what do you think about the upcoming windows vista?

T4i

LOL!! What a passionate thread.

Interesting opinions!

You know the houses with the all the Christams lights at Christmas.....thats my comparison with Vista.

All these fancy GUI's are all very well but we are going to need 4GB of RAM just for the OS soon. Transpareny, who needs that right fair....all it seems to do is strain the eyes.

What won't I be able to do using XP compaired with a m8 who uses Vista? Apart from have 64-bit suuport?

nej

Need Vista? Fancy graphics? Waste of time. Let's all go back to using DOS. It could run in 640k and didn't need any fancy graphics, or 10 gigs of hard disk space, and a 25Mhz CPU and a 512k ISA graphics card was fine.

Seriously people - it's called progress. Yes, the hardware specs are a little high, but in a year or two, they will be nothing. MS has an eye on the future at least.
128MB DX9 graphics card? So what. 2GB RAM? Who cares? 2Ghz CPU? We'll all have 4Ghz 64-bit ones soon anyway...

If you want to keep your old machine cos it works fine then do so (I won't be upgrading my laptop, but I will upgrade my desktop), but don't moan about Vistas graphics or requirements.

I've not played much with Vista, but the Aero GUI will make using it more enjoyable and more intuitive. This is a GOOD THING. MS have improved Windows with every release (ME aside!) and Vista will be the same.

tomS_4

I think it just looks like they have copied all the good ideas from Apple and made a nice shiny DirectX10 skin.

If you run it without the Aero skin it just seems remarkably similar to XP.

True, they have re-written a lot of the underlying stuff... which might make it more secure, or might introduce more vunerabilities. It will be impossible to tell for a few years.

Bascially, I'm very disappointed they haven't take this as an opportunity to try and re-do from scratch a lot of the obtuse interface problems in XP. It isn't XP#s fault.. the interface was fine when it was introduced, but since then it's just had more and more options and bells and whistles added and become an unintuitive mess of windows, buttons, tabs, etc..

I think now was the opportunity for a big cearout and overhaul.. rather than just some nice whizzy transparent skin with all it's good ideas borrowed from apple.

That said, they do at least seem to be trying to do something new with the new Office suite. I downloaded the new Word beta and its totally changed from the one we are all used to. I'm not convinced about a lot of the changes in it though.

ajo

Vista is just a bad copy of OSX that you need a good graphics card and lots and lots of memory to use.

superscaper

The whole "microsoft copying apple" thing gets very tiring. Who cares if they copied it so long as it's good and works, although I'm not sure what Apple have ever done that's not already been done before. If it's a good idea and people like it, that thing will adapted and used throughout the market sector.

whotook316

I don't know much about software, and I wondered if anyone had the time to explain what all this network stack business is about? What effect does it have on the OS?

garcia

I already have a fantastic looking desktop which runs perfectly well on my modest spec XP machine (2.4g, 512mb ram). Why would I want to infect myself with DRM??

(Click pic for bigger version)

nej

whotook316 wrote:

I don't know much about software, and I wondered if anyone had the time to explain what all this network stack business is about? What effect does it have on the OS?

Without getting too technical...

The network stack is part of the OSI model, which states there are 7 different layers in network communications, ranging from the "Physical" layer, i.e the actual network card dealing with electrical signals, to the "Application" layer which is the software doing the sending/receiving.

In the middle (layers 3 and 4 I think, but am prepared to be wrong), is what is known as the Network Stack, which handles (layer 3) the addressing (i.e the IP address) and routing, and the transport (layer 4) which handles data flow, error checking, data recovery etc. This is usually the TCP or UDP protocols (TCP maintains a connection, UDP is a kind of fire-and-forget message).

MS have rewritten their implementations of these layers for Vista. This may not be a good thing as they may have some bugs that won't come out for a while. Or, it may be really secure and good. Time will tell.

There you go - glad you asked?