Vista feedback loop

Lincoln Russell 8 Oct, 2007 at 9:32am ET Article published in Tech

Comments

1. 
   8 Oct 2007 ~ 10:27am BuddyJ Meh. Oddica is where it's at.
2. 
   8 Oct 2007 ~ 10:34am Linc Whilst replying to shorties, pls keep your tabs straight. kthnx.
3. 
   8 Oct 2007 ~ 10:47am Thrax I worked with "Vista users" for 8 months. From the day of its release until September of this year, and I can guarantee the author of this article that they didn't like it any more than I did. Every day, I was bombarded with complaints about bugs, crashes, how slow it was, etc. etc.
   
   I even gave it an honest shot as my primary OS for 30 days, and it gave me nothing but ****. I'm sorry, I don't believe that Vista end users like Vista, because I've seen that they don't.
4. 
   8 Oct 2007 ~ 11:16am BuddyJ /me fails again. :(
5. 
   8 Oct 2007 ~ 12:35pm Nomad Most end-users of Vista who were not very computer aware seemed semi-satisfied with the operating system, but like OS X it takes a lot of the control from a more advanced user and I think that's why most of the technological community hates it.
6. 
   8 Oct 2007 ~ 1:48pm mas0n I am not a neophyte, and I like Vista.
   
   I hated Vista throughout the beta versions that I used and into the several months after release of sluggish performance on the PCs I ordered for clients.
   
   Then, 5 months ago I installed it at home. I disabled UAC and most the other annoying crap, disabled all the services that no one really needs and did a few easy upgrades to the rig, including a fast 4GB flash drive for ReadyBoost and 4GB of RAM. My performance compared to the same rig in XP is within 3.5% in either way, depending on the application.
   
   I do not love Vista. I don't like a few things here and there like the lack of a filepath in explorer and the Network and Sharing Center drive me nuts, but in the end it is a good OS for the future and brings a lot to the table. I really like SuperFetch and think it does a good job working with ReadyBoost to increase overall performance on systems that have the resources to really take advantage of it. Yes, at idle (+ F@H SMP) I run ~80 processes and use 2.2GB, but everything I run on a regular basis starts almost instantly and runs smoothly.
   
   
   Long story short, I was ready to bag Vista for good until I used it on a worthy PC and really gave it a go, but I still loathe the time I spend in front of MOST Vista PCs...
7. 
   8 Oct 2007 ~ 1:49pm Thrax Readyboost is an additional page file. It's not more temporary workspace as its been billed as several times. If adding a flash drive w/ readyboost improved the performance of the PC, even with 4GB of RAM, then Windows is hitting the page file on 4 god damn gigs.
   
   That's unacceptable.
8. 
   8 Oct 2007 ~ 1:55pm Tex I had a buddy running Vista on a older AMD 2000 on a old ecs MB with a gb of ram. He complained it was slow (vista is a pig) and asked me to upgrade it for him.
   
   So I just chunked in an amd x2 dual core on a MSI MB with differant chipset, audio, nic grapics and firewire.
   
   Every single part changed except the hard drive.
   
   And it booted straight into Vista and fixed every device and everything works perfect.
   
   Just by plugging it in. I have done enough repair installs on XP to appreciate the beauty of what just happened for me in the blink of an eye.
   
   Vista may have some maturing to do and yes it requires more hardware resources....... I would not recomend a lot of my customers to upgrade until at least SP1 gets out of beta but.....
   
   If we dial the time machine back a bit the whining about Vista and its interface today was the same whining I heard here on this forum when XP came out and everyone here except for a handful hated it and said they were staying with win2k.
   
   I liked XP right off the bat back then. I like new things. I don't game. I have the hardware to run the pig so yes I'll probably upgrade my two desktop boxs to Vista soon.
   
   It's not time for everyone to switch but its time for me to.
   
   Tex
9. 
   8 Oct 2007 ~ 1:58pm mas0n It's an additional pagefile that is accessed 8 times faster for small I/O than even my raptors can achieve, and unfortunately some programs still insist on using a pagefile so I'd rather they don't page out to slow storage.
   
   The real boost comes from moving to 4GB of RAM as SuperFetch eats it up like candy.
10. 
    8 Oct 2007 ~ 2:48pm QCH I've been running (walking sometimes) Vista for a month. No real big problems so far. Yes it's slow, yes I see some serious lag when too many things are launched while listening to web radio. The web radio cuts in and out... But I think it will, eventually, make my job easier since I support 600 computers. Less likely to get infected with spyware. We'll see...
11. 
    8 Oct 2007 ~ 2:53pm CB I still tell my students to hold off on upgrading to Vista for a little while if they already have XP, but I've stopped telling students that it's a bad time to buy a new pre-fab computer because all of them only come with Vista.
12. 
    8 Oct 2007 ~ 8:19pm Tex

    Thrax wrote:

    Readyboost is an additional page file. It's not more temporary workspace as its been billed as several times. If adding a flash drive w/ readyboost improved the performance of the PC, even with 4GB of RAM, then Windows is hitting the page file on 4 god damn gigs.
    
    That's unacceptable.

    
    But XP and all the 2000 series windows os's page some things to the pagefile before you run out of physical ram anyway. There is a guy at 2cpu.com that co-authored one of the XP internals books and he is a super source for understanding the way XP works under the skin and he really changed a lot of my views on setting up systems and stuff. But he says XP is paging some things all the time even when it has available ram based on a number of things like how long its been since it was last accessed etc..
    
    But Ready boost is supposed to not act totaly like a traditional pagefile because the stuff they try to put there is small i-o, thats more random i-o in nature and not sequential i-o. These ready boost devices are superb at random I-O but a fast disk will be more efficent for sequential I-O as their transfer rate is faster for sequential I-O.
    
    Remember how we used to all believe we should put the pagefiles on its own partition at the front of the drive where I-O was faster? Well teh guy that wrote that book disagrees with that notion also. He claims the optimal setup is to have the pagefile as close to the OS and Programs as possible. Meaning that the old guide MM had with all the seperate partitions for OS, programs, pagefile etc.. that so many followed is actually very flawed for optimum performance in real life as the heads are having to move to far. You want the length of the stroke as short as possible so the OS, Programs and pagefile should be as close as possible not seperated in seperate partitions for performance.
    
    in writing the books he was given access to the engineers and program managers that "owned" in Microsoft terms the individual features that controlled how the OS actually works. And it was great fun reading his thoughts. I used to PM him all the time actually.
    
    Cheers
    
    Tex