Phobos@Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 11:29 am :
I guess it's Microsoft's new thing? I stumbled across a news blog that had the new windows, "Windows 7," written all over it.

I researched. Apparently a beta soon?

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/

and a benchmark of sorts:

http://windows7news.com/2008/12/12/windows-7-benchmarks/



BloodRayne@Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 12:05 pm :
After waiting for nearly a year and a half I recently switched over from XP to 64bits Vista and I have to say I'm very happy about it so far!
Stability, response times and all over performance has increased for me, and I've not had any major issues with compatibility. Those issues that I did have were due to me switching from Nvidia to Ati (I always used Nvidia before).

I'm hearing very good things about Windows 7 from our development partners at work that have been treated to sneak previews (I am a microsoft certified professional, believe it or not) and I'm eager to take a loot at it myself.

Looks like MS learned a lot from their previous experiences, I like the way they changed their communication:

Quote:
It's the next version of Windows for PCs, and it's the result of working hand-in-hand with our partners and with people who use Windows in the real world every day. We're paying particular attention to the things they're telling us are important to them and will make their PCs work the way they want them to—things like enhanced reliability, responsiveness, and faster boot and shut-down. We're also trying to make their everyday tasks easier, like connecting and syncing devices, browsing the web, and managing a home network.

Of course, we're also working on new capabilities, so people will be able to do things with Windows 7 that were difficult (or perhaps impossible) to do with PCs before. Finally, we're working hard to ensure that Windows 7 will run on any PC and work with any program that works today with Windows Vista, so upgrading from Windows Vista will be easy.

We hope this helps you find what you're looking for. Please check back soon.



The Happy Friar@Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 2:10 pm :
I wouldn't say those are things they've been listening to, it's things they've been doing always. Each version of windows improved upon those things (to most opinion anyway!).

i'm more excited Windows 7 will support multi-point interfaces. hopefully that means it also supports multiple mice vs just touch screens.

But I'm betting they'll still have the crappy way to sort files in the explore... blah!



BloodRayne@Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 2:51 pm :
The Happy Friar wrote:
I wouldn't say those are things they've been listening to, it's things they've been doing always. Each version of windows improved upon those things (to most opinion anyway!).

I meant more their tone of voice. :)

This is what I like about Microsoft, they only work from their own strengths, not the competition's weaknesses. Take a company like Apple, they'll say 'Apple is great because so and so works better than it does with Windows', the same goes for many Linux fanboys that I know. They'll try to convince me of the strength of linux by comparing it to the weaknesses of Windows. MS focusses on their own strengths (see my initial quote from their website). Any OS has it's own perks and weaknesses. My personal favorite is a Windows OS, but that might not apply for somebody else. :)

As a company, MS have come much more 'down to earth' in the last 5 years. 5 years ago when we needed support from them (for work) it took 2 weeks to get a response. These days, we can call directly and get instant support, huge difference from 5 years ago!

I know I am sounding like a fanboy, it's not that MS doesn't have it's weaknesses because it does!
For balance to name a few: They continue to abuse their market position, they remain awfully silent as to security, freedom of speech and other major issues that affect them just as much as the rest of the world (think about how MS and Cisco help China with censoring the people of China etc..etc..) so there is still a lot of room for improvement.

But they do have guts. They did ship a new OS, and continue to do so, they did re-invent Database management, workflow and they DID implement (and think up of) 'the new way of working' where everybody in MS can work atleast 1 day from their homes to help with traffic issues etc..etc..

Sorry for derailing this thread, I'll back off now. :mrgreen:



pbmax@Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 2:59 pm :
i just like the fact that windows 7 isn't a bloated piece of crap like vista. operating systems should be lean and fast. at least that's what i've heard MS wants windows 7 to be like. i'm sure some feature creep will happen...



goliathvt@Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 3:29 pm :
Agreed. Vista, even stripped down and services disabled and whatnot is so much slower than an XP box running much older hardware. Nevermind the 1GB OS MEMORY footprint. What a fucking joke. XP takes up, what... 300MB, if that?



