Windows Vista Catchall

[Yegolev]

January 30, I believe.

So, I doubt that it would be a great idea to get this right off, but I am hoping that someone can explain a few things to me.  One thing I am wondering about is that Amazon shows XP Home as a prereq for Vista Home Premium Upgrade.  The implication is that I cannot, say, install Vista Home Upgrade on top of XP Pro.  That would be annoying, perhaps.

Also just a general "what's the state?" for anyone that was bold enough to install Vista.  Am I really going to want to avoid this for 6-12 months, or more?

[Morfiend]

I was looking in to Vista yesterday. What I found was. XP Home and XP Pro can upgrade to Vista, XP Pro x64 CANNOT upgrade, you have to buy the full Vista.

I think a lot of us here are going to want Vista Ultimate, as it has the gaming features of Vista Home and Vist Entertainment, but it also offers all the parts of Vista Business, like Remote Desktop and some security stuff.

Im hoping to pick up a OEM copy from Newegg.

[Strazos]

Does...eh...Your XP Pro key need to be....valid, in order to upgrade?

[sinij]

Upgrading before Jan 2008 to Vista is asking for pain, PAIN and more PAIN. There are cheaper ways to do it, like stapling your genitalia to a wooden cross and setting it on fire.

[HaemishM]

My suggestion is not to upgrade until you upgrade your hardware, then just buy it with your new computer.

[Etro]

[NiX]

My friend just uninstalled the recent build because it lacked hardware/driver support. I'd say wait.

[Samwise]

The installs I've seen of it have been dog slow compared to XP running on the same box.  I suspect that with better hardware the disparity would shrink, but really, why the hell should the OS on its own require more than a gig of memory?

[Yegolev]

There is also the issue of cockblocks that don't look good.  Maybe some brave soul will feel this out for me.  I'm inclined to agree with sinij.

Hey, agreed with twice in one day.  How's it feel?

As for the hardware upgrade, I was going to wait until then, but I'll be doing that in a few months I expect.  This will be before the suggested January 2008 tollgate.  I don't think Vista will be shipped with OEM PC parts, so it's a retail box for me in any event.

Does...eh...Your XP Pro key need to be....valid, in order to upgrade?

Seems that IE7 and recent DirectX updates require this too (if you use Windows Update, at least, nyuk, nyuk), so I'd think that's a certainty.  I won't even bother to try to put a Vista Upgrade on my machine until I get around to installing that (hopefully) legit copy of XP I recently bought.

[Strazos]

Eh, oh well. I'm going to eventually build a new rig anyway, so I might as well get a full version of Vista so I don't have to juggle 2 OSs.

[Big Gulp]

Thing is, I know my LinkSys Skype phone doesn't support Vista yet, and I'm pretty sure my scanner doesn't also (never got it working in the beta).  That's 2 pieces of hardware down the tubes.  Now I have some confidence that eventually my phone will be supported because Linksys is a reputable company.  Visioneer, the company that produces my cheapass (but completely suitable for my needs) scanner?  Not so much.

[Sky]

I won't touch Vista until 2008, or SP1, whichever comes first. But it does look like Creative found a workaround for the EAX problem, but we'll see how much more overhead it throws on the system. Stuff like that is one reason I was considering quad-core, just to spread the load of background shit like audio processing, since hardware nerfing. Anyway, Creative is adding in something to catch EAX calls and translate them into OpenAL, for games that don't support OpenAL.

I think another year of XP will work out ok.

Visiontek sucks balls for driver support, we had to toss (actually sold it for $10 at a yard sale) a scanner because we couldn't get it working with OSX. OS9 only? Ok, sure.

[Yoru]

Having dinked with betas of Vista for the last year (for business purposes), I can safely say I'm keeping it off my home machines for as long as I possibly can. Aside from the performance issues, the phone-home DRM stuff irks me, and the security features are sorely lacking compared to the hype they've received. In fact, they're generally just really annoying instead of actually useful for the power user, and you cannot shut them off.

And, really, there's no compelling reason to upgrade a gaming machine to Vista aside from DX10. I'm absolutely going to wait and see how the dev community approaches the DX10 issue. Being an early adopter here can only cause pain.

