SP1 enabled was base OS support. it gave the product teams and official release of windows to develop on.

XP SP2 broke that trend. Instead of simply being a collection of hotfixes and updates, they decided to force quite a bit of new features down everyones throats. However, when you actually go through what was new to XP SP2 and what was released prior to it, you will find that there was substantially less features that shipped new to SP2 than you would imagine. It did, however, polish XP to the point that it was finally a mature OS. But one thing that a lot of people tend to gloss over is the incompatabilities it introduced to legacy apps. This is one of the reasons why releases like it are very rare and generally not the sort of thing that you want to release every year.

again, most of the stability and performance improvements that people saw over the first few years XP was out came came predominately from driver/application performance improvements and hotfixes released seperately from the Service Packs. Just like Vista.

Thats why SP1 for Vista is not going to be the end all be all of releases. Microsoft did a good thing when they integrated Windows Update into Vista. The end result is that critical patches are being pushed down to a larger segment of their install base than previously. It is not like XP, where many people never installed the updated BITS client and thus never recieved many updates, SP2 included.

[DGhost]

Technoid - quite a few manufacturers released driver updates (and even Microsoft, through WU) within the first 30 to 60 days that improved performance by a huge margin. Hell, I was practically counting down until release just so manufacturers would life their embargo and release updated bits to everyone.

you would be amazed at what running Windows Update will bring you these days.

edit: and before it comes up, i would love to hear how my computers, that are painfully outdated and less powerful than your coworkers, have no problems running Vista...

[Nowhere]

Nope, I don't play the game systems. No interest.

BTW, if Erik haven't stumbled upon it already, you might point him to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_XNA
I guess I just wouldn't be surprised if he'll find it interesting some day, and sooner rather than later (unless of course he'll be preferring by that time free software/Linux side of doing things, Pygame for example...)


@Dghost: I'm not necesserilly subscribing to that opinion...but the thing that you're overlooking is simply that, up to now, SP1/etc. in case of MS was basically an equivalent of "proper" 1.0, non beta version...and people know it.
I see you're convinced that Microsoft is justified with naming Vista, as it is now, this "Vista proper" stage. But are they truly right about this?

And I really hope our beloved convicted monopoly won't mess something in SP3 of XP...

[DGhost]

Nowhere - I can agree with that. But you have to understand that a lot of that was because network administrators didn't nessicarily always get the latest hotfixes and patches, and that the SP's were traditionally Microsoft's way of making it easier for everyone. Instead of having to hunt down 20 different hotfixes that may or may not apply to your system, you just installed SPX.

While it started with Win2k, XP was the first OS to make any sort of substantial shift away from this. Keep in mind that XP SP2 was release on August 24, 2004. That was over 3 (three!) years ago. That means that any hotfixes, security updates and product improvements between then and now have all been pushed down via WU, the MS download service, or on disk to special customers.

Again, Vista features much tighter integration with WU than XP ever did. Vista machines, on average, stay up to date with patches far better than XP machines did, especially at release. My whole point with Vista SP1 is that existing customers are far less likely (as a result of the above) to notice any sort of appreciable improvement in their system - because the patches that provide those improvements are already installed.

And, XP SP3 is looking nice. It didn't have any adverse affects on my machines and it did bring in some nice features from Vista.

[Nowhere]

Out of curiosity (and, well...because I'm waiting with reinstall for SP3), what nice features? (I guess not DX10... )

[DGhost]

All I can do is tell you to look someplace like, oh, here, and note that there are actually other features that are being included as well.

Sadly, DX10 is not one of them. I don't know if they could do that without backporting WDDM also.

[Nowhere]

Thanks, I'll look at it.

edit: hm, not sure if any of the new fatures is actually usefull for home user like me...oh well, at least I'll have all patches in one package/slipstreamed into install disk.

And regarding DX10 - AFAIK the only, real (and completelly valid BTW) reason for DX10 not working on anything but Vista was the way it accesess video memory (don't know the details, something with "mutitasking" of video memory acces for apps I believe...), which was impossible to simply backport to XP driver model.
But I've also read somewhere that first gen DX10 Nvidia hardware doesn't actually support this feature, so Microsoft dropped it from minimum requirements, for Nvidia. Apparently the conclusion in what I've read was that backporting DX10 is actually technically feasible thanks to this...