BloodRayne@Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 4:01 pm :
goliathvt wrote:
Agreed. Vista, even stripped down and services disabled and whatnot is so much slower than an XP box running much older hardware. Nevermind the 1GB OS MEMORY footprint. What a fucking joke. XP takes up, what... 300MB, if that?

I have a dual boot at the moment, Vista 64 bits and XP32.

There is one issue that XP users forget, I have 6GB of memory but XP 32 bits (almost nobody runs XP 64 bits) cannot allocate more than 3GB of system memory to the OS (and then only by using AWE). I could make a benchmark, but on my machine I'm pretty sure Vista would win due to the simple fact that I'd have 3GB of extra system memory available, and my 8 cores are much more happy in a 64 bit environment.

Conclusion: Choosing an OS depends on what kind of hardware you have running and what you want out of your rig. :)



The Happy Friar@Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 4:25 pm :
BloodRayne wrote:
I have a dual boot at the moment, Vista 64 bits and XP32.


like you said, you're compared Vista 64 to XP 32. Like above, I could argue that Linux & OSX support 64-bit long before Windows, and that gives it the advantage in this area (ironically, it does. Many *nix & MacOS programs supported the extra memory long ago. *nix also supported multiple CPU's before Windows did). You'd have to compare Vista 32 to XP 32, or else compare vista 64 to XP 64 when you're talking about programs that use a lot of memory.

I've heard great things about Vista 64 from video folks. The worst part is the lack of 64-bit support software (plugins & the like). That's where Apple & Linux have the advantage with age: those have already been worked on. The only part I've heard AGAINST XP64 is that MS didn't push it & everything only officially supports Vista 64. IMHO, bad move MS. That's made Vista64 a 64-bit experiment with things that should of been solved with XP64.



goliathvt@Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 5:45 pm :
I run XP64. :P:D



The Happy Friar@Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 6:09 pm :
and it runs great I assume, right? :)

but that's my point: XP64 wasn't even pushed. vista64 is.



BNA!@Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 8:17 pm :
I've never been negative about MS, but Vista is the first upgrade I regret.
Even running XP in a virtual machine on a MAC feels faster and has less compatibility issues.



iceheart@Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 11:15 pm :
BNA! wrote:
I've never been negative about MS, but Vista is the first upgrade I regret.
Even running XP in a virtual machine on a MAC feels faster and has less compatibility issues.


I can't see how you manage that - the only compatibility issues I've had are from the fact that it's 64bit, not vista itself. It certainly doesn't have an appreciable performance difference for me compared to XP.



TRSGM@Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 12:33 am :
goliathvt wrote:
Agreed. Vista, even stripped down and services disabled and whatnot is so much slower than an XP box running much older hardware. Nevermind the 1GB OS MEMORY footprint. What a fucking joke. XP takes up, what... 300MB, if that?

Idle, you mean. Under heavy load my memory footprint drops to roughly 250-300MB, if the sidebar is to be believed. At the specific times you mention, however, I don't really care. Not like I'm doing anything with my 3GB anyway.

Also, I believe XP paged a lot more of itself for most of the time, but I can't say for sure. Don't quote me on that.

Oh, and I forgot to ask-- how's the entire kernel running on one thread working out for ya?



BNA!@Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 9:47 am :
iceheart wrote:
BNA! wrote:
I've never been negative about MS, but Vista is the first upgrade I regret.
Even running XP in a virtual machine on a MAC feels faster and has less compatibility issues.


I can't see how you manage that - the only compatibility issues I've had are from the fact that it's 64bit, not vista itself. It certainly doesn't have an appreciable performance difference for me compared to XP.


We run Vista 32 here in the office. The internet connection and lan access frequently get's interrupted (for Vista boxes only - Macs and XP's still work fine). The whole network needs to get rebooted with the vista boxes to get them back online. Happens every two weeks.

My HP LAN printer / fax / everything makes coffee too device could not get addressed by Vista computers for 15 months, neither MS nor HP felt responsible to provide the necessary patch or whatever. It's not an ancient printer from 2005 or older, it's a mid 2007 model.

Customized excel tools we use and write work well across multiple office versions, but to get it working reliably on Vista sort of requires random luck. That's pretty much annoying when your run a macro through a pile of 50k documents to do something (more advanced than changing the address of mass mailings). This works for almost 50k documents, emphasis is almost - numbers do not add up and sherlock holmesing around finds you the dozen or so failed routines.

