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

[Anonymous Coward]

It will work with a non-drm display, but you won't be able to play certain media at full resolution without a drm monitor.

Re:1 reason vista will suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically, Vista will be HDCP [wikipedia.org] enabled, so if you want HD and protected content on it, you have to have a DRMed up monitor that can process HDCP.

Re:1 reason vista will suck

[jorenko]

What he means is that if you want to watch HD-DVD or Blu-Ray media that is protected by HDCP(which practically all retail movies probably will be) at a resolution higher than what's possible with a regular old DVD under Vista, you'll need to buy a monitor that also supports HDCP. But this is also the case for your TV and other equipment and in no way impairs other functionality of Vista.

Re:Sorry to be Negative....

[Skye16]

Having played with it for 13 days after getting it off of BT, I can say that Vista is as much a change away from XP as Linux is. I actually found it easier configuring things in KDE and Gnome than I did in Vista -- how crazy is that? Of course, this is mostly because every configuration you could do via a particular widget on the control panel has been moved to another widget, or hidden, tucked away in the shadows to the left, but it's much different.

Whether or not the security model truly is secure is something I can't answer. However, Vista pesters you for permission to run just about every exe out there for the very first time, assumedly before it has been registered as 'safe'. I don't remember 100%, but I believe it required me to create a separate user account on installation, along with the administrator account. Of course, since my activation would expire after 14 days, I really didn't give a fuck if someone would be able to compromise my system, so I ran everything as Administrator anyway. Therefor I can't really tell you if it requires Administrator priveleges to install programs.

It did make use of a C:\Users\ folder, however, which was rather nice.

In any event, I'm sure you can find the DVD ISO on one of the torrent networks so you can check it out yourself. I like to give Microsoft a hard time just as much as the next guy, but in all honesty, this is a very, very slick and polished OS. I had vowed never to buy it and to move to Linux, but now I'm questioning my decision. Now it's a question of all the DRM restrictions I would have to endure.

Vista sucks.

[millennial]

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.

Re:5 Reasons Why Vista WON"T Suck

[marshall_j]

You don't think maybe it's a case of if it's there use it?

I have a flash graphics card in my computer and when I don't have a game running the gfx card isn't used so why not use it?

Re:Exsqueeze me?!

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Small random I/O from flash media is MUCH faster than small random IO from HDD (HDD has seek time penalties, flash does not)
2) Its a write-through cache. (You can plug out the USB drive anytime and not lose data.)

The DRM talking point

[Keith Russell]

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.

Re:Exsqueeze me?!

[Foolhardy]

Process memory allocation != heap allocation. The smallest amount of memory the kernel can allocate to a process is one page, which is 4096 bytes on the i386 architecture. Linux operates exactly the same way. To request more memory be committed and mapped in a process, the NtAllocateVirtualMemory [ntinternals.net] syscall is used. 4096 bytes is much too large for most general purpose allocations, so a heap structure is used to further divide up the memory size. The standard heap [ntinternals.net] code (used by the Win32 heap functions [microsoft.com] and Microsoft's C runtime) resides in ntdll.dll, and are executed entirely in user mode. When the heap code needs more pages to expand the heap, it surely does call NtAllocateVirtualMemory, but most allocations are done on a much smaller scale.

XP introduced (and had backported to 2000) the Low Fragmentation Heap [microsoft.com] option that uses presized buckets to reduce long term fragmentation. That's the only thing I can think of that they could be talking about. It's part of the standard heap code in ntdll running in user mode.

Microsoft certainly didn't rewrite "large parts of the kernel." If they were going to do something on that scale, you'd think they would ditch (or at least marginalize) the awful Win32 subsystem, but they aren't. This is one of the worst attempted technical articles I've seen in a while. Besides, the kernel never was the weak point in Windows NT's (yes, Vista is still NT) security model, or as an OS in general.

Re:Sorry to be Negative....

[amliebsch]

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.

Re:Except network shares

[JourneymanMereel]

You kinda can using something called DFS on Windows servers. It's kindof a pain to set up, but you can make it so F:\Share points to \\server1\share and F:\Stuff points to \\server2\stuff. Not perfect and AFAIK a PITA to set up, but possible.