Windows Vista

I guess a those Vista machines have crashed. This new bloatware package will not get installed by me. The trend is towards ever more features we don't need and that require ever more computing power to run them. It is the height of laziness to just add more nice graphics and glossy features without adding functionality. I would advise all concerned to wait until at least 2009 before thinking about buying a copy.

From a guest to a guest... You have the right solution... All Vista does is force you to a hardware upgrade! How many times are we going to go through that? They should have just offered the XP SP3 they've been promising! MicroShaft? I guess that's what happens when you become a billionare you let idiots like Ballmer run your company and you lose touch with reality. I wish MicroShaft had a competitor like Intel (AMD).

> I wish MicroShaft had a competitor like Intel (AMD).

It does. Why do people still insist on self MicroShafting?

I have a Mac and a WindowsXP. The Windows machine is reasonably stable but not like the Mac. What really drives me crazy about the Windows machine is how hard it is to do a selection. You wouldn't notice this unless you are familiar with how easy it is to do a selection on a Mac. There are numerous little things like this. Plus OSX security is HEADS above any Windows product. Personally I think XP is a downgrade from W2K in many ways. Vista is just a bomb.

Really, even if you don't like Macs, Linux is better than Windows.

I'm going to sell both machines and buy a new Mac install WindowsXP on a different partition. I'll run OSX probably 95% of the time or more and XP 5% or less.

You may not be aware you can boot to BOTH systems at the same time on a Mac and OSX is UNIX.

"I wish MicroShaft had a competitor like Intel (AMD)."

Ubuntu. Linux has come a long way. Check it out.

HY,

I tend to agree with the guest coleague here... i had the horror of working with some official and non official releases of Vista... besides nice graphics and high hardware requirement i haven't seen anithing intwresting... no funcionality... and ideed there are lots of bugs...

The hardware i tryed with the vistas was brand new and "windows vista ready" but still it would crash for no particular reason :)...

if u whant a nice looking SO... then try Vista... it's the nicest i have seen yet...

If u whant a stable SO... keep to your XP :)

good luck to u

Purchased a new Sony Vaio and received a copy of vista from Sony a couple weeks ago. After installing I found several programs that would not run on it, but, the majority of software that is less than a year old seems to be running o.k. Have not had a single crash requiring reboot since installation. My copy of XP was going down about once a week, sometimes more. My system is the dualcore and seems to be handling vista well. Ric

As usual, the early users are the Bug finders for MS.....nothing new there!

Furthermore, some of the other "features" might put a lot of customers off, for example, once it has been re-installed 2 or was it 3 times, you need to buy a new copy!!! Does anyone who now has Vista on CR4 know this before they bought it!!! I am sure that MS will have to goto the XP version of rebuilds.....

I believe that SP1 has now been released for Vista recently too.....so some bugs might be fixed....

I first bought XP at the end of 2003 and mostly I am happy with it, my main problems were that I bought IBM disk drives as well, awful!! Which is why IBM sold all its drive manufacturing to Hitachi I believe!!!

I personally will never touch a drive (or anything at all from IBM) from either firm ever again......they were going down sometimes both in a week, one after the other!!!!!! (I had 2x40GB drives). I eventually got thru 11 drives before I had two that stayed alive for a reasonable amount of time.....because IBM would not give me the later improved version.....only a "re-re-re-repaired" original and bad version, but I managed to get them anyway changed for the later version with a small trick!.....the later versions are still running, but with nothing important on them....

But XP has been very solid in spite of starting before SP1 with it.....so why touch a running machine?

Therefore I have stockpiled 3 new and original/legal copies of XP that I bought extremely cheap on Ebay.....in case I need an extra computer once MS stops selling it!! They might even go up in value eventually if Vista proves to be a hand full!!!!!!!

Wow, 11 drives? That's impressive! I knew about the IBM Deskstar Drives, where they had a few models that were complete junk, but I had no idea they were that bad. Actually, before that episode, I thought that IBM hard drives were the best and most reliable you could get. (my laptop is a testament to that, the original 20gb drive is still in it from nearly 6 years ago, and has ~7600 hours of power on time. It has about 3900 power on cycles. The laptop has had the snot beat out of it too, it has lots of battle scars on the corners from the previous owner dropping it all the time.) My experience (and my friends experiences) with Maxtor hard drives is nearly as bad as your "DeathStar" drives. "Maxtor, your Six Month data storage solution!!!" About IBM, I think that every company has their total flop products, but I think that 98% of their products are very high quality. Some of you have probably heard me ranting about how durable the original IBM Thinkpads were... although Lenovo seems to have done pretty good continuing the Thinkpad Legend (we just bought one). And I thought that now especially, Hitachi makes very reliable drives, right up there with Seagate.

