quote: The UI changes seem minor at best - new themes and Flip3d anti-aliasing do represent and improvement, but they're not really Vista's weakness at this point.
I can't understand how MS propose to sell this Vista.
For what?
Home users? Only for rotating windows? All other features I can have right now on XP.
Business users?? HAHAHAHA!!
There are tons of reasons for businesses to be very interested in Vista, in my mind, maybe even more than home users.
For one, there are twice as many group policies in Vista compared to XP. Over 3000.
Another thing that businesses are going to be very interested in is BitLocker. Federal Government agencies that I work with can't wait for this. The ability to store an EFS keypair on a smartcard is another huge thing for businesses. Network Access Protection (NAP) is another big interest.
The new install and imaging technology is very interesting to business that maintain desktop images, espcially when they may have to support multiple machine types. In Vista, you can have one image that will work on all of your hardware, and updating it is easy.
So when you post next time, try to know what you are talking about.
Will users that use Vista be able to set different local GPO's for different users on a standalone PC? As you know XP pro local GPO's effect every user on a standalone PC with multiple users, unless a member of a domain.
That would be extremely handy if that is possible. Also the more GPO's the better, so an extra 3000 is brilliant for fine tuning users access.
Words of wisdom... I bet these people see a perfect reason to use OSX and buy the anual updates - but certainly not any iteration of windows with several years in between.
I was using 2000 until Obilvion came out and it would not install on w2k. Bought XP and plan to keep it for 5-6 years as well. I'm a always a few years behind but that's nothing compared to where I work..about 250 machines all are w2k and we have a site licence for any MS stuff we want to install on any machine. Even new Dells that come in with XP on them the admins wipe and put 2k on.... needless to say I, we, the whole world maybe is'nt in any hurry for Vista with performance and bugs like that.
lol, i work on a quite a few contracts, one of them being a 15,000 user base running in an NT4 environment :shocked; Now that is old school, but it works and is sufficient for what is required.
However, a new rollout is on the horizon with Dell’s running XP. With cost and time aside, the biggest issue is with OS stability/reliability and quality of tech support when running immature platforms. From what I see now from my stand point XP is becoming the norm, as the platform is peeking in its maturity.
When vista comes along, I doubt companies will embrace it too quickly, since their tech support wont be up to speed (along with OS stability), this takes time, and could cost a company a lot of money trying to maintain full capacity on a low tolerance infrastructure.
I have you both beat. One of the local small businesses I do tech support for has several desktops running...Windows 3.1. But it gets even better; their data processing team is running entirely on original IBM PC/AT. Talk about vintage computing.
It's kind of funny that they didn't eliminate the hourglass cursor years ago. It just seems like a big taunt at the user, saying "hey, you're just sitting there waiting, tick tock tick tock". A rotating ring, or anything that is just a looping icon, is somewhat neutral by comparison, although a ring implies it's working and not getting anywhere.
Seems kind of dumb to make even the mouse cursors similar to OSX. It's like they're just begging people to point out how they are just copying Apple.
The free build contains no debugging hooks in the kernel -- this doesn't mean that the beta drivers or userspace programs installed don't have their own internal debugging/logging/overhead that won't be there in a final release.
Any "new" thing I've seen in Vista is a copy of OS X. Shows how stupid some people are, actually wanting to buy an OS with features you could have had 5 years ago. lawl
I thought that Windows Vista was not going to run DirectX 9 natively... but that it would be run in an emulated layer.
Did something change... does vista now run DX9 natively
If it doesnt... then why are the 3D gaming marks surprising to anyone. If it is emulated.. those are very decent numbers. I thought the reason to leave DX9 behind was to get rid of overhead... change the driver model and clean things up. I had heard the expectation was that future graphics cards would be so much faster that emulating older games would be fast enough to hide the emulation.
Can someone please correct me if I am wrong because it blows my mind that anandtech is not mentioning this at all.
