Why Vista Won't Suck

creativity writes "ExtremeTech is running an article on the new features of Windows Vista and why it is a must upgrade for all Windows users. They take apart the marketing hype and tell you what exactly to expect in Windows Vista. They specifically pick out less-hyped features like a kernel which has new Heap Management and details on SuperFetch, which is Vista's application cache."

Re:1 reason vista will suck

Reason #1 doesn't apply, it costs 250$ to submit a driver for signing : https://winqual.microsoft.com/download/WHQLPOLICY. doc [microsoft.com]

Reason #2 doesn't apply for the same reason

Reason #3 Eh, simply play non-DRMed content then, playing it at low-quality is better than not being able to play it on your Linux box or other

Reason #4 I call that jaleousy

Sorry to be Negative....

Sorry to be so negative, but this is like the Highway Division saying "Well, we got tired of projects taking 15 years to complete, so now we're going to do them in one year!"

If it's true, great, bully for them and well done, but I'll believe it when I see it. My hopes aren't too high for all these cool fixes/features to actually function as advertised. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised, who knows?

Re:Sorry to be Negative....

As I already said, by convention the only one that is "required" is C:\. As a convention, it is neither right nor wrong, it just is. All additional volumes can be mounted as subdirectories under C:\, even removable volumes, which I believe will automount based on either device ID or volume label (I haven't tested this rigorously.) When you remove the device, the mount point becomes a simple directory, and when you re-attach the device, it automounts to that same directory. If you are connecting many hard drives, you can simply mount them as C:\mnt\hda1, C:\mnt\hdb1, C:\mnt\hdc1, etc., so it scales just fine.

5 Reasons Why Vista WON"T Suck

1. DRM is good for you. It builds strong bones and healthy muscles.
2. Using half your memory for your windowing tool will impress all your friends.
3. Now you can set the color of your blue screen of death to mauve or taupe.
4. You know the customer support is only going to be better.
5. Collectable virus game built in! Better than Pokemon on crack.

Exsqueeze me?!

From TFA:

SuperFetch also takes advantage of external memory devices--plug in that spare 256MB USB key (any size will work, really) and Windows can cache a lot of the working set to it. It's not as fast as your system RAM, but it's much faster than randomly grabbing small bits of data from all over your hard drive.

Aside from the fact that modern hard discs are supposedly faster than USB 2.0, isn't paging out part of the VM to a hot swappable device just dope-assed? Shurley shome mishtake!

Re:Exsqueeze me?!

I don't believe for a second they rewrote the fscking NT kernel.

Indeed. If that were the case, and Dave Cutler were dead, we could attach magnets to his corpse and use it to generate electricity. Another anomaly:

...there are problems in Windows XP when developers deal with large heaps, heap fragmentation, etc. In the Vista kernel, they have cleaned that up, helping to prevent heap fragmentation and gracefully deal with large heap requests...

Now, hang on a minute... what the fuck does the kernel have to do with application heap management? I thought that was part of the user-space runtime — the C++ libraries, or whathaveyou. Are they talking about the kernel memory allocator or something (the "Object Manager" in NT parlance)? Have they added a slab allocator to NT? So much for the elegant architecture of NT!

Why Windows * Won't Suck

Why limit yourself to Windows Vista!?

Windows Me

"Windows Me: PC Health Features Keep PCs Stable, Secure and Reliable -- and Take the Frustration Out of Computing for Home Users" (source) [microsoft.com]

Windows 2000

"Our primary goal is to improve security and safety for all our customers -- consumers and businesses, regardless of size -- through a balance of technology innovation, guidance and industry leadership," Gates said. "We're committed to continued innovation that addresses the threats of today and anticipates those that will undoubtedly emerge in the future." (source) [microsoft.com]

Windows XP

"Windows XP is the most secure and dependable operating system we have ever produced." (source) [microsoft.com]

Windows Vista

"In Vista, it should be much more difficult for unauthorized programs (like Viruses and Trojans) to affect the core of the OS and secretly harm your system." (source) [extremetech.com]

a "MUST UPGRADE"?

If you want it, you must upgrade... everything. Unless, of course, you're currently running the latest blood-still-flowing-from-the-wounds-edge game machine, in which case you'll just need more memory and a better video card.

Why must I upgrade, though? What will I gain that I want in the first place? Better game performance? Not needed, since I don't do games. The ability to run the latest Microsoft Office at speeds approaching what you could do 5 years ago? Sorry, I already jumped ship to other options. Stronger DRM so that I'll be able to play Sony's next CD/DVD/WhateverD? I'll pass...

What I'd like is some tuning on the current operating system, so that it doesn't need more CPU cycles to do simple tasks, like display directories. And how about fewer holes for virii and worms, without introducing a whole new layer of software to protect the last new layer of software, which was to protect me from bugs in the previous new layer...

Oh, wait... that's Linux.

Looks like a forced upgrade for US gov users...