About Vista, avoid it like the plague for now at least. It will make your computer slow and inefficient and has shown itself to be unreliable.

-Nick

I agree with you that any company can have a bad run so to say, but IBM would not give me the later improved version that was available quite soon after I bought my drives......they would only replace the duff ones with repaired duff ones that went duff a short time later.......!!!! It was only using a trick and a very helpfull supplier that I managed to get the later versions after 6 months of utter S**T.

I was running a dual drive RAID and one would go down, after 10 days the replacement would be there, I would put it in and as I powered up, the other one would die!!!! That happened twice.....

What IBM has not understood is that some people (like me) NEVER BUY THE PRODUCTS EVER AGAIN WITH THEIR LOGO ON!!!! (This is me on CR4 shouting !!)

This goes for Sony, Olympus cameras (after 5 years they could not sell me a lense cap/remote control after the battery (not replaceable) went dead!!) and Intel and a few others not in the computer world that have supplied me with bad products or service over the last 10 years.....

I never forget, and I never buy from them again and I always recommend other makes to my friends......after telling them why!!

In the great order of things they probably do not feel my gnat bite, but I feel better for it!!!

While we are on the subject of bloated software there is something that I have noticed with Windows XP that only seems to have started some tine in the last 12 to 18 months.

When I cold start my notebook that is running Windows XP and log in the system runs like an elephant stuck in a bog. Windows Task Manager shows the CPU usage is running at or near 100% for the first 10 to 15 minutes after logging in immediately after a system restart and it is impossible to get the system to do anything. The offending routines seem to be svchost.exe and CCAPP.EXE. After about 10 to 15 minutes the background CPU usage drops to less than 2% and the system becomes useable.

I don't seem to remember this always happening and it seems to be something that has sneaked in some time in the not to distant past. I also have a second desk top system that is running Windows XP and this exhibits identical behavior after startup. It seems to be something that has appeared after one of the numerous on line updates that Microsoft like you to perform on Windows XP but I can't be certain of when the problem first appeared.

Has anybody else noticed this or is it just some weird option that has somehow been enabled on my machines?

I had problems starting my XP - often took 3 attempts to boot, and then 10 mins after log-in until fully usable. I decided to install "Ubuntu" (a linux OS) as an alternative boot, and since then XP has started to behave!

Re. svchost.exe:

http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/svchost/

and ccapp.exe:

http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/ccapp/

It may be worthwhile removing and re-installing to ensure they have not been corrupted/ hijacked

Reading this and other similar threads makes me glad I use a Mac!

Dick

I use a Mac as well as a Dell. The IT department rides herd on Windows flaws. I just mend fences around my Mac software issues.

Masu:

Yes, I've noticed the same thing, but I have found a work-around.

The problem is definitely caused by one of the automatic updates which are so generously provided by Microsoft. The machine I use at the office of one of my clients behaves exactly as you describe. My home machine does not. The difference is that my client's system administrator dutifully installs all the updates on all the machines on their network, while I have had the updates disabled on my machine at home for about 18 months.

The workaround is to start Task Manager right away when you boot, and use it to delete the offending copy of svchost. If you click the "Processes" tab to display the list of running processes, you will notice that there are several copies of svchost running, and one of them is using 100% of your CPU time, or close to it. That's the one to delete. Just right click on the list entry and then select "Delete Process Tree" from the context menu that pops up.

You will have to do this every time you boot, which is inconvenient, but it's better than sitting around feeling violated for 15 minutes per day!

I had the same problem. If you do a google search for ccapp you'll find it's related to Norton Anti Virus, which is probably why it's slowing down so much. The virus scans seem to hog alot of resources sometimes. You might check your setting on NAV, perhaps you're overkilling?

The CCAPP program is related to Norton (Symantec) I think. I had a lot of trouble with that on an older machine. It was crashing my outlook (2001) constently. It would also not close properly on shutdown or restart (I had to manually end the program or hang the computer in the process). Was that annoying?

I finally found that by upgrading to Outlook 2003 a lot of the crashing with outlook went awy. Finally bought another computer (dual core) and the other problem went away.

It seems that driver upgrades are just not necessarily in step with the current state of your computer and needs of your computer. Drivers are not always backward compatible and if you get new drivers on an older machine, beware. I mean let's not pretend that computers and drivers are so simple. There are so many products, drivers and conflicts available we are luckier than sh_t that anything can work at all.

Also many programs nowadays access the internet on startup. Why? Because it's there is the only reason I can see except for privacy violations and maybe looking for upgrades. If there is any problem getting out to the internet in a timely manner, that is before a tiemout occurs, then the whole startup routine may be delayed. That was happening with me as well. I was using SKYPE occaisionally and that would take forever to log in. That's gone now. Instant messenger is also gone. They stay gone until I need them.

Dell gave me a free upgrade from