[sinij]

Why the rush to upgrade to Vista, can't wait to get fucked by DRM up the ass? What suddenly wrong with your XP/2000 OS, it still works and there isn't a single Vista exclusive out there.

[Big Gulp]

Why the rush to upgrade to Vista, can't wait to get fucked by DRM up the ass? What suddenly wrong with your XP/2000 OS, it still works and there isn't a single Vista exclusive out there.

Psh...  There's no DRM alive that can't be circumvented.  I don't see DECSS preventing me from using my Blockbuster Online account to it's utmost.  Beyond that Vista is quite a bit better than XP. 

[Samwise]

And, really, there's no compelling reason to upgrade a gaming machine to Vista aside from DX10. I'm absolutely going to wait and see how the dev community approaches the DX10 issue.

MS will bribe or buy a developer to ensure that at least one megahit game requires DX10.  All other developers will follow suit a month later.

[stray]

Crysis

[Brolan]

I'll get Vista at the time I actually need it to play a game that will not run on XP.  My guess is it will be 2010 before that happens.

[bhodi]

I can't make my middle fingers gigantic or numerous enough for vista. Not just no. Hell no. Fuck no. My next OS is ubuntu, fuck you, I'll go consoles if I have to, before I put up with the DRM shit you're trying to shove down my throat.

[Yoru]

And, really, there's no compelling reason to upgrade a gaming machine to Vista aside from DX10. I'm absolutely going to wait and see how the dev community approaches the DX10 issue.

MS will bribe or buy a developer to ensure that at least one megahit game requires DX10.  All other developers will follow suit a month later.

Halo 2 for PC is, I believe, a DX10 exclusive. As is, as noted above, Crysis. The Shadowrun game will be Vista/360. According to Microsoft, Hellgate:London and AOC will have DX10 support, but no word on exclusivity.

[ajax34i]

I might be off, but yeah, I too looked at it briefly and got the impression that they wrapped a lot of crap around a DX upgrade, and are trying to basically bundle an OS with what people want (DX10).  I don't know what the hell Microsoft is thinking, but what I want from an OS is something that lets me run Applications, not something that interrupts what I'm doing every 5 minutes.  And, as far as business users, they just want to click their Word and Excel and email and once they've done that, they want to WORK, not play with the damn computer, cause they got deadlines and shit to do.

It all started with the Anti-Virus applications upgrading themselves to Security Suites and then being extremely annoying with pop-ups whenever you turn off parts of the "suite" (such as the freaking firewall component; I have a damn Cisco box blocking the Internet, it's sufficient).  And now Microsoft... what they made is a whack-a-popup game, not an OS.

[stray]

It sounds stupid, but Microsoft really does want to own your asses, and have their hand in everything you do. It's in your interest to push them back at least once. Just one fucking time.

Stop buying their shit.

[Zetleft]

I'm going to protest by not buying their vista only games and instead buying their 360 versions.... and I guess I'll need to buy a 360 for that.....   

[stray]

As long as you stick to games on the XBox, you'd be fine (even though MS has all of these grand plans to coax cripple you into buying a Zune and Vista in the future, for various media functions).

As for DX10 games, for some reason Crytek has come out and said that both the 360 and PS3 are incapable of running Crysis (even with the 360's partial DX10 functionality).

Pretty lame considering that UE3 looks every bit as good.

[Jain Zar]

Whenever Apple updates the iMac Ill be getting XP64 for Bootcamp.  (Getting Dawn of War off a putzy low graphics output 15" screen onto a big badass dual or quad core with a middle-high end card?  Oh FUCK YES.  And then I will have the excuse to play through it again as the Tau and Necrons!)

I probably will skip Vista as long as possible.  If not permanently.  We will see what solutions like Parallels and Cider end up doing for the Mac market.

Will I be able to play all my current CD and DVD based games with XP?  Yes. Will I be able to play the newest Trackmania (now with 100% less Starforce on the downloadable version of the game!)?
Yes.

Do I care about not playing Halo 2, a game I won't care about till i can get it for the X Box/360 for 10 bucks?  No.

