What does MS Vista really offer?

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jaganath
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Post by jaganath » Wed Nov 29, 2006 12:33 pm

I can see how prompt patching + good internet surfing "hygiene"+ firewall can keep you virus-free; still, I think XP SP2 was a big improvement over SP1, what with Security Center and all.

Beyonder
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Post by Beyonder » Wed Nov 29, 2006 2:22 pm

jaganath wrote:still, I think XP SP2 was a big improvement over SP1, what with Security Center and all.
Oh, I totally agree with you there. Although with Vista, I feel like MSFT has gone a overboard with User Account Control. It's too intrusive to me.

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Post by AZBrandon » Wed Nov 29, 2006 2:57 pm

Beyonder wrote:Because it's pretty easy to tell. I program for Win32 for a living, so I have a pretty good idea of where and how to look for something--if you want details, I'd be happy to share.

That being said, I don't look often because there isn't a point--there are simple things one can do to not get infected in the first place.
Funny you should mention Windows XP not needing anti-virus. Spyware was a huge problem in the pre-SP2 days if you used Internet Explorer, but even then, I never had anything identified outright as a virus end up on my PC. Somewhere maybe 3 years ago I got around to putting AVG on my PC which of course does nightly scans and runs in realtime too. I can think of only one time in 3 years I've had AVG come up and say some sort of code-execution had taken place it thought was a virus.

This is with me spending all kinds of time on the internet - probably 30 hours a week in fact - and never having any special precautions. Oh, and using IE the whole time too. I've used Firefox but *gasp* I actually like IE better. People rag on Windows a lot, but I've been sitting on the internet for quite a long time over the years and other than the sort of "Age of Spyware" for a little while there, I've never had any problems.

Erssa
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Post by Erssa » Wed Nov 29, 2006 3:30 pm

Beyonder wrote:
Mar. wrote:
Beyonder wrote: XP doesn't need anti-virus in my opinion, so I think your skepticism is unwarranted. I haven't run anti-virus in the last five years, and I have yet to be infected with anything.
How would you know? lol
Because it's pretty easy to tell. I program for Win32 for a living, so I have a pretty good idea of where and how to look for something--if you want details, I'd be happy to share.

That being said, I don't look often because there isn't a point--there are simple things one can do to not get infected in the first place.
I can second this. User actions dictate, if he gets viruses or not. I have friend who doens't even use firewall on one of his comps. It just sits "safely" behind NAT.

I have never been infected with my SP2, but I recently installed NOD32, just in case, because I downloaded some files, which I had reason to believe might be infected. I'm not going to unistall it though, since it's by far the best AV I have ever had...

I'm really not convinced that Vista can offer me anything. Xp is working like a dream and I'm sure Vista will still be bug ridden, maybe I'll switch when Vista gets it's first SP.

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Post by DonQ » Wed Nov 29, 2006 6:28 pm

aristide1 wrote:The idea of buying 2GB of DDR2 is not pleasant as its still too expensive and DDR3 is just around the corner.
No kidding about RAM. The decision to upgrade from my Athlon XP was based on the fact that I already had 2 GB of CAS2 DDR400. (I got a 44.1W Opteron 152.)

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Post by AZBrandon » Wed Nov 29, 2006 6:35 pm

Erssa wrote:I'm really not convinced that Vista can offer me anything. Xp is working like a dream and I'm sure Vista will still be bug ridden, maybe I'll switch when Vista gets it's first SP.
I should hope not, considering they've been working on Vista for 5 years already and it's been in very widespread beta testing for over a year with many folks attesting that it's pretty darn good, even in beta form. I expect more of the bugs to be in the 64-bit code however, which has undoubtedly had less development than the 32-bit code. Probably a lot of that will just be the fault of 3rd party drivers anyway, not the OS code itself.