Looks like a forced upgrade for US gov users; if AES-256 and "SHA-2" hashs are really going to be US gov security requirements, the only way Microsoft will support them is by upgrading EVERY windows desktop and server to Vista. (For some reason Microsoft has refused to put AES-256 support into any non-Vista version of its SSL stack even though the rest of the industry has been doing so for almost five years now.)

Vista sucks.

I've been beta testing Vista for a while now. After installing Vista, I swear to God - the OS cached every single EXE file on my computer in a folder in the root of Vista's installation drive. Each EXE file is given its own subfolder in this folder, with the same name as the file followed by a unique hash. Each subfolder contains the EXE file and several accompanying files, at least two of which are XML documents.

When all was said and done, this folder took up nearly 5GB on disk. I can't even open this drive in Explorer. I let it sit for about 20 minutes once and my PC slowed to a crawl

Whatever this godawful "feature" is, I hope it is removed for the final version.

Why Vista will suck...

From the article:

The whole kernel has been reorganized and rewritten to help prevent software from affecting the system in unsavory ways. In Vista, it should be much more difficult for unauthorized programs (like Viruses and Trojans) to affect the core of the OS and secretly harm your system.

As opposed to authorized programs, like the Sony backdoor, which used Microsoft-supplied methods to create the program to hide from the users.

SuperFetch learns which applications and bits and pieces of the OS you use most and preloads them into memory, so you don't have to wait for a bunch of hard drive paging before your apps or documents load.

Great, the new OS is going to be bigger and bloated just from the OS, and now SuperFetch is going to suck up even more free memory with programs that I may or may not load, but that my computer thinks I'd like to be able to access quickly. Like Windows Media Player, and MSN, and Internet Explorer. And Kazaa. Sorry, was that my outside voice?

...Vista should be far more secure by design, so hopefully we'll see almost no viruses or Trojans, or at least not any that affect a large number of users...

Oh, so we won't use Outlook any more, that's a plus at least.

The new networking stack has a much bigger focus on security, working better with firewalls to allow much finer granularity of which applications can use network resources in which ways, and it's made to stand up a lot better to network attacks.

Great. Now when your parents get the popup that some application wants to access the network, and are presented with all these options for "finer granularity of which applications can use network resources", they'll just turn them all on and go instead of actually learning the ins and outs of TCP security. That's much more secure.

Besides improved security, the most noticeable difference in Vista's networking will be its greatly improved performance.

With the kernel sucking up all my memory by preloading applications, a brand new networking stack, and all these operations going on in the background to maximize my heap, I'll not be holding my breath.

That's right, Vista will include a built-in speech recognition engine, and new and improved speech synthesis.

Vista will have per-application volume control.

Now a new feature called SafeDoc will let you automatically create shadow copies of files as you work on them, so if you accidentally delete a file or need to go back to a previous revision, you can restore the shadow copy of just the file you need.

If you've got a DirectX 9 graphics card with 128MB of RAM or more, you'll be able to enable the "Aero Glass" desktop in Vista.

More, more, more, and more performance-sucking and hardware-gobbling "features". I don't know anyone outside of hardcore gamers that currently has a DX9-compliant, 128MB video card - my parents surely don't. I just last month bought one so that I could play Fable on my comp while I'm away from home for a few months. And I guess I better get that double-500G hard drive option in my new computer so that all my SafeDoc backups don't make all my disk space go the way of my free memory used by SuperFetch.

Users, by default, operate in a mode with fewer privileges than before, which means that "noobs" who don't know any better can't accidentally install software full of spyware.

And "noobs" who do know just a little better will give themselves administrator accounts so that they can install software whenever they want without changing roles, completely mooting any "default user level access" security changes being made.

Unfortunately, there is no built-in virus protection software.

Why do we need virus softwar

The DRM talking point

To all of you who are bitching about DRM in Vista:

How is DRM in Vista any different from DRM in XP? Or Windows 2000? Or Mac OS X?

The answer is simple: It's not any different. The reason is even more simple: Big Media is calling the shots, not Microsoft.

Whether the media in question is downloaded music, downloaded videos, or HD-DVD/Blu-Ray, it is Big Media making the demands. If you're a software vendor, your choices are to go along to get along (Microsoft, Apple, Tivo), do without (Linux), or face the wrath of an army of lawyers (DeCSS, 321 Studios).

The tools and techniques keep changing, but the principle remains the same. Big Media will burn down everything in their path to stop people from copying bits.

Let me see if I have this straight

One of the reasons Vista won't suck is because Microsoft is moving a bunch of stuff out of the kernel and into user space. OK, 10 years ago when Microsoft shipped NT 4.0 they put GDI in the kernel to increase performance, which was a terrible idea as the performance increase this gave was more than offset by stability problems. If Microsoft had been smart they would have kept the kernel as small as possible and waited a couple of years for hardware speeds to increase, as they inevitably did. So basically one of the biggest reasons Vista "won't suck" is because Microsoft has finally decided to undo mistakes they made 10 years ago. Color me less than impressed.

Why Vista Won't Suck?

Let me guess. Because it will include a vacuum cleaner, right?