The choice is easy.  Yall deal with the bullshit.  Ill wait as long as I can.

[raydeen]

I can't make my middle fingers gigantic or numerous enough for vista. Not just no. Hell no. Fuck no. My next OS is ubuntu, fuck you, I'll go consoles if I have to, before I put up with the DRM shit you're trying to shove down my throat.

I have high hopes for Feisty Fawn what with it having ATI and Nvidia drivers loaded by default. If Feisty + Wine can run EQ, CoH, and WoW then it's away with Windows (I'm pretty sure WoW is a done deal at least with Crossover). Oh, and Morrowind and Oblivion. I've been meaning to try Sabayon which has 3D support but I don't have a DVD drive in my desktop yet and I don't want to mess with my laptop at this point.

[Riggswolfe]

I am holding out some hope that the Ultimate edition of Vista will give you more control of the OS somewhat like XP Pro does. If that's so I may get Vista eventually. If not, my computer will become what I use for word documents and internet surfing after games go totally DX10. I refuse to be forced to upgrade hardware so my computer can run slower than it currently does.

If Microsoft is looking to force people onto consoles for gaming they've made a good start.

[Yegolev]

Considering everything I have heard, I don't see how any large corporation could justify dealing with this sort of irritation, except of course being forced into it by lack of support for XP.  I'd like to think there will be pressure from that end to change things, even if you don't hear a peep from the average moron.  Obviously I need to make a friend on our Windows team and see what I can find out.

Having my fears confirmed, more or less, I am now curious about the other OS options.  Seems like they have a chance to move up in the install-base rankings; Apple is an obvious player that is going to take advantage of any openings left by MS, but what about some Linux flavors?  Is there even anything else out there?  Can someone run OS X on PC hardware?

I don't like Linux, however it seems that I will probably like Vista even less.  Basically I ranked them by ease-of-use, not counting OS X since I don't have a Mac.  Maybe it was instinct, I don't really know, but last week I upgraded my Safari subscription and picked up the O'Reilly bash book.

[Engels]

Linux isn't what it used to be. Its really grown in terms of responsiveness and professionality in the last years. At work I use a Linux Fedora Core 6 box as much as I can get away with, both for its snappiness on a lower end system as well as just the sheer amount of tools for networks and hardware diagnostics it offers simply out of its own download database. Since it easily authenticates with basic Windows 2000/2003 server for the purposes of network file sharing, the only road block is the intercompatibility between Open Office and MS Office. You can also do a whole bunch of media manipulation and creation without having to spring for Adobe CS2.

I've heard great things about Ubuntu, in particular its awsome database of both tested and 'available, but not 100% verified' stuff. For example, you can download DVD codecs from Ubuntu's repository. Stuff that would otherwise cost you some money unless you obtain the codecs as bundled software, is readily available.

The real reason to get into Linux is quite simply, the command line. Apple, as far as I know, doens't have one, and Windows' command line is pitiable. Linux has a learning curve, a quite steep one, depending on how deep you want to get. Windows and Apple don't have a particularly deep learning curve for home use, but then again, there's a tacit assumption with them that the end user has to have absolutely everything done for them, so there are built in road blocks all over the place.

My recommendation to someone who wants to dabble in Linux is to set up an extra low end box you have lying around. I currently have FC6 running just fine on a Pentium II 400 mhz machine with 380 ram stuffed in it. It runs an ProSql/php database just fine, for instance. Of course, the load on it is miniscule, but its a good example of how far a Linux OS can stretch old hardware.

[Trippy]

The real reason to get into Linux is quite simply, the command line. Apple, as far as I know, doens't have one, and Windows' command line is pitiable.

OS X runs on top of FreeBSD/Mach (heavily modified of course) and a standard Unix command line is readily available from the "Terminal" app or another 3rd party program.

[Engels]

Oh, cool. Didn't know that. Maybe Apple is the way to go, since nowadays you can boot to XP as well as the native hardware. I'm still a little gunshy about Apple, since although it has awsome robustness and no 3rd party shenanigans that MS products have, in the past the end user was stuck with few options. Granted, this was back in the early 90s.