Erssa
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Post by Erssa » Wed Nov 29, 2006 8:54 pm

AZBrandon wrote:
Erssa wrote:I'm really not convinced that Vista can offer me anything. Xp is working like a dream and I'm sure Vista will still be bug ridden, maybe I'll switch when Vista gets it's first SP.
I should hope not, considering they've been working on Vista for 5 years already and it's been in very widespread beta testing for over a year with many folks attesting that it's pretty darn good, even in beta form. I expect more of the bugs to be in the 64-bit code however, which has undoubtedly had less development than the 32-bit code. Probably a lot of that will just be the fault of 3rd party drivers anyway, not the OS code itself.
Yeah, I'm sure it's pretty good already, but still I'm quite positive some small annouances might occur, even if Vista as a whole would be pretty good. And since there's nothing wrong with xp, why rush it...

As for why it took so long for Vista to be released, maybe this blog will explain some of it...

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Post by vertigo » Thu Nov 30, 2006 12:50 am

Long story short: vista has a very, very different approach to memory management, and attempts to pre-emptively populate every byte of system memory with what it thinks I might need next. This makes sense;
Hmm, I don't know much about Vista but I don't like the sound of this. If we look back to Win95, swap space was free until physical memory ran out, which was great if you had enough physical memory but things go south rapidly as soon as physical memory runs out.

Then in Win98, they changed it so that when memory is allocated, like when you load a game, some items in memory are preemptively put in the swap file to free up memory in anticipation of greater memory needs in the future. Unfortunately, it swapped stuff to disk as your game was loading, which usually means a thrashing hard drive and long load-times. In Win98, one could return to the old algorithm by adding a line to system.ini, if I recall correctly.

So when you say that Vista preemptively caches a whole bunch of stuff you might need, that sounds to me like disk thrashing galore, because surely if you were to load a game for instance, it would change it's mind about what one might need and would therefore cache stuff while the game was loading.

Now I admit that I don't know the details of Vista but in my experience, cacheing unneeded stuff is far more wasteful and annoying than not doing it because inevitably you don't need all that much from the disk compared to the volume of information stored there.

So my worry is that all this will mean in practical terms is far more disk reading with little to no benefit.

Now if they have done it so that stuff is only cached when the disk is idle, so that loading games and such is not hampered, it might not be too bad, but if it tries to be smart as a game is loading and reads a whole bunch of extraneous and wasteful information, I want none of it.

This sounds to me to be a very wasteful thing because I want my disk to read less, not more, and it sounds potentially hampering for loading legitimate information. My intuition is that a cache should be non-intrusive, one shouldn't notice it.

The primary and almost only bottleneck in a PC is the hard drive, which is why I think of virtual memory as extremely precious, not to be abused or used unnecessarily. I suspect that this new caching mechanism will swap stuff to disk to make way for what it considers to be more pertinent information.

I wish Microsoft would include a switch to disable virtual memory entirely. You may say they do because one can turn swapping off but some programs don't work then. But truly, if microsoft would reserve some portion of memory to swap to, for those who have plenty memory, the performance would be astronomically better. I want control over when virtual memory is used. I don't like this black box that windows puts around it.

Ok, enough waffle. I'll read up on this new caching mechanism rather than speculate further.

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Post by Erssa » Thu Nov 30, 2006 1:45 am

vertigo wrote:
Long story short: vista has a very, very different approach to memory management, and attempts to pre-emptively populate every byte of system memory with what it thinks I might need next. This makes sense;
Hmm, I don't know much about Vista but I don't like the sound of this. If we look back to Win95, swap space was free until physical memory ran out, which was great if you had enough physical memory but things go south rapidly as soon as physical memory runs out.

Then in Win98, they changed it so that when memory is allocated, like when you load a game, some items in memory are preemptively put in the swap file to free up memory in anticipation of greater memory needs in the future. Unfortunately, it swapped stuff to disk as your game was loading, which usually means a thrashing hard drive and long load-times. In Win98, one could return to the old algorithm by adding a line to system.ini, if I recall correctly.