I am also unhappy that I have to deactivate something called user access control (or similar, forgot about it since I switched it off day two after installation) which forces you into sado maso style "Click OK to proceed" pop up window cycles born in hell, adapted by porn sites and brought to mankind as eternal revenge by MS Vista.

Side note: Laptop battery life is 20% to 30% shorter.

I could go on with that list, but it doesn't change a thing. Vista is not evil and it doesn't stop everything from working, but it introduced me to many new problems I didn't have under XP, even when running XP virtualized on a MAC. In this sense I regret the upgrade to Vista - wasted money.



BloodRayne@Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 10:22 am :
Most of those seem like management/development errors more than anything else to me.

Some things that I notice when reading your post:

- Macro's in Office? = no no no..
As soon as you need to resort to Macro's then you have bigger issues than just compatibility. Whenever somebody at our dev team meantions 'macro in excel' we send him to the corner for an hour to cool off and get back to reality. We roll out standardised apps for Office, everything works fine regardless of any OS, all developed in .NET or by using basic Office functionality.

Network configuration issues stem in 99% of the times from misconfiguration, I've seen so many XP administrators think they can get away with their old tricks in Vista and then getting lots of issues, just because they're too lazy to RTFM, it's not funny any more.

If you need 100% compatibility then use XP, don't upgrade. How do you expect an OS to evolve if it's kept back backwards compatibility? That's just backwards. In fact, as you can go on with making examples of all of these 'compatibility' issues, I'm pretty much sure I can debunk 99% of them. :)



Kristian Joensen@Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 11:58 am :
How can you debunk them seeing as how BNA! actually experienced them and you don't know the particulars of each situation ?

"Network configuration issues stem in 99% of the times from misconfiguration"

You say this based on what? How can you know that was the case here? You are outright dismissing what BNA! is saying without any arguments.



BloodRayne@Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 12:41 pm :
Kristian Joensen wrote:
How can you debunk them seeing as how BNA! actually experienced them and you don't know the particulars of each situation ?

"Network configuration issues stem in 99% of the times from misconfiguration"

You say this based on what? How can you know that was the case here? You are outright dismissing what BNA! is saying without any arguments.


I am speaking from my own experience as Database Adminstrator and 5 years before that as both Novell and Microsoft networks admin. I am saying it basically to show that his statements are just as general as mine, an example:

Quote:
We run Vista 32 here in the office. The internet connection and lan access frequently get's interrupted (for Vista boxes only - Macs and XP's still work fine). The whole network needs to get rebooted with the vista boxes to get them back online. Happens every two weeks.

The whole network needs to be rebooted? What does that mean? Each PC in the network, the domaincontroller.. what? In the first case (each PC in the network) I would say; that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of. As far as the domain controler goes, a reboot in order for PC's to get an internet connection a DC controller is not even necessary, one simple gateway setting is all that is required. Split the DC from the internet gateway (one of the first rules of a corp. network: NEVER have you DC be your internet gateway).

So, general statements such as these (which are just basically just general accusations) deserve nothing less than general counter-arguments, nothing personal. :)

It's such a sweeping generalisation that nobody could do anything with that statement. To simply say this is Vista's fault is short sighted.



iceheart@Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 1:58 pm :
goliathvt wrote:
Nevermind the 1GB OS MEMORY footprint. What a fucking joke. XP takes up, what... 300MB, if that?


That's just nonsense, my Vista 64 Ultimate SP1, at this very moment, with nothing disabled anywhere, is using 519mb of my 4gb ram. A XP SP2 Home I just checked for reference is currently using 417mb. A totally shocking increase, indeed.



goliathvt@Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 2:16 pm :
I'm the IT Manager for my office and have been testing Vista on an extremely powerful rig for about 6 months just to get an idea of when we might move on from XP. From the looks of things, it won't be for maybe a year or two, likely well after MS stops support for XP.

"If" you are lucky enough to run Vista on hardware that it plays nice with, then yes, Vista runs well. It's still not as fast as XP, but it's not too bad. My girlfriend's laptop does extremely well even though it lacks the recommended amount of memory to run Vista comfortably. So, I do know that Vista can run decently....