One thing I do know for certain is that when shopping for a computer for someone who isn't actually interested in computers and can't be assed to learn, Apple is the only answer. I recently helped purchase a new Dell for someone who's not computer savvy, and I had to spend well over 5 hours just tearing down 3rd party junk to make the thing behave with a modicum of civility to the end user. There was so much intrusive crap bundled with the Dell that I honestly felt that Linux would have been more user-friendly to a computer newbie than a commercially pre-packaged Windows PC.

[naum]

The real reason to get into Linux is quite simply, the command line. Apple, as far as I know, doens't have one, and Windows' command line is pitiable. Linux has a learning curve, a quite steep one, depending on how deep you want to get. Windows and Apple don't have a particularly deep learning curve for home use, but then again, there's a tacit assumption with them that the end user has to have absolutely everything done for them, so there are built in road blocks all over the place.

Apple is Unix, or more precisely a BSD variant. At low level, I'm sure that means a heck of a lot, but at even the software developer level, it just means I have to remember to type "ps ax" instead of "ps -ef" to view process list. Just about anything built for *nix, I can compile and run on OS X. I say just about anything because sometimes software bundles have some esoteric CPU centric quirks (not so much an issue with Intel Mac now, but occasionally building software for PPC macs one would run into this, but not very often), but I have everything *nix that I ever had on Linux/Unix and more (a more aesthetically pleasing appearance and superior font anti-aliasing via Quartz). And that isn't enough I can run Linux through Parallels (as I could run Win too) without a reboot. Or just dual-boot with Boot Camp but running Windows on a Mac box is extremely distasteful to some…

[Yegolev]

I should probably explain why I don't like Linux.  I'm accustomed to a real UNIX, if you can call AIX UNIX, and the pervasive halfassness of Linux bothers me.  Admittedly this is mostly from a work perspective; things I can do in a three-word command on AIX would take a script or third-party app to do on Linux... or HP/UX or Solaris for that matter (thinking about the LVM here).  Another is that I know ksh.  I know ksh.  I can and will learn bash, but I am not at all excited about it.  I could use ksh on Linux, but the system files are all in bash so it would be in my best interest to just use bash myself.

Anyway, all of that doesn't really matter if I have a machine to run my games on.  Apple is looking good, actually, with no small thanks to Boot Camp.  It's not like all of my games run on WinXP, so I'm not married to that bullshit.

naum's "ps ax versus ps -ef" comment is one of the reasons I like AIX and one thing that would irritate me about Linux.  I can do both of those in AIX.  I usually do `ps -ef` but one of the things I like to do is `ps auxw|egrep -v "^USER"|sort -n +4`.

[Sky]

While I stated above I won't touch Vista until 2008...it was as consideration as a main OS. If I've got a hotrod pc (and I will), and something like Crysis comes out, I can see grabbing a copy of Vista to dual boot. It'd be just like the early days when I was a DOS gamer and booted into Win 3.1 only to play Civ for Windows. I hated Win 3.1 with a passion, never used the stinky thing otherwise.

For games like Spore, if there's a Vista version with lots of cool eye candy, I'd boot into Vista to play them, too. I just don't see it as a 'main' OS for quite some time, though.

Oh, and the apple command line (Terminal) is pure joy. Also, XP on a Core Duo mini with a gig of ram runs really nicely (not loaded with crapware, of course). I was REALLY hoping Jobs was going to announce a Core 2 Duo mini. I'm installing two new internet terminals this month (kiosks with the browser as shell) and cost-benefit-analysis (I heart CBA) says the intel mini. We'll be booting them into XP, and I can repurpose them as a mac later if needed. My (longtime mac addict) supervisor and I get a chuckle that I'm buying a couple macs to run windows. But it's the best scenario for the application, really.

[OcellotJenkins]

Question for people with Bootcamp experience; can files on the Windows partition be accessed from OS X and vice versa?  I'm considering putting either XP or Vista on my iMac for Oblivion and a few other games but I can't make up my mind on partition sizes.  I'd like to, for example, be able to access MP3s in Windows that are stored on the OS X file system.