Posted by Stewie After dorking around with Vista for the last week, I'm totally agreeing with what has been said. Right off the bat, the memory usage is INSANE. On Ultimate 32-bit, I was getting up to 700mb of my 1GB RAM used by Windows. After disabling MANY un-needed services, I was able to get it down to 350mb used after boot... but that's still about the same as a fully loaded, un-touched XP config. After doing the same in XP, I can get it down to less than 100mb used by Windows and services. Even after disabling those services, gaming performance was just horrible, probably due to driver instabilities. Most notably was World of Warcraft. Areas in which I had gotten over 40-50fps on XP with all settings maxed were now down to 15-20fps even with settings pulled back a fair bit. At first I tried to live with it, but then I noticed the sound card also wasn't playing a fair bit of the game sounds properly, and that was just too much. So, if you're not a gamer: Vista is awesome. It runs beautifully and looks really "pretty" once you disable a bunch of services. If you *are* however a gamer, it will turn your world upside down... in a bad way. I have since gone back to XP Pro and I'm currently using 88mb of RAM with all of my drivers installed, Firefox running and some chat apps. I love it.

You really like the Vista look? I don't.

Even in Classic view it unhinges me.

Vista is forever spinning up the HD/CPU usage even with indexing and most everything off and striped, even when just idle! WTF?

It's horrible on laptop batteries.

I actually pulled the trigger and got Vista. Premium that is.

And you know what? I like it.

It's blazing fast with my Q6600 and 2gb of XMS2 ram. I can work very comfortably in CS3 with bridge with huge ass RAW files while itunes, firefox and msn is running.

DRM? Nope. ALL my mp3s play just fine. Utorrent works as it should. So does Limewire.

I do not regret moving up to Vista.

Posted by Professor Chaos I actually pulled the trigger and got Vista. Premium that is. And you know what? I like it. It's blazing fast with my Q6600 and 2gb of XMS2 ram. I can work very comfortably in CS3 with bridge with huge ass RAW files while itunes, firefox and msn is running. DRM? Nope. ALL my mp3s play just fine. Utorrent works as it should. So does Limewire. I do not regret moving up to Vista.

Meh, it's good you like it.

Keep us apprised as to if that's a fad or fact...

Posted by Stewie After dorking around with Vista for the last week, I'm totally agreeing with what has been said. Right off the bat, the memory usage is INSANE. On Ultimate 32-bit, I was getting up to 700mb of my 1GB RAM used by Windows. After disabling MANY un-needed services, I was able to get it down to 350mb used after boot... but that's still about the same as a fully loaded, un-touched XP config. After doing the same in XP, I can get it down to less than 100mb used by Windows and services.

A bit of an explanation of Vista's memory usage. First off, of course it will never be as slim as XP, but it's not nearly as bad as it seems. I too freaked out when it was using 700 MB at boot, but if you watch it and read up on what it is doing with all that memory you'll see it's actually better than XP at managing what it uses.

Take a good XP install, say 80 MB of RAM at boot. XP pretty much needs that 80 MB at all times and will swap out your other apps to get it. Also, that 80 MB does not include disk cache which adds to memory useage. XP is pretty aggressive (more so than Vista) at keeping memory for disk cache at the expense of application memory.

Now take Vista, 700 MB at boot. Fire up an app that needs 500 MB. On a 1 GB system you would think that now you are out of memory (700 + 500 = 1.2 GB ) and hitting swap hard, but this is not the case. You will probably be at about 900 MB or so. Vista will actively reduce it's memory usage to give apps memory. Quit your app and you'll see Vista only using 400 MB for a few seconds until it realizes there is free mem and takes it back. From my informal experiments Vista will trim itself to about 200 MB or so before forcing your system to swap. Not as good as XP, but still not 700 MB bad.

The reason for all this is mainly Superfetch. If memory is free it will take most of it and pre-load apps and files that it thinks the user will access in the near future. If it's wrong it will give the memory to the apps that need it. However, if it's right then your apps will load faster with really no downside. Unlike the standard disk cache, Superfetch's memory usage shows up in the task manager total. This is also why Vista gets faster with more memory, it allocates more to Superfetch.

Look at it compared to the minimum specifications. XP's minimum is 128 MB and if you are using 80 MB for the OS you have 67% lost right away. Vista on 512 MB might take 400 at boot, but it can drop it self to 200 MB, using only 39% of your total. Vista is actually usable on 512 MB, we have a couple of test machines at work with this config. You are definitely not wanting to game or run Photoshop, but it does work acceptably.

One last thing to consider, if you have an integrated video card Vista will take crazy amounts of memory because it is allocating your main memory as video memory. The 512 MB test machines at work were unusable if running Aero on their integrated cards. Putting in a real video card or disabling Aero made them run quite acceptably.

I disabled Aero, and as much of the security features as possible, and indexing.
Vista still hogged away.

The kernel was sound, but it all (most) went south from there from all I have heard, and seen for myself.
It can't be fixed; MS is boned.

The little tricks it does, aren't worth the trouble. It should have been a near seamless transition from XP to Vista.
It's not.

MS just thought it could cold cock Vista down our throats. wrong.

Jesus Christ. Shut the fuck up already.