However, if you run Vista with hardware that it doesn't play nicely with, then you can expect things like the following:

- A simple move/copy operation taking 10-20 seconds after the "Copy/Move" dialog appears to actually begin copying/moving files.

- Network hiccups in Vista that DO NOT HAPPEN if I dual-boot the SAME hardware into XP or Linux.

- Process spikes in dwm.exe (Vista's Desktop Window Manager) most noticeable when playing games that hitch your apps/games briefly, but repeatedly.

- I can't count the times I'm doing a simple task and I ALT-TAB to another window and have to wait while the window fades white and I get a "Not Responding" in the title bar for a few seconds, then all resumes like normal. This machine is a Core2 6600 @ 2.4GHz running a Geforce 8800 GTX 512MB. As if the number matters, I hit a 5.3 on the "Experience Index," though I run Vista looking like the old ugly gray of Windows 2K/XP Classic theme to ensure best performance (laugh).

I could add much more to this list if I got out my notes.

Oh, and iceheart: Running Firefox only (to write this post, with a process footprint of 80MB due to multiple tabs open) here's my Vista memory usage:

Image

I'm required to run Symantec Endpoint for security purposes, but that's only taking up maybe 30MB between all of its different services.

The top "offenders" for memory after Firefox with about 10 tabs open are 3 svchost.exe's. The Vista usage would be even greater if I had the SearchIndexer enabled, but I turned that crap off long ago.

I'd love to hear what other Vista 32bit users report as their memory usage... I notice you're running 64.

I've done fresh installs and disabled tons of services and have almost no background processes other than a firewall and Symantec Endpoint. The result is always the same.



iceheart@Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 2:20 pm :
628 mb (total - cached - free) does sound a bit high since you've turned aero and the search indexer off, but not exactly cause for alarm on a modern system if you ask me.

The highest memory using things on my system that are not my own are:
Searchindexer 91mb
Explorer 88mb
38mb svchost (running windows update, windows management, themes, hardware detection, system even, logon, task scehudler, remote access connection manager, user profile server, network computer browser, and some other small and insignificant things.)
DWM 34mb
2x22mb svchosts (running defender, dns, cryptographic services, network location awareness, terminal services.)
14mb audio device graph
Everything else is sub-10mb.



goliathvt@Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 2:31 pm :
I wouldn't mind it "if" Vista ran smoothly. I wouldn't care if it used up 8GB of memory (assuming I had that much). The fact is, though, it doesn't run smoothly at all, and that poor experience is fairly common (search around the net for stories of woe RE Vista and its performance...). With the right hardware, Vista might be fine for a home system but I won't even try to put it into production in a business environment.



BNA!@Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 4:04 pm :
BloodRayne wrote:
- Macro's in Office? = no no no..
As soon as you need to resort to Macro's then you have bigger issues than just compatibility. Whenever somebody at our dev team meantions 'macro in excel' we send him to the corner for an hour to cool off and get back to reality. We roll out standardised apps for Office, everything works fine regardless of any OS, all developed in .NET or by using basic Office functionality.


Macro's in Office? = yes yes yes...

The clients we work with use Excel 24/7, nothing else. The only way to get needed functionality (mostly process streamlining and restrictive measures) on their computers is an Excel macro. Any application else needs to get sent from Munich to Frankfurt to Paris to London to New York to Dallas and back in this order to get IT clearance.

I am fully aware not of all but some ways to produce better programs than macros in Excel, but I'm not the star of the solar business system I live in.

Quote:
Network configuration issues stem in 99% of the times from misconfiguration, I've seen so many XP administrators think they can get away with their old tricks in Vista and then getting lots of issues, just because they're too lazy to RTFM, it's not funny any more.


The network got configured by a professional network guy who also happens to be the founder (in the 1990ies) of a computer mag. A nerdy geek to the bone. This does not rule out any errors, but if you look on the web it is a very frequent feature of Vista not to realize it is connected with the net, any net. Or better - to suddenly forget it is connected. Sometimes it is only the falsely displayed icon that you're disconnected, sometimes you are disconnected.
I have also one station which refuses to display any correct webpage after letting Vista upgrade live search.