DX9 will not be "emulated" ... i don't think that's really a term that can even be applied to APIs.
Yes, the driver model will be different, but Vista won't require DX10 -- it will require DX9. And even so, running a DX8 game won't require any kind of extra overhead to run. I'm really not sure where that idea is coming from.
I haven't been following this for a while, but a while ago MS said they were going to impliment OpenGL through DX -- this would add an extra step in the pipeline for OpenGL applications.
I have Vista Beta 2 (not installed yet), can i upgrade to the latest build, i.e. software automatic update or something, or is it a totally different procedure to get the latest build? Thanks.
P.S i have the Windows Vista Beta preview program, from MS as the DVD case set.
quote: We would rather see more work go in to the internals of Vista, but with a large company like Microsoft, the "too many cooks" problem would likely apply. What we have seen of work done underneath so far is promising; the Vista UI is noticeably faster, overall performance is a little higher, UAC is finally becoming more friendly
What are the sort of internal changes that you'd like to see in Vista? The two items listed here are external items.
I'd like to know how well the new TCP/IP stack works, what the average overhead of the new driver model is, how much the caching technologies (SSHDs and USB flash boosts) improves the performance and where the breakeven point would be. There are a large number of under-the-hood changes implemented in Vista already.
Yet I keep hearing about how MS is only making cosmetic changes when people are simply looking at the cosmetic changes. If you're only looking at the surface, of course you'll only see the surface.
I agree. When are we going to see reviews about Vista's internal workings or what I like to call the actual purpose of an OS. Bundled applications are just there to hurt the competition. We don't need reviews of virus protections, DVD player, browser, media player, etc. What about how drivers are handled, what about support for SATA drives when installing Vista on a blank drive, what about network performance, the registry (if is still exists), etc.
I remember a time when an OS talked to the BIOS and allowed a user to have a good interface with the hardware of the computer in order to install third-party software. What ever happened to those, browserless, mediaplayerless, viruscanless, bundleless days of the OS.
Well, the included applications are a great deal important to an OS.
For example, when people think about OSX, they think more about the applications that come with rather than the OS itself. The surface is always easier to see and critique.
That's why I personally don't feel that it's wrong for Microsoft to bundle applications with Windows. It should be expected even. What was wrong was integrating IE so tightly into the OS that it would be difficult/impossible to remove without breaking everything.
I saw somewhere that WinFS has been cancelled and will not be coming out at all for Vista... looks like we're going to have to wait until Windows 2015 before we get an upgrade to WinFS
Until gaming numbers are equal to or better than XP's, gamers have no reason to upgrade from XP aside from the temptation of future Vista-only releases.
What a shame that all signs point to us having to accept quite atrocious performance hits in gaming if we move to Vista. This just further ups the hardware requirements and thus the cost of PC gaming for all of us.
the only thing keeping me on M$ O$ is games.
Not too many releases for linux.
Otherwise, open office and FTW. Mac is just a non-starter.
Games and the fact that people always crack it for me :D.
I can see why Billy Bob retired. What a ffffrieking nightmare they have built for themselves.
Here's a potential reason for gamers to upgrade: if you have WinXP Home Edition, your support will be over two years after Vista comes out, just like Win98 support is now expired. Buying Vista in a pro-level version will get you another 10 years of product support.
what? that's just another reason even Home users have another two years before they'd be forced to upgrade. and for the majority of us on Pro, we'll likely be fine even longer.
That said, I would anticipate drivers improving performance a ton within 6-12 months of Vista's release, and that's right around the time I think most of us would transition over to it.
You know, give it some time to get the worst bugs and vulnerabilities worked out and the performance improved.
Well that depends on if it is actually up to Microsoft or Nvidia and ATI. They did afterall change the graphics driver structure. Didn't it even take a while for Nvidia and ATI to reach equal performance on 64-bitt?
