Windows Vista

[WarmFluffyUK]

Longhorn was built from scratch. Then, they gave up, and just upgraded XP a lot. Yup, thats vista for you.

EDIT: Fresh install XP or vista, they do boot up in seconds, install more then 2 programs on it, and bam, 1-2 min wait time lol.

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Actually Vista was written from scratch, but because of peoples oppinions about Vista looking so different from XP they decided to remodel the interface to retain a lot of XP's interface. So not to give windows users the shock of getting used to something totally different.

Under the hood though Vista is very different, it's a whole new breed of OS, it just looks like XP that's all.

To be honest, even if Vista was the best OS on the planet, people would still slag it off because it's a Microsoft product. It's just the way it is....

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But it's SO bloatware!

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Gosh that was a quick reply, you got in before I posted an edit to my last post

 

[Nova]

I my dual-boot.

Best of both worlds.

 

[Reaperman93010]

this microsoft lawsuit really hurt computers.

back in the day, microsoft would release a new OS every couple years, and we'd all need to run out and buy a MUCH more powerful computer to run it. Since they've held on to XP for so long, my celeron from 2002 seems to run pretty close to current bargain machines--the non-amd64, sempron64's for example. Granted the sempron is faster, but not by much.

a $500 machine today should simply *FLATTEN* my $500 machine from 3+ years ago, and the fact that it doesn't comes from the fact that it doesn't take any more power to run windows xp now than it did in 2002. We *NEED* this operating system to make our machines obsolete and move forward. If we don't the bargain machines will *never* really get any faster, and the high-end will advance at a greatly slowed pace.

kind of a backwards way of thinking, I suppose...

 

[G Morgan]

I thought the machine charge had stalled due to reaching natural limitations in technology. It has suddenly become financially viable to look at new chip architechture hence the slow down in progress and the ridiculous price of new chips that currently do little more than my Sempron 3000+. However when multithread programming gets under way my chip will then look stupid but the current dual cores will be so out of date by then. Anyway, I've decided to wait until they have standardised and the price comes down then I will buy.

Anyway, does Vista have a firewall, virus scanner and spyware protection as standard. Does it default into an administrator account as well. Is the code a buggy piece of crap as well.

/edit- besides do we really want to give games developers more power. They already produce pretty pictures rather than games to a large extent. What we really want is MS to develop an OS that chokes your computer so instead of going 'wow, look at the shaders' we can go 'wow, theres actually a game here'.

 

[Ravnos]

Virus scanner's not available by default. There was an article on /. the other day that discussed it. Apparently there are business reasons for this (such as "putting your own virus scanner on your monopoly OS would force pretty much every other AV-scanner off the market.")

 

[G Morgan]

Virus scanner's not available by default. There was an article on /. the other day that discussed it. Apparently there are business reasons for this (such as "putting your own virus scanner on your monopoly OS would force pretty much every other AV-scanner off the market.")

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Would be a good argument if there wasn't decent free scanners out there. I have Norton from my old mans work (he has a license to use it for work at home before anyone mentions the P word) and AVG free. I've found AVG to be as useful as Norton.

 

[Ravnos]

Virus scanner's not available by default. There was an article on /. the other day that discussed it. Apparently there are business reasons for this (such as "putting your own virus scanner on your monopoly OS would force pretty much every other AV-scanner off the market.")

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Would be a good argument if there wasn't decent free scanners out there. I have Norton from my old mans work (he has a license to use it for work at home before anyone mentions the P word) and AVG free. I've found AVG to be as useful as Norton.

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So have I, but AVG is basically using their free version as an advertisement for their corporate version. If MS had a decent free scanner, there would be no need for the corporate version, either, thus making all AV scanners free and taking Norton and the like out of the game. And if MS is putting out an AV scanner that's so shitty that you need to d/l or buy a better version anyway, why should they bother with one at all?

Edited to add: Also, if there's one built into the OS, most people won't bother with a 3rd party AV scanner. IE provides a perfect example, basically forcing Netscape out of the browser business and making it virtually impossible for anyone to sell a browser anymore. Opera does (or rather, did) it, but I don't think they were making that much from their computer-based browser sales with their tiny marketshare. They make their big money in selling it for embedded use.

 

[G Morgan]

Even better would be a Linux, your not root user so Virus can't easily alter system files without password, style system. As if MS would ever admit their methods were wrong though. In XP even with the limited account I found I could trash the OS in about 5 seconds.

 

[Ravnos]

Even better would be a Linux, your not root user so Virus can't easily alter system files without password, style system. As if MS would ever admit their methods were wrong though. In XP even with the limited account I found I could trash the OS in about 5 seconds.