As a long time Windows user I am no stranger to esoteric issues, but with Vista planets have to line up correctly more often.

Quote:
If you need 100% compatibility then use XP, don't upgrade. How do you expect an OS to evolve if it's kept back backwards compatibility? That's just backwards. In fact, as you can go on with making examples of all of these 'compatibility' issues, I'm pretty much sure I can debunk 99% of them. :)


Well, that's why I wrote the compatibility or lack thereof was caused by a piece of unexotic hardware released at the same time as Vista.

I expect MS to keep backwards compatibility like everyone else who doesn't work for a computer but expects a computer to work for him / her. If they wouldn't do that zero people would upgrade since they would have to buy all their applications new too. On our workstations the price of applications is about 80 times the price of windows.

Your points are all valid, so are mine.



Bittoman@Posted: Sat Dec 20, 2008 2:23 pm :
BloodRayne wrote:
goliathvt wrote:
There is one issue that XP users forget, I have 6GB of memory but XP 32 bits (almost nobody runs XP 64 bits) cannot allocate more than 3GB of system memory to the OS (and then only by using AWE). I could make a benchmark, but on my machine I'm pretty sure Vista would win due to the simple fact that I'd have 3GB of extra system memory available, and my 8 cores are much more happy in a 64 bit environment.



I think you're thinking of PAE, not AWE but neither are my forte so I'm probably wrong or have them confused. But also, your test bed is a bad way to benchmark a PC because it is so far and above the average that you don't even compare. My wife's laptop which is far more comparable to my desktop (other than it has a 5400 rpm HDD and a crappy Intel GPU vs my nVidia 8800 GT) when it boots, with Vista, takes about 4 times longer to load and this is after I've gone in and stripped out all of the crap share/trial/freeware bloat that these systems come with by default. Once it's loaded the hard drive never stops grinding and it's as responsive as a corpse.



whitewolf@Posted: Sat Dec 20, 2008 2:39 pm :
Quote:
I have 6GB of memory


I thought Vista can only use up to about 2 gigs of ram effectively, and anything over that is pretty much wasted?



The Happy Friar@Posted: Sat Dec 20, 2008 2:58 pm :
whitewolf wrote:
I thought Vista can only use up to about 2 gigs of ram effectively, and anything over that is pretty much wasted?


video guys who use Vista64 say they have no more memory problems with Vista64 & 4+gb of memory. Or very few memory problems compared to XP/Vista32.

for all it's worth, my wife's Vista laptop seems no less responsive then any XP system I've used. It may just be me, but it might even be more responsive then a laptop with XP. Her account has all the bells & whistles on while mine has them all off. It's not really used for intense gaming (the kids play some games on there: RIP, Iron Grip Warlord, Snood, Quake 2, Serious Sam 2nd encounter) though. Edits video nice (not as good as my quad-Phenom, but good for a laptop that cost $600 imho).



BloodRayne@Posted: Sat Dec 20, 2008 3:14 pm :
whitewolf wrote:
Quote:
I have 6GB of memory


I thought Vista can only use up to about 2 gigs of ram effectively, and anything over that is pretty much wasted?

That only counts for (any) 32 bits windows OS.
And to Bittoman, yes your right. AWE = for SQL server, PAE = for the OS. I incidently confused the two. :)

My Vista64 automatically goes into 'gaming' mode when I start any game, d3d or opengl. I see the memory footprint for the os drop to about 128MB (which is normal). It's like a sort of 'sleep' mode. I'm not sure this is an Acer thing or Vista thing though.

But right now I have Vista64 bits and WinXP 64 bits (dualboot) and after benchmarking several games I see 0 difference in FPS and loading times.



Bittoman@Posted: Sat Dec 20, 2008 6:04 pm :
whitewolf wrote:
Quote:
I have 6GB of memory


I thought Vista can only use up to about 2 gigs of ram effectively, and anything over that is pretty much wasted?