Well , Not really M$ fault on gaming. If you look back when Windows XP was about to released , alot of older game ran better on windows 98. Same people said the same thing "Untill Microsoft don't gaming performance i am not upgrading to windows XP"
I think the issue likes in Video driver where Nvidia and ATI tweak the crap out of it.
Interestingly, back in the mid 90s, Microsoft did do something right.
Memory management in DOS games used to be a crazy difficult thing to do. Some games would need a certain ammount of base memory free in order to run, which could be difficult. One of those games happened to be Wing Commander III.
Not only did WC3 run more easily under Windows 95 than under DOS, but it ran faster and with higher stability.
Of course it's all been down hill since then.
But please guys -- this is an interim release of Beta quality software with beta drivers all around. Let's hold off on passing any final judgements and just take this for what it is: a peak into where MS is with development so far.
That is not true, compatibility with totally new Windows kernels has been down to Microsoft's desire to include backward compatibility.
Around about the 1998-2001 era, most games ran poorly if at all on Windows 2000 unless specifically designed with them in mind as well as Win98/ME. Only a few developers included NT/2000 as a supported platform so you were out of luck if you expected games to run on it. But around when Windows XP was released, Windows 2000 SP2 suddenly increased compatibility with large numbers of games and the Application Compatibility Toolkit plus a command-line fix to enable selection of compatibility modes (something MS didn't automatically enable by default presumably because they wanted people to buy XP which included it by default) made Windows 2000 and XP run large numbers of older games. Although some games take a bit coercing, it's surprising just how many Windows games from the 1996-2000 era can be made to work properly under Win2000/XP despite being intended for Win9x only.
I imagine the same will be true with Vista and games designed for XP/2000. This time we shouldn't have the wait until Service Pack Whatever for the compatibility to arrive, but it will get there. We'll never get quite the same raw performance under Vista as with XP/2000 as there are additional overheads that can't be removed, but it'll be close enough in DX9 titles to satisfy most of us. A few hundred 3DMarks isn't going to matter in DX9 when we've already moved up to DX10. And emulation or however they implement DX8/DX7/DX6 and DX5 Direct3D is also irrelevant so long as it is 100% complete as the games which use those interfaces will run screamingly fast on even a low-end card.
Having said that, I won't be migrating to Vista anytime soon. I might download an unofficial evaluation copy of the final version (either Ultimate or Corporate depending on how I feel) to see what I think, but DX10 only games hold no sway with me. Chances are I'll migrate to Vista when SP1 is out and proven stable.
I posted that to the wrong part of this thread. Sorry. But the commenting system is totally rubbish anyway and often posts comments in the wrong place by itself. And has no editing or deletion facility.
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45 Comments
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Zoomer - Sunday, August 6, 2006 - link
Shouldn't it be 'an'?
Ingas - Saturday, July 29, 2006 - link
I can't understand how MS propose to sell this Vista.For what?
Home users? Only for rotating windows? All other features I can have right now on XP.
Business users?? HAHAHAHA!!
stash - Sunday, July 30, 2006 - link
There are tons of reasons for businesses to be very interested in Vista, in my mind, maybe even more than home users.For one, there are twice as many group policies in Vista compared to XP. Over 3000.
Another thing that businesses are going to be very interested in is BitLocker. Federal Government agencies that I work with can't wait for this. The ability to store an EFS keypair on a smartcard is another huge thing for businesses. Network Access Protection (NAP) is another big interest.
The new install and imaging technology is very interesting to business that maintain desktop images, espcially when they may have to support multiple machine types. In Vista, you can have one image that will work on all of your hardware, and updating it is easy.
So when you post next time, try to know what you are talking about.
RichUK - Monday, July 31, 2006 - link
Will users that use Vista be able to set different local GPO's for different users on a standalone PC? As you know XP pro local GPO's effect every user on a standalone PC with multiple users, unless a member of a domain.That would be extremely handy if that is possible. Also the more GPO's the better, so an extra 3000 is brilliant for fine tuning users access.
stash - Monday, July 31, 2006 - link
Yes.
