Programmer didn’t have much to work with back in the day so they had to write very efficient code. Nowadays memory isn’t a problem, so sloppy code persists in several mainstream software

I ran the beta from its release and found litle in the way of problems with my existing software – this made me think that Microsoft were going to make 7 MORE backwards compatible not LESS – how wrong I was – from the compatibility checker, most of my programs will now have minor issues and 4 of my most used programs (video editors) wont run at all – these ran ok in the Beta version – now it appears I have to buy at least the Pro version in order to run XP MODE – then maybe my software would work! HA!!!!

This isn’t about the people living on the sides of the road, this is about the people DRIVING on it. The operating system must support the tools that are being used today, just as the road must support the cars being driven on it. Make a road that you can’t drive your car on, and guess what? You aren’t going to pay the toll to drive on it.

These issues are mostly unrelated to the Operating System itself. It is true that the small business and home market finds it hard to upgrade software every time a new OS comes out, so there is a point there.

However, technology must move forward, we cannot stop making roads because of the inconvenience to the people on both sides of the construction. Is it possible that because I am “computer knowledgeable” I hardly ever have any problems with my personal machines or is it because I avoid using programs not written for the OS I am using, keep a “good” antivirus up to date, avoid questionable sites, keep OS updates up-to-date, and install only programs I need that my experience with XP, Vista, and now Windows 7 RC has been a pleasant one? Just a tought!

As a network engineer, I still see Win NT, 2k Systems in the workplace, because they work and do their tasks and companies can’t afford to get new code to run their machines and software. I still see 98SE machines, because there are still DOS based programs that are required by businesses for the same reason.

It seems that Microsoft has finally forgotten their customers that aren’t well financed and can’t buy the bleeding edge to outfit their entire organization with the new hotness.

Having been Microsoft certified for ten years, I am about to become Apple Certified because that is where this paradigm shift is leading to.

So long Microsoft. I’ll still be using XP as long as the hardware is out there. Because Xp runs so super fast on everything now and always will.

Hello Apple, because your marketshare is about to increase 20 fold.

We should have an os that works for current and future hardware, streamlined for performance and includes a more robust virtual machine to run older programs.  I have used M$ virtual PC it’s not bad but needs to be improved.

I remember switching from dos to windows, I went from dos to windows 98, why?  because windows 3 was horrible, 95 was decent but 98 started to loose backwards compatibility but it still wasn’t great.  Look at ME it was a dud, why?  because it was a facelifted child of 98.  Windows 2k&xp were children of nt.

We need a new start, an os for the current hardware that dosen’t try to support old hardware and programs.  People don’t like the idea of buying new programs, well for the next 10 years keep the same fundemental structure and for the rest use vertual machines.  Trying to support outdated software is why we need to buy new programs, there is so much emulation and converson going on that the current os’s perform porly on even the best hardware.

I use mac’s and linux, I find that mac’s dont crash just get slower then hell, linux works well but once it’s running well do only security updates as it’s easier to re-install then do major updates.  I play games which is why I use windows, also I install then install drivers and most of the time it works fine, after 6-8 months it starts getting bogged down then it’s time to backup important info and re-install. 

I’m hoping windows 7 is beter then vista, though I had windows XP x64 and vista x64 dual booting on my machine when I first tried vista, was testing it.  3DMark 06 performance was withing 10 points between the two os’s.  Looked into framerates for games I was playing, xp had slightly higher framerates (4-5fps) but was less consistant (ie fps would jump and spike) vista was more consistant with a slightly slower max framerate.  This depended on the game as well but was comon to most games.

I’ve been using vista only since sp1, pre-sp1 had issues.

This will change in some how the bad impression people got it in Windows Vista.

re vista:  I’ve noticed no problems in the year I’ve had vista ultimate.  maybe i’m blessed with ingenuity to hack through walls that any OS’ll put in my way…  why does everyone complain so much?

addressing one thing:     “If speed is what businesses want,”   speaking from my business (gov’t) — we care far more about compatibility.  so much so, we’ve put off doing a global refresh to vista until … still a few months to go (this is tens of thousands of computers)… speed is the last thing we care about when we’ve got more custom applications written 20 years that anyone can shake a stick at…

If the new Windows 7 (horrid name…) is actually going to be fundamentally different from previous offerings I would think it is actually a move away from Apple which is rapidly loosing it’s own unique identity and becoming more of the Microsoft I’m used to while Microsoft moves to continue to define the bulk of the industry. The risk they’re taking here is with another flop the folks at home might start migrating to a trendier alternative that’s just the same old thing with a new coat of paint.

