Vista RC2: More Refined, But Still Not Perfect

jcatcw writes, "Scot Finnie continues his love — hate relationship with Windows Vista. He installed the latest beta, RC2, on three machines. First problem: drivers — too many of them that should be available just aren't. User Access Control remains annoying and Vista's Software Protection Platform puts antipiracy above user security. Software compatibility is still in need even at this late date. However, previous problems with the Media Center were absent." And turnitover writes to point us to PC Mag's RC2 review. Their bottom line is that they expect an RC2+ or even an RC3 before it goes final. Here is PC Mag's slide show.

Update: 10/09 19:33 GMT by kd : michigano writes: "This late in the game and Microsoft has pulled firewire support from their OS! No one knows if its permanent."

Re:Perfect?

[DittoBox]

Yes. That's the point of an RC. RC builds are candidates for release and as such are Feature Complete. If any show-stoppers are found then they fix them and release another RC build. If, after a reasonable amount of time, no more show-stoppers are found then the RC is retagged and reversioned as the final build and subsequently published.

Release Candidates are supposed to be fit for release, if they aren't then changes are made to make them fit for release. Hence the term "feature complete" (depending on the project or manufacturer, some people consider betas to be feature complete or near-feature complete, where as Alphas are still in product and functional development) Once they are ready, they go "gold," that is the "gold master" media images are created and the product is manufactured for general popular consumption.

Re:Random thoughts

[cp.tar]

For comparison, I recently decommissioned a server that has only been rebooted 3 times since XP was released.

I'll take it XP wasn't installed on it, then... it takes more reboots just to install it.

Firewire is NOT gone

[ChronoReverse]

Right now I'm running RC2 and the firewire controller on my Asus A8N-VM is right there in the device manager. However, Microsoft has removed the firewire networking that nobody used.

Re:Firewire is NOT gone

[Wizard Drongo]

Nobody uses it?? Since when. I find firewire the nicest way (by far) to network two machines when one of them is already configured for ethernet into another network. This is particularly true when (for instance) I want to transfer large files from my laptop to a machine on my Uni's (and before that, my college's) network. Then there is also the fact that most pc's lack gigabit ethernet, so firewire is at the least, 4 times faster for transfer speed. Which, when coupled with the above ease of connectivity (don't have to change settings back and forth for the ethernet etc) makes it a total winner. There's a reason why firewire networking is the default method of files between two macs when you buy a new one...... I currently do this regularly between my Macbook and said Uni pc's with little hassle. Looks like Windows Vista is gonna be even shitter than it was looking to be.....

Re:Seriously, they must be joking

[ThinkFr33ly]

The amount of RAM used by Vista varies by the following:

1.) Available Physical RAM - the more RAM you have installed, the more it will use by default because it enables certain in-memory caching features and other performance related boosting features. I have a machine with 512MB of RAM and RC2 installed. On startup, with nothing else open, it uses about 320MB of RAM.

2.) Current Memory Pressure - Windows will relinquish memory that it is uses if it detects that applications need it. Sometimes this is through the managed framework (.NET) and its garbage collector, and sometimes its through other mechanisms.

The point is that looking at task manager for the amount of ram being used by a fresh boot is not an accurate way to guage Windows Vista's memory usage patterns.

Re:Microsoft and DRM

[oddfox]

Considering that they're at a stage where if you rip mp3s with media player you can't easily send them to another PC you use, they're already there.

Stop spreading this goddamn lie that I see coming out of the mouth of every fool who hasn't even bothered to see if it's true in Vista! You don't even have the capability to enable copy protection on MP3 files encoded in Windows Media Player 11! It doesn't even default to using copy protection when you encode to WMA or WMA Pro!

There isn't one end user out there that wants more DRM, so MS isn't doing it for the mass market.

Some people might not want their own personally created and original content redistributed to other machines.

By the way, there's plenty of DRM support making it's way into the Linux world, you obviously don't know where to look if you haven't seen it making it's way.