Just to clarify, its about 3000 total. XP has about 1500.
ChronoReverse - Sunday, July 30, 2006 - link
And yet people predict things like Macs will suddenly make a comeback.Griswold - Sunday, July 30, 2006 - link
Words of wisdom... I bet these people see a perfect reason to use OSX and buy the anual updates - but certainly not any iteration of windows with several years in between.Zebo - Saturday, July 29, 2006 - link
I was using 2000 until Obilvion came out and it would not install on w2k. Bought XP and plan to keep it for 5-6 years as well. I'm a always a few years behind but that's nothing compared to where I work..about 250 machines all are w2k and we have a site licence for any MS stuff we want to install on any machine. Even new Dells that come in with XP on them the admins wipe and put 2k on.... needless to say I, we, the whole world maybe is'nt in any hurry for Vista with performance and bugs like that.RichUK - Saturday, July 29, 2006 - link
lol, i work on a quite a few contracts, one of them being a 15,000 user base running in an NT4 environment :shocked; Now that is old school, but it works and is sufficient for what is required.However, a new rollout is on the horizon with Dell’s running XP. With cost and time aside, the biggest issue is with OS stability/reliability and quality of tech support when running immature platforms. From what I see now from my stand point XP is becoming the norm, as the platform is peeking in its maturity.
When vista comes along, I doubt companies will embrace it too quickly, since their tech support wont be up to speed (along with OS stability), this takes time, and could cost a company a lot of money trying to maintain full capacity on a low tolerance infrastructure.
Elitist Snob - Tuesday, August 1, 2006 - link
I have you both beat. One of the local small businesses I do tech support for has several desktops running...Windows 3.1. But it gets even better; their data processing team is running entirely on original IBM PC/AT. Talk about vintage computing.Lord Evermore - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
It's kind of funny that they didn't eliminate the hourglass cursor years ago. It just seems like a big taunt at the user, saying "hey, you're just sitting there waiting, tick tock tick tock". A rotating ring, or anything that is just a looping icon, is somewhat neutral by comparison, although a ring implies it's working and not getting anywhere.Seems kind of dumb to make even the mouse cursors similar to OSX. It's like they're just begging people to point out how they are just copying Apple.
stash - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
All publically released builds of Vista are 'free' builds, and therefore contain no debugging code.If you were running a checked build that does contain debugging code, trust me, you would know it.
DerekWilson - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
The free build contains no debugging hooks in the kernel -- this doesn't mean that the beta drivers or userspace programs installed don't have their own internal debugging/logging/overhead that won't be there in a final release.Thanks,
Derek Wilson
Fissiongrid - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Any "new" thing I've seen in Vista is a copy of OS X. Shows how stupid some people are, actually wanting to buy an OS with features you could have had 5 years ago. lawlsaiku - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Could I play all my FPS/RTS games on MAC 5 years ago? I want Vista because of DirectX 10 and DirectX 10 games.absynthe49 - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
I thought that Windows Vista was not going to run DirectX 9 natively... but that it would be run in an emulated layer.Did something change... does vista now run DX9 natively
If it doesnt... then why are the 3D gaming marks surprising to anyone. If it is emulated.. those are very decent numbers. I thought the reason to leave DX9 behind was to get rid of overhead... change the driver model and clean things up. I had heard the expectation was that future graphics cards would be so much faster that emulating older games would be fast enough to hide the emulation.
Can someone please correct me if I am wrong because it blows my mind that anandtech is not mentioning this at all.
DerekWilson - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
DX9 will not be "emulated" ... i don't think that's really a term that can even be applied to APIs.Yes, the driver model will be different, but Vista won't require DX10 -- it will require DX9. And even so, running a DX8 game won't require any kind of extra overhead to run. I'm really not sure where that idea is coming from.
I haven't been following this for a while, but a while ago MS said they were going to impliment OpenGL through DX -- this would add an extra step in the pipeline for OpenGL applications.