A new operating system can help lead to new ideas, new ways of doing things and a better understanding for some that struggle with how to use a computer.  A computer, no matter what operating system or software is has, is a tool.  It will always be a tool, but how beneficial of a tool is up to us.

"Vista struggles with performance because Microsoft choose to incorporate regulatory challenged features like Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player using a modular design, rather than the monolithic processes used in previous versions of windows."

Laughable almost, they need better programmers I think.

The other web browsers run fast, Windows media player which I use to play Cd's and that's about it.

Compatability is Vista's biggest problem. Vista with SP1 is much better than the original vista. Cut out compatability hardware and software wise on Windows 7 and then see how their sales drop. I will be buying a MAC then.

The search engine needs tweaking as it seems to be using every bit of ram it can grab and the graphics game they played with Directx 10 also is a problem as they hoped limiting this to Vista would make people upgrade.

The native 64 bit OS issue…old news

I remember a Windows NT 64 bit version that ran on a Dec Alpha and emulation of x86 programs and that was way back in 1996 ..they called it FX!32

DEC shipped a very interesting x86 emulator on NT-Alpha. It did the now-pedestrian x86 to Alpha instruction emulation, but with a twist: it cached pretty much *everything* it converted, persistently. The longer you ran an emulated x86 Win32 application, the faster it got. It eventually achieved about 70% of native Alpha speed. Even with the performance penalty, it blew x86 apps out of the water.

They need better programmers, now if they had just kept those DEC guys around…

 

If you DO happen to have a 2+ core system, 4gb+ ram, dx10 hardware, and an SSD, Vista is pure gold if you disable some of it's annoyances.

XP is a good OS but it doesn't take advantage of newer tech like Vista does though Vista also promised compatibility, which was the mistake I think. Too many companies shipped Vista on popular available tech instead of only on the high end models. Take my brothers new laptop for example, it came with Vista Home x32 on it even though it contains an older athlon x2 an integrated radeon x1400 (shared memory), 1gb ddr2 667, and an 120gb(8mb) 5400rpm sata hard drive. Okay hardware for xp, but NOT for vista, should never have come with it.

Most likely MS claiming that W7 will break backward compatibility is EXACTLY for the reasons I listed above. W7 is going to be very, very multithreaded with lots more I/O, older multithread cpus take a big performance hit switching between that many threads. Compare the latency of the core duo arch to core 2 for example, with a huge number of threads the performance hit would be devastating, especially if the hard drive was fetching data for each thread from a mechanical drive with a large access time.

I'm all for a new OS that takes advantage of current and expected things. And that's the way hardware manufacturers are going. That DOESN'T mean that software companies will stop writing code that will execute on XP on current hardware. People will have that OS for a long, long time I think. I STILL see windows NT 4 in places I services, and I really doubt many pople will migrate without new hardware for all of the above reasons.

It all boils down to two things I think

#1 Even good tech has to be legacy hardware at some point for the sake of advancement.

#2 MS is hosed. They are approaching the limit of improvements that can be made to the OS with existing hardware because of other software devs, and the best improvements they CAN make only matter to those small pecentage who afford up-to-date multi-thousand dollar machines.

It's not going to have the same interface. Early milestones of 'Longhorn' looked exactly like XP, remember? Vista has a bad image due to compatibility issues, good to see they will fix that with Windows 7; ha! Reminds me of the sudden PPC to Intel Macs craze. I like the idea of a virtual XP or Vista to run old binaries.

So as some of you have said, just get rid of your 90′s and some of those meaningless programs and it will work a treat.

Yes Loading Vista takes a little longer but I can wait.

And what is the point of comparing a MAC to a windows based machiene.

Windows has to cater for all the bloody manufactures out there. MACs are a little choosey.

Sony Vaio VGN-FE41S
Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 1.66Ghz
2BG/Go DDR2 SDRAM (677Mhz)
160HD
nVidea Geforce Go 7600

Starting over is a great idea. Stability and rigidity is a mammoth concern and is killing Vista. Its time people ditched the 90's software they're running, cause this is the only way to practically leave their constant stability issues behind.

Its either gonna be " 100 dollars worth of my software from 1995 doesnt run, I refuse to update so Microsoft sucks " or " My new nVidea based $1200 machine doesn't run, Microsoft sucks". The latter sounds like a much better (and less rediculous) argument, and its also far more widespread at the moment.

What good is your crummy old software if the hardware you want to run it on can't function? Its time to get stable.

In regards to backwards compatibility it's something that should be done in encapsulation. Past versions of windows had major flaws that the developers are trying to avoid and remove. If they have to make all applications backwards compatible those issues will remain just by virtue of the past architecture. The only way to really fix the windows OS is to start over.