So when you say that Vista preemptively caches a whole bunch of stuff you might need, that sounds to me like disk thrashing galore, because surely if you were to load a game for instance, it would change it's mind about what one might need and would therefore cache stuff while the game was loading.

Now I admit that I don't know the details of Vista but in my experience, cacheing unneeded stuff is far more wasteful and annoying than not doing it because inevitably you don't need all that much from the disk compared to the volume of information stored there.

So my worry is that all this will mean in practical terms is far more disk reading with little to no benefit.

Now if they have done it so that stuff is only cached when the disk is idle, so that loading games and such is not hampered, it might not be too bad, but if it tries to be smart as a game is loading and reads a whole bunch of extraneous and wasteful information, I want none of it.

This sounds to me to be a very wasteful thing because I want my disk to read less, not more, and it sounds potentially hampering for loading legitimate information. My intuition is that a cache should be non-intrusive, one shouldn't notice it.

The primary and almost only bottleneck in a PC is the hard drive, which is why I think of virtual memory as extremely precious, not to be abused or used unnecessarily. I suspect that this new caching mechanism will swap stuff to disk to make way for what it considers to be more pertinent information.

I wish Microsoft would include a switch to disable virtual memory entirely. You may say they do because one can turn swapping off but some programs don't work then. But truly, if microsoft would reserve some portion of memory to swap to, for those who have plenty memory, the performance would be astronomically better. I want control over when virtual memory is used. I don't like this black box that windows puts around it.

Ok, enough waffle. I'll read up on this new caching mechanism rather than speculate further.
I don't see how your post is related to the quote. It says Vista will use all of the memory before swapping. Isn't this ideal, isn't it what you want? As little swapping as possible?

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Post by Rusty075 » Thu Nov 30, 2006 11:00 am

I think I get what vertigo is thinking...he's just a bit confused about how it works under Vista.

Vista's "Superfetch" feature fills a portion whatever ram is unused at that moment with whatever it thinks you are going to ask for next off the HDD. (It leaves some space empty in case it guessed wrong) But if it is wrong, that superfetched data in RAM doesn't get written into the swap on the HDD..it just gets wiped quickly from the ram to free up space for whatever you did pull into ram. It's not new or in-use data, so there's no need to save it.

The idea is that it should reduce the HDD as a bottleneck. When the HDD is idle vista will start guessing about what you are likely to use next. For example, if you always run Media Center after you check your email, it will learn that, and pull those files into RAM while your hdd is idle as you read your email. All you'll notice is that media center opens faster than it used to. At least, that's the theory.

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Post by NeilBlanchard » Thu Nov 30, 2006 1:44 pm

Hello,

Apparently, OEM's are getting Vista today? Us consumers will have to wait until January...I'll wait longer than that, thanks.

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Post by aristide1 » Fri Dec 01, 2006 8:59 am

For most power users, the Vista Home Premium or Business would be the best offerings, depending on if you wanted the encrypted filesystem technology or not. Pricing is pretty steep, as is typical for Microsoft ($400 for Vista Ultimate) but that's the price to play.
I'd have to see what each one offers.

Also - Since quad cores are coming and I believe up to and including XP only allowed 2 cores, what will happen when quad cores go mainstream?

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Re: What does MS Vista really offer?

Post by DryFire » Fri Dec 01, 2006 10:30 am

On a small home network with a hardware firewall I don't think anti-virus is necessary with XP either.

Anti-virus programs seem to be there to make up for the user's deficiencies (computer related or otherwise).

Now, would I recommend no anti virus to someone who's PC I just removed 1k instances of spy ware from?