A 32bit os "technically" can utilize up to 2 gigs before using PAE (physical address extension) however the Windows XP and Vista consumer level implementation of PAE blows and largely depending on hardware windows will only make full use of between 3 and 3.8 gigs of your system RAM. Linux and Mac can actually "utilize" something like 64 gigs for linux and 32 gigs for Mac but it is very slow so it's not normally recommended. The thing that causes the windows version of PAE to suck aside from being artificially limited to 4 gb is that it lumps video memory into the physical memory addressing scheme which reduces the actual amount that windows will address for system RAM so if you consider the average lower mid-range gaming PC has a 512 mb video card then you're going to be limited to the ~3.5 gb system memory allocation or an upper mid-range PC with a 1 gb video card then you are further limited to only ~3 gb of system RAM when using XP/Vista. You can imagine how much it sucks if you build an nVidia triple header with 1 gb each, you really must move to 64 bits or you will actually start losing performance.

For the most part the average consumer has no need for more than about 3 gigs at this point and even that's a bit extreme depending on who you call the "average" consumer. Most specifically a "gamer" or just a general purpose user, a gamer needing the higher amount and general user (office, email, etc.) not really needing more than 1-2 gigs depending on what you're doing. For example, me at work I've usually got 2-4 excel spreadsheets open with fairly large spreadsheets, half a dozen IE's, a couple of call monitoring tools as well as whatever specific tasks software I'm working on at the time. In most cases I'm at or over a gig in use plus swap file.



kit89@Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2008 1:37 am :
Surely a 32-bit processor can access a maximum of 4GB, as that is the maximum amount of memory addresses it can reference too.

On that note there was an interesting test, on the performance of Ubuntu vs Vista when using Java. It'd be interesting to see a XP vs Vista on Java tests.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... ance&num=1

A modern Operating System should attempt to cache as much as possible for quick access. Though when another resource requires it, that cache should be easily & be quickly dumped for the resource that actually demands it.

Quote:
How do you expect an OS to evolve if it's kept back backwards compatibility?


By thinking a head. If they actually designed a system that was secure & reliable from the start, they wouldn't have these(or as many) issues. The whole Windows system is a tangle of mess, with one application relying on another, multiple .dll of the same library spread across multiple directories. When one application fails it can cause an entire system failure, purely because another application is relying on it causing a domino effect. Applications requiring Administration rights(crazily insecure).

Granted they attempted to resolve these issues in Vista but by doing so they had to re-structure practically all of it meaning backwards compatibility is lacking. I guess that's the price you pay when your design is fundamentally flowed from the get go. :roll:

Is it just me or is Vista> moving to a more Unix design concept?



iceheart@Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2008 1:47 am :
kit89 wrote:
Surely a 32-bit processor can access a maximum of 4GB, as that is the maximum amount of memory addresses it can reference too.


Yes and no.

The maximum mathematical size of the address space doesn't translate straight into the real-world for a considerable number of reasons.

A normal 32bit application on windows can address 2gb of memory, some apps can address 3gb with a little prodding. The amount available for a 32bit OS with 4gb of ram is 4gb-all the various reserved memory addresses, like graphics memory.



BloodRayne@Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 5:25 pm :
kit89 wrote:
By thinking a head. If they actually designed a system that was secure & reliable from the start, they wouldn't have these(or as many) issues. The whole Windows system is a tangle of mess, with one application relying on another, multiple .dll of the same library spread across multiple directories. When one application fails it can cause an entire system failure, purely because another application is relying on it causing a domino effect. Applications requiring Administration rights(crazily insecure).

Granted they attempted to resolve these issues in Vista but by doing so they had to re-structure practically all of it meaning backwards compatibility is lacking. I guess that's the price you pay when your design is fundamentally flowed from the get go. :roll:

Is it just me or is Vista> moving to a more Unix design concept?

What you are asking is impossible. MS are good, but they cannot see in the future. The fundaments of NT were laid down in the 80's, at one point or another it's time to move on and break backwards compatibility.

You undermine your own arguments.. 'thinking ahead' first... then.. 'Granted they attempted to resolve these issues in Vista but by doing so they had to re-structure practically all of it'..