Thanks,
Derek Wilson
ChronoReverse - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
That's also been changed. OGL has full access to the hardware again as well as being compatible with the windowing system.The only catch is that it requires new drivers from the hardware vendors
RichUK - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
I have Vista Beta 2 (not installed yet), can i upgrade to the latest build, i.e. software automatic update or something, or is it a totally different procedure to get the latest build? Thanks.P.S i have the Windows Vista Beta preview program, from MS as the DVD case set.
Ryan Smith - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
No, you can't upgrade. It has to be a fresh install.stash - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
No it doesn't, upgrade from beta2 to 5472 is supported.RichUK - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Damn i can't remember my MSDN login :|ChronoReverse - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
What are the sort of internal changes that you'd like to see in Vista? The two items listed here are external items.
I'd like to know how well the new TCP/IP stack works, what the average overhead of the new driver model is, how much the caching technologies (SSHDs and USB flash boosts) improves the performance and where the breakeven point would be. There are a large number of under-the-hood changes implemented in Vista already.
Yet I keep hearing about how MS is only making cosmetic changes when people are simply looking at the cosmetic changes. If you're only looking at the surface, of course you'll only see the surface.
mlittl3 - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
I agree. When are we going to see reviews about Vista's internal workings or what I like to call the actual purpose of an OS. Bundled applications are just there to hurt the competition. We don't need reviews of virus protections, DVD player, browser, media player, etc. What about how drivers are handled, what about support for SATA drives when installing Vista on a blank drive, what about network performance, the registry (if is still exists), etc.I remember a time when an OS talked to the BIOS and allowed a user to have a good interface with the hardware of the computer in order to install third-party software. What ever happened to those, browserless, mediaplayerless, viruscanless, bundleless days of the OS.
ChronoReverse - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Well, the included applications are a great deal important to an OS.For example, when people think about OSX, they think more about the applications that come with rather than the OS itself. The surface is always easier to see and critique.
That's why I personally don't feel that it's wrong for Microsoft to bundle applications with Windows. It should be expected even. What was wrong was integrating IE so tightly into the OS that it would be difficult/impossible to remove without breaking everything.
DerekWilson - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
they're still here -- sounds like you'd love LinuxAkumaX - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
LMK When WinFS comes out ;)Bowsky - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
I saw somewhere that WinFS has been cancelled and will not be coming out at all for Vista... looks like we're going to have to wait until Windows 2015 before we get an upgrade to WinFSyacoub - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Until gaming numbers are equal to or better than XP's, gamers have no reason to upgrade from XP aside from the temptation of future Vista-only releases.What a shame that all signs point to us having to accept quite atrocious performance hits in gaming if we move to Vista. This just further ups the hardware requirements and thus the cost of PC gaming for all of us.
trexpesto - Monday, July 31, 2006 - link
the only thing keeping me on M$ O$ is games.Not too many releases for linux.
Otherwise, open office and FTW. Mac is just a non-starter.
Games and the fact that people always crack it for me :D.
I can see why Billy Bob retired. What a ffffrieking nightmare they have built for themselves.
"Whateva, I do what I want"
Griswold - Sunday, July 30, 2006 - link
No, the bottom line is, you shouldnt look at a beta without taking performance figures with alot of salt.mechBgon - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Here's a potential reason for gamers to upgrade: if you have WinXP Home Edition, your support will be over two years after Vista comes out, just like Win98 support is now expired. Buying Vista in a pro-level version will get you another 10 years of product support.yacoub - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
what? that's just another reason even Home users have another two years before they'd be forced to upgrade. and for the majority of us on Pro, we'll likely be fine even longer.That said, I would anticipate drivers improving performance a ton within 6-12 months of Vista's release, and that's right around the time I think most of us would transition over to it.
You know, give it some time to get the worst bugs and vulnerabilities worked out and the performance improved.