-Not if hell froze over.
sjschwinn wrote:DVD & Blu-Ray "ripping" with DRM / encryption and the ability to serve it to media clients (ala XBOX360).
Excuse me for not getting excited over one of the most ridiculous, invasive and annoying copy protection schemes I've ever seen (did I mention it's been broken?).

vertigo
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Post by vertigo » Fri Dec 01, 2006 11:03 am

Vista's "Superfetch" feature fills a portion whatever ram is unused at that moment with whatever it thinks you are going to ask for next off the HDD. (It leaves some space empty in case it guessed wrong) But if it is wrong, that superfetched data in RAM doesn't get written into the swap on the HDD..it just gets wiped quickly from the ram to free up space for whatever you did pull into ram.
I'm not so sure about that. What I have read seems to suggest that the prefetched material is swapped to disk if a memory-hogging program loads, and when it closes the prefetched items are fetched from the disk as soon as possible so that they are in memory when needed.

So it sounds like some amount of memory is reserved for the prefetch and if more than that is needed, some of it is swapped to disk. I also see there is an option for this prefetched stuff to be swapped to a flash memory device instead, thereby lessening the disk thrashing that will occur when you load Battlefield 1942 or whatever.

And I don't know if it has changed yet but don't flash-memory devices have a limited amount of writes?

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Post by aristide1 » Fri Dec 01, 2006 11:08 am

Here's a comparision chart

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/g ... fault.mspx

If you want all the benefits of the home and business versions you need to buy Ultimate. Oh well.


I noticed that the "upgrade" price is $259, which is not much worse than the current upgrade price of XP Pro of $199. So if the upgrade accepts my Win 2000 Pro CD I'm all set.

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Post by vertigo » Fri Dec 01, 2006 11:14 am

I laughed reading that comparison chart. The first item is 'the most secure Windows ever'... if only that was worth something.

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Post by AZBrandon » Fri Dec 01, 2006 11:18 am

aristide1 wrote:Also - Since quad cores are coming and I believe up to and including XP only allowed 2 cores, what will happen when quad cores go mainstream?
That's a good point, does anyone know how many cores are supported by Vista? Like if somebody buys Vista Home Premium next year with an Intel Quad core processor and suppose two years down the road they can swap in a 16 core processor, is Vista going to think there's a licensing problem? I haven't been able to find anything that lists that information for Vista.

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Post by vertigo » Fri Dec 01, 2006 11:19 am

We all know the tremendous benefits four cores will have over two.

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Re: What does MS Vista really offer?

Post by croddie » Fri Dec 01, 2006 12:53 pm

aristide1 wrote:Over XP Pro with all the SPs installed?

I mean real stuff, not cosmetic issues and changes in the way things are done, just for the sake of change.

It plugs security holes? Really? When was the last time they plugged a hole and didn't create 2 news ones? Bill Gates makes the little Dutch boy look like a master plumber.

/rant off
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_n ... dows_Vista

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Post by seemingly.random » Fri Dec 01, 2006 1:07 pm

Beyonder

Not debating whether you've had any viruses - you could tell with XP flakiness or stolen identity or credit abuse or the like eventually. I'm wondering if you've used RootkitRevealer from SysInternals and if it's the best at exposing this pernicious form of malware.

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Post by Mar. » Fri Dec 01, 2006 1:14 pm

At $159 for the upgrade version of Home Premium, I'm actually thinking about trying it when it's available. The Xbox integration is pretty nice-sounding, now only if they could improve Media Center...

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Post by Beyonder » Fri Dec 01, 2006 1:23 pm

seemingly.random wrote:Beyonder

Not debating whether you've had any viruses - you could tell with XP flakiness or stolen identity or credit abuse or the like eventually. I'm wondering if you've used RootkitRevealer from SysInternals and if it's the best at exposing this pernicious form of malware.
oh yeah. :) If you're running XP, I think it's totally worth the time to learn how to use the SysInternals tools. Especially Process Explorer, which is like Task Manager on crack (I love being able to take take instantanious snapshops of individual threads and get a call stack--this is invaluable when trying to troubleshoot AV/Software Firewall issues, actually).

I use their other tools quite a bit, although to a lesser extent. I've used their root kit revealer, although I've never found anything malicious.