ANY other OS has needed restructuring from the getgo and has met a point in time where it had to break with backwards compatibility. In fact, of all OS'es I figure NT is one of the lastlonging OS'es as widely spread used as it is. Sop basically, none of your arguments hold true and are in fact arguing semantics, rather than telling me in depth why NT would be such a 'flawed' system.

It's not, because a 'flawed' system would never have survived as long as it did.



kit89@Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2008 4:07 am :
Quote:
ANY other OS has needed restructuring from the getgo and has met a point in time where it had to break with backwards compatibility. In fact, of all OS'es I figure NT is one of the lastlonging OS'es as widely spread used as it is. Sop basically, none of your arguments hold true and are in fact arguing semantics, rather than telling me in depth why NT would be such a 'flawed' system.


I'm guessing you're not familiar with Unix based or Unix like Operating systems? Where the fundamentals(file structure, permissions, etc) has not changed from it's conception in the late 1960s.

When you look at Windows History you can see that in each new iteration of the Operating System modifications to it's fundamentals, drastically changes. There's new protocols required when installing software to conform to the more securer File Structure. Just looking at XP & Vista you can see the way Vista handles Files, User Permissions & Applications is completely different from XP.

However if you look at for example Debian(a Linux Distro) it's basic file structure, how it deals with user permissions, accounts, applications, etc. Has not changed. Infact I'm still able to play 10 year old games on my Kubuntu machine (a Debian variant) as it still conforms to the same standard structure that existed back then. Years before Kubuntu ever existed. That's forward thinking.

So yeah, I do believe that with some forward thinking right at the start(and I'm talking DOS here) they could have made it so much easier on themselves & customers. But then again if they did make a strong Operating System that could adapt easily (Unix like/based has) then there would be no incentive to upgrade to a new Microsoft Word. :?



iceheart@Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2008 10:39 am :
To be perfectly honest the original design "paradigm" of unix isn't exactly inspiring. It's a testament to the dedication of the developers that unix/linux systems have lived this long, not the design concept of the system.



Burrito@Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2008 12:31 pm :
Isn't it ironic that MS made Vista a fat bastard but the technology around it evolved into the small Netbooks we know today....therefore they have to constantly continue XP support to keep licensing these machines too.

A sign of ignorance or just a too big company where ideas and direction is lost in management.



BNA!@Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2008 3:34 pm :
Burrito wrote:
A sign of ignorance or just a too big company where ideas and direction is lost in management.


I'd say feature creep meeting too many billions of cash reserves.



asmodeus@Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2008 9:42 pm :
kit89 wrote:
However if you look at for example Debian(a Linux Distro) it's basic file structure, how it deals with user permissions, accounts, applications, etc. Has not changed. Infact I'm still able to play 10 year old games on my Kubuntu machine (a Debian variant) as it still conforms to the same standard structure that existed back then. Years before Kubuntu ever existed. That's forward thinking.


Yet, surprisingly enough, you can't install a seven year old game because of that same design. When you track down a previously installed version in a zip file, you find just how bad that design is due to shared object version mismatches. When you finally track down all of the obsolete shared objects the game depends on, it still can't run because of symbol mismatches due to that same "forward thinking" design.

Or haven't you tried to install Tribes 2 on a modern distribution lately?

BloodRayne wrote:
at one point or another it's time to move on and break backwards compatibility.


Which is exactly what Linux does, and look at how wonderful the lack of backwards compatibility has made the Linux desktop today. Sure, the lack of backwards compatibility sounds nice from a developers standpoint, but it is a nightmare from a usability standpoint. Just ask any of the Ubuntu users with older nvidia cards that suddenly lost 3d when they upgraded to the latest stable release because someone thought it was a good idea to break backwards compatibility.



Bittoman@Posted: Wed Dec 24, 2008 2:36 am :
Backwards compatability is only something that the "average user" and companies ever has concerns about. Companies most notably because they are notorious for being forced into OS upgrades but (as example) may hang onto that 8 year old finance program that is no longer available/stale and won't easily migrate to other systems. Linux users generally don't care because there is little in the way of programs to create an issue. In fact the only things that don't get upgraded to fit with the current mainstream linux are programs that have gone stale due to little or no interest in the software or games which have a very limited (typically 6 month) shelf life making it very cost inefficient for companies to bother keeping up with the changes.