TowerShield - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Well that depends on if it is actually up to Microsoft or Nvidia and ATI. They did afterall change the graphics driver structure. Didn't it even take a while for Nvidia and ATI to reach equal performance on 64-bitt?ChronoReverse - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
I agree, it's because of the new driver model that this is happening. The vista drivers from ATi and Nvidia right now are still pretty dismal.Zoomer - Sunday, August 6, 2006 - link
Plus, they moved it to userspace instead of kernel space. That's bound to cause some performance loss.Damn microsoft.
deathwalker - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
It's Microsoft..so we should expect something different?tuteja1986 - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Well , Not really M$ fault on gaming. If you look back when Windows XP was about to released , alot of older game ran better on windows 98. Same people said the same thing "Untill Microsoft don't gaming performance i am not upgrading to windows XP"I think the issue likes in Video driver where Nvidia and ATI tweak the crap out of it.
DerekWilson - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Interestingly, back in the mid 90s, Microsoft did do something right.Memory management in DOS games used to be a crazy difficult thing to do. Some games would need a certain ammount of base memory free in order to run, which could be difficult. One of those games happened to be Wing Commander III.
Not only did WC3 run more easily under Windows 95 than under DOS, but it ran faster and with higher stability.
Of course it's all been down hill since then.
But please guys -- this is an interim release of Beta quality software with beta drivers all around. Let's hold off on passing any final judgements and just take this for what it is: a peak into where MS is with development so far.
Thanks,
Derek Wilson
PrinceGaz - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
That is not true, compatibility with totally new Windows kernels has been down to Microsoft's desire to include backward compatibility.Around about the 1998-2001 era, most games ran poorly if at all on Windows 2000 unless specifically designed with them in mind as well as Win98/ME. Only a few developers included NT/2000 as a supported platform so you were out of luck if you expected games to run on it. But around when Windows XP was released, Windows 2000 SP2 suddenly increased compatibility with large numbers of games and the Application Compatibility Toolkit plus a command-line fix to enable selection of compatibility modes (something MS didn't automatically enable by default presumably because they wanted people to buy XP which included it by default) made Windows 2000 and XP run large numbers of older games. Although some games take a bit coercing, it's surprising just how many Windows games from the 1996-2000 era can be made to work properly under Win2000/XP despite being intended for Win9x only.
I imagine the same will be true with Vista and games designed for XP/2000. This time we shouldn't have the wait until Service Pack Whatever for the compatibility to arrive, but it will get there. We'll never get quite the same raw performance under Vista as with XP/2000 as there are additional overheads that can't be removed, but it'll be close enough in DX9 titles to satisfy most of us. A few hundred 3DMarks isn't going to matter in DX9 when we've already moved up to DX10. And emulation or however they implement DX8/DX7/DX6 and DX5 Direct3D is also irrelevant so long as it is 100% complete as the games which use those interfaces will run screamingly fast on even a low-end card.
Having said that, I won't be migrating to Vista anytime soon. I might download an unofficial evaluation copy of the final version (either Ultimate or Corporate depending on how I feel) to see what I think, but DX10 only games hold no sway with me. Chances are I'll migrate to Vista when SP1 is out and proven stable.
PrinceGaz - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
I posted that to the wrong part of this thread. Sorry. But the commenting system is totally rubbish anyway and often posts comments in the wrong place by itself. And has no editing or deletion facility.But I still stand by what I said.
gersson - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Its possible that that the video drivers are really @ fault. Cos PS performance is up...?? Any other appz known to run faster on Vista?JarredWalton - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Time in seconds means lower is better, so PS and AutoGK performance are still down from XP, but up from Beta 2.PeteRoy - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
What balances the loss of performance? The new graphics? The "bonus" security? Internet Explorer 7? Media Player 11?Microsoft better make Vista faster on the final release.
ChronoReverse - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Yeah, what do we do about the negative performance loss for non-3D applications in a beta build? I'm not sure either =P