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Post by aristide1 » Fri Dec 01, 2006 3:11 pm

vertigo wrote:We all know the tremendous benefits four cores will have over two.
The ability to tab between 4 separate blue screens of death? :shock:

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Post by floffe » Fri Dec 01, 2006 4:02 pm

aristide1 wrote:
vertigo wrote:We all know the tremendous benefits four cores will have over two.
The ability to tab between 4 separate blue screens of death? :shock:
It might be funny if it wasn't so true :lol: :lol:

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Post by aristide1 » Fri Dec 01, 2006 4:37 pm

By default, Windows Vista ships with thirteen gadgets: Calculator, Clock, CPU Meter, Currency Conversion, Feed Viewer, Feed Watcher, Notes, Number Puzzle, Picture Puzzle, Recycle Bin, Slide Show, Stocks, and an egg timer.
Well no wonder it's need 2 GB of RAM to run properly. :?
e-mail messages are now stored as individual files rather than in a binary database to reduce frequent corruption
Really? Corruption of data in a Windows product? Get the hell out.
Windows Calendar is the new calendar application that is included in Windows Vista.
So hackers can be sure you're not home?
Snipping Tool is a screen-capture tool included with Vista that allows for taking screen shots (known as snips) of windows
Same function, new name, same old MS habits.
while Pinball has been dropped.
Hey this is serious!
Microsoft is introducing a number of Digital Rights Management and content-protection features in Windows Vista, to help digital content providers, corporations, and end-users protect their data from being copied.
Bye bye illegal, and probably legal copying as well.
Icons in Windows Vista are visually more realistic than illustrative.
Real progress.
Process creation overhead is reduced by significant improvements to DLL address-resolving schemes.
IE our current code is crap.
Motherboard support for ACPI is required for Windows Vista; as a result, older motherboards supporting only Advanced Power Management will no longer work. Other "legacy" hardware technologies no longer supported include: EISA buses, game ports, MPU-401, AMD K6/2+ Mobile Processors, Mobile Pentium II, and Mobile Pentium III SpeedStep; ISAPnP[68] is disabled by default.
Power Management, isn't that just a feature we all turn off immediately?
IPX networks are no longer supported.
Ow!
Last edited by aristide1 on Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by Rusty075 » Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:07 pm

aristide1 wrote:
By default, Windows Vista ships with thirteen gadgets: Calculator, Clock, CPU Meter, Currency Conversion, Feed Viewer, Feed Watcher, Notes, Number Puzzle, Picture Puzzle, Recycle Bin, Slide Show, Stocks, and an egg timer.
Well no wonder it's need 2 GB of RAM to run properly. :?
If they're not turned on, they're not using RAM. I think the only one that is enabled by default is CPU Meter, and maybe not even that.


And Vista runs just fine on 512 megs of RAM.

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Post by AZBrandon » Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:17 pm

floffe wrote:
aristide1 wrote:
vertigo wrote:We all know the tremendous benefits four cores will have over two.
The ability to tab between 4 separate blue screens of death? :shock:
It might be funny if it wasn't so true :lol: :lol:
I don't know what kind of stuff you guys are doing but the only time I've ever gotten BSOD under XP is with extreme overclocking. I've actually never had a BSOD when not overclocked. Ever. I've been stunned at how solid XP has been, although I didn't upgrade until SP1 came out. It's a shame too, since I upgraded from Windows ME - possibly the saddest OS since Windows 3.11.

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Post by aristide1 » Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:21 pm

If they're not turned on, they're not using RAM. I think the only one that is enabled by default is CPU Meter, and maybe not even that.
That's good, but think about it. The resources required to run an egg timer. It boggles the mind! I'm going to pop a vessel if I don't stop thinking about this. OW!

:shock:

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Post by aristide1 » Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:25 pm

I don't know what kind of stuff you guys are doing but the only time I've ever gotten BSOD under XP is with extreme overclocking.
Here you've identified the real problem, there is no tongue-in-cheek icon.

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Post by DryFire » Fri Dec 01, 2006 7:14 pm

I always wondered what was the point of the windows media center. Does it do anything I can't do with free software anyway (other then adding drm)?

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