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Apparently Vista fixes this, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

[G Morgan]

Virus scanner's not available by default. There was an article on /. the other day that discussed it. Apparently there are business reasons for this (such as "putting your own virus scanner on your monopoly OS would force pretty much every other AV-scanner off the market.")

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Would be a good argument if there wasn't decent free scanners out there. I have Norton from my old mans work (he has a license to use it for work at home before anyone mentions the P word) and AVG free. I've found AVG to be as useful as Norton.

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So have I, but AVG is basically using their free version as an advertisement for their corporate version. If MS had a decent free scanner, there would be no need for the corporate version, either, thus making all AV scanners free and taking Norton and the like out of the game. And if MS is putting out an AV scanner that's so shitty that you need to d/l or buy a better version anyway, why should they bother with one at all?

Edited to add: Also, if there's one built into the OS, most people won't bother with a 3rd party AV scanner. IE provides a perfect example, basically forcing Netscape out of the browser business and making it virtually impossible for anyone to sell a browser anymore. Opera does (or rather, did) it, but I don't think they were making that much from their computer-based browser sales with their tiny marketshare. They make their big money in selling it for embedded use.

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While IE still has the lion share of the market people are starting to realise that a swift kick between the legs is far more conductive to their general health. Admittedly IE can be locked down (disabling active-x, blocking cookies etc.) but I like to spend less time covering for other peoples mistakes (at least in the case of a multi-trillion dollar company that should be able to produce a passable browser, I could handle the Mozilla guys making mistakes considering the financial resource difference) and more time doing what I want to do.

//edit- of course not to mention those people who'd scratch their head at the mention of a cookie.

 

[Targus]

yay yay lets stay on xp (though personally 98 first edition is my favourite OS)

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windowz 3.1 baby there specs are kind of high though 1mb of ram... shoot i got to upgrade my 512kb chip anyone selling a SIM memory chip?! wasnt long horn going to have a new file system... better then ntfs?!

 

[PSyMastR]

As I already stated. Longhorn was, but that is why its called vista, they scrapped longhorn and called it vista, as its just an upgraded XP.

 

[Ravnos]

As I already stated. Longhorn was, but that is why its called vista, they scrapped longhorn and called it vista, as its just an upgraded XP.

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I haven't followed the whole thing closely enough to join the argument myself, but if the whole basis for you saying it's an upgraded XP is the name, you're on pretty shaky ground. XP was called "Whistler" before it was released. MS, like just about every company, uses an internal codename for new projects. Neither of those names are very marketable, though, so they get ditched when the project nears release.

 

[PSyMastR]

Yes, I know this.

It was originally called longhorn, but they decided to scrap the "longhorn" project (which was the entirely newly rewritten windows from the ground up with the new file system). The decided to just scrap that whole thing and upgrade XP. Hope that helps. Yes, I know longhorn is a codename, just as Dolphin was for Gamecube (I think), etc...

 

[sam fisher]

actually you have it in reverse. Longhorn was just an upgraded XP and Vista (or 'View' in latin) is written entirely from the ground up. Know your facts before you attempt to post.

 

[Hanz™]

Yes, I know this.

It was originally called longhorn, but they decided to scrap the "longhorn" project (which was the entirely newly rewritten windows from the ground up with the new file system). The decided to just scrap that whole thing and upgrade XP. Hope that helps. Yes, I know longhorn is a codename, just as Dolphin was for Gamecube (I think), etc...

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That's not right. That's not right at all.
Vista is just a new name for Longhorn, the features are just the same. WinFS is planned as a later free update. As far as I know it is not a proper file system but an extension to NTFS (?).

Edit: Yep that is right, I checked. WinFS will be free as a patch later on when it is finished.

 

[DemonStar55]

wikipedia said "Microsoft basically started development afresh, building on the Windows Server 2003 codebase."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista

 

[c0ncept]

all hail the great wiki

 

[PSyMastR]

actually you have it in reverse. Longhorn was just an upgraded XP and Vista (or 'View' in latin) is written entirely from the ground up. Know your facts before you attempt to post.

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I stand corrected. Thanks.

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

actually you have it in reverse. Longhorn was just an upgraded XP and Vista (or 'View' in latin) is written entirely from the ground up. Know your facts before you attempt to post.

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I stand corrected. Thanks.

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When Microsoft are developing a new OS, they codename it, usually to where they are actually doing the main development for the product. Windows Longhorn was the codename for Vista, it's the same product. If you look at the version number for the Vista Beta, you will see it has a Longhorn version number.

However, you are almost correct in saying that Longhorn was developed on top of XP technology, as this was correct for the start of the project. They then realised it was futile, scrapped it and redesigned Longhorn from the ground up based on Windows Server 2003 SP1. So in effect, Longhorn is still the codename for Vista, but it went through major changes before the Vista Beta arrived.