Just for SnG, here’s what I’ve got. If you have something “much better” I’d have to question how you choose to spend your money more than you supposedly getting tricked into buying Vista…

AMD Phenom 9850 Black Edition (quad core proc)
8GB OCZ DDR2 RAM
ATI x1950xt video card (this is the so-called bottleneck in my machine……)
250GB 16Mb cache SATA 3 7200.10 primary drive
other drives (350GB and 500GB) each with 16MB cache
A770 A2+ mobo w/onboard Gigabit NIC

This is running into a gig router then over a cable connection to the outside world with an 8MB link.

So, while it’s not the top of the line killer machine, it’s what I have and if you’re having issues with something much better you may need to check your configuration because I’m happy with what I’m running. If you can’t figure out how to change the color scheme then you might want to search the web or RTFM….

mojave experiment? yeah, ive seen it. a couple of people see someone else use it, showing them all of the things that are different. the first time i saw vista, i thought it looked really great, too. so i got a computer with vista. at first i liked it. then as time went by, i uncovered more and more of its annoying flaws. then i started playing games, and i thought that the game must just have unrealistic expectations of the hardware. then i saw a friend of mine play it on xp with an extremely inferior computer, and i was enraged! i still am!

not only that, but some of my games dont even work correctly on vista, and some other miscelanneous programs too. then, i got tired of having to look at this sickly blue color that the toolbars and buttons always are in aero. i mean, after a while of running firefox, and having to look at how ugly and sickly those pale blue buttons and tabs and toolbars, i started to feel like i was turning a sickly pale blue. i ended up turning off aero, but the gray boxiness also looks ugly.

in general, vista is a steaming pile of fresh shit, and i dont recommend to anyone that they get it, and especially not upgrade it, because upgrading from xp 2 vista causes a lot of bugs, and your computer will be even more unstable than vista is already.

How can we judge which articles are trustworthy and which aren’t?

Thack

Do you know how to tell a mactard or appletard? Simply listen to their statements and lack of knowledge of anything computer-wise.

"As for vista I spend more time rolling back vista to win xp than ever before with older versions of windows, am still building new computers with XP"

First of all, you wouldnt be "rolling back" you'd simply be reimaging or reformating the older computers to run XP. Only an MACTARD would say something like "rolling back" as if it were an update of some sort.

"before with older versions of windows" WTF does that mean?

This has always been amusing to all us IT admins and managers that actually deal in the real world rather then the fantasy land that Mactards seem to live in.

While you PRETEND to have computer/IT jobs, some of us actually DO! And most of us actually deal with XP and Vista.

So far the only dumb idea about Vista is an in-place install which I would never recommend. But as Vista surpasses OSX even more(and its already surpassed it greatly), more people will look and the the Mactards as what they are. Poor little attention seekers that need some validation of their little lives.

As for WM 7, some one else made a good point, it isnt out yet. How can you bash something that hasnt been released yet. As for the iPhone OS, its hardly OSX, and the iphone can't really run 2 applications at once. The iphone wont permit it. And recently the 2.0 has been crashing and freezing like crazy. So if you must critique a phone OS, why not start with iPhone 2.0 that's the newest, and now most crash proned out.

Some issues that iphone has with outlooks active sync that THIS admin has had:

* Only the inbox can be set to synchronize – subfolders can be accessed but no synchronization policy can be set

* No Flagging on email

* Cannot set Out of Office message

* No Hot Keys for managing messages

* Difficult to get to Global Address List

* No support for Activesync Schedule (eg. push during work hrs – pull outside of that)

* No Smart Filtering

* No ability to change sort order of email messages

* No support for Server Search of email messages

* Trying to delete messages or move them when you don’t have connectivity generates lots of errors messages and you cannot actually delete or move when offline

* Message status is not set on the server for replying/forwarding to an email, similarly the status from the server is not provided to the iPhone

* You cannot automatically set attachments to download

* There is no control over maximum attachment size

* You can’t see the number of unread or new emails without unlocking the device

* No ability to invite attendees to a meeting

* You cannot provide a reason for declining meetings

* Attendee status is not available

* There is no click through to get access to information from the GAL for a participant

* No support for setting Out of Office message

* You cannot delete a single occurrence of a recurring meeting – you can only delete the whole series

* Cannot enforce Storage or device encryption

* Remote wipe doesn’t seem to be immediate and restore requires recradling to iTunes

* PIN unlock timeout is not enforced on the iPhone

* You have to ‘slide’ to unlock – then enter the PIN code to unlock the device

Granted, a lot of these are advanced features. However, why make a big deal about Push Email if you aren’t going to make it a better Push Email experience? After all, with Safari you can check your webmail and get a lot of those features.