It's especially awesome when you complain that it takes forever to change something, simply because you don't know how to do it. That's wonderful. Should helicopters be abolished because you can get there in a car, and it takes to long to figure out how to fly a helicopter? God you are a dumbass.

Posted by MutantMandias Jesus Christ. Shut the fuck up already. It's especially awesome when you complain that it takes forever to change something, simply because you don't know how to do it. That's wonderful. Should helicopters be abolished because you can get there in a car, and it takes to long to figure out how to fly a helicopter? God you are a dumbass.

You shut the fuck up; your almost as slow as visty.
Why not just make it an even midget fucking month?

Well Mr. Wile E. Coyote if your such a super adapt mother fucker feel free to enlighten me how this is done.
You wanna play with me?
Point by point, or shut the fuck yourself!

Better yet, why bother taking a huge chunk of time to learn to use a flawed OS the isn't worth using when there are far better alternatives.

Visty looks like a Mac, and I hate the Mac look.
Every fucking thing has been reorganized, why should I care to find it?
This is a tool, not a game; it's suppose to save me time.
Does Canon juxtaposition all it's camera controls around on new models just to make it look different?
Why should I want to relearn something some asswipe hide it from me on purpose?
Got a easy fix for all these dumb ass Visty design flaws ?


No you don't, BECAUSE THERE IS NONE!
And your little MS doesn't have any solutions either,
because it's far too late in the design cycle to salvage this 9 month abortion.

One last thing, why isn't there no index for the Windows Help section?
Did it use too much RAM or is that information now indexed in our brains?
Visty is so fucked up compared to XP Pro, or Server 2003, it ain't worth even trying to use it.

If you can't write about 2 pages of detailed flaw analysis on how MS failed so miserably in designing Vista, don't waste my time trying come harder, or last longer.

Posted by blackhawk Better yet, why bother taking a huge chunk of time to learn to use a flawed OS the isn't worth using when there are far better alternatives.

Okay, so now you have to explain why you are using XP, since Linux is a far better alternative. It's much easier to do all kinds of things in Linux or Unix. But you would still have to learn to do it wouldn't you, because you don't know already, and learning is just a little too much for your empty fucking shithead.

Posted by MutantMandias Okay, so now you have to explain why you are using XP, since Linux is a far better alternative. It's much easier to do all kinds of things in Linux or Unix. But you would still have to learn to do it wouldn't you, because you don't know already, and learning is just a little too much for your empty fucking shithead.

I learn faster than you; as you can't even remember what you just read.

Wow, look no profanities; try using your simplistic psyche curses with someone in your face, otherwise I'm not impressed or provoked.
You taught me nothing.
Try harder or go do something your good at, like learning visty.

Whatev's

OMG U FAGS, WINDOWZ XP OWNZ YER ASSEZ


YO WUT NOW BITCHES WUT WUT

Benchmarks for pink slips, biznatch!

yo ur on holmes, lemme hook up mah wateercoolin yo (i call it NOS yea yea)





yah, i dont think this thread was really going anywhere else

Meh

My vista is still running great. No bugs. No crahses. CS3 is fucking fast. Don't know what the whole ram thing is all about. It runs FUCKING GREAT WITH 2GB.

So yeah, I still like Vista. A lot I might add.

That's good. I wish I could have said the same. I'll give it another go when I decide to do the big upgrade.

Posted by Professor Chaos Meh My vista is still running great. No bugs. No crahses. CS3 is fucking fast. Don't know what the whole ram thing is all about. It runs FUCKING GREAT WITH 2GB. So yeah, I still like Vista. A lot I might add.

meh, that's cool. On a desktop the ram thing doesn't really matter. Since all my apps are older, none of Vista's technology is really going help me.
Plus, I really don't like the Mac style look at all.

Is CS3 able to run on a 64 bit system? That's the one upgrade I want for my XP system, but not many apps can utilize it effectively.
CS3 would really jam with the additional ram you could add plus the boost in raw computation speed.

Office '07 is horrible. IMO

Posted by tholcomb Office '07 is horrible. IMO

I still barely use a fraction of the older version, and that does everything I need, except I can't run it on a second desktop.
After seeing how badly MS juxtaposition everything around and arbitrarily dropped essential features like the the index function in Windows Help, I can only imagine what the new, "improved" Office is like.
MS is too greedy, and doesn't value their customers time, or patronage. That's the message MS is sending me. All their products are harder to update and load then when I first started using them about 4 years ago.

Care to elaborate on the problems you found with Office 07?

Posted by blackhawk I still barely use a fraction of the older version, and that does everything I need, except I can't run it on a second desktop. After seeing how badly MS juxtaposition everything around and arbitrarily dropped essential features like the the index function in Windows Help, I can only imagine what the new, "improved" Office is like. MS is too greedy, and doesn't value their customers time, or patronage. That's the message MS is sending me. All their products are harder to update and load then when I first started using them about 4 years ago. Care to elaborate on the problems you found with Office 07?

I hate the layout of all the tools in office 07, it feels like its made for idiots (American public?). They laid it out so that you can click large buttons to get the style type and format, but i hate scrolling through them to find the style and font and all that bullshit. Its mostly just supposed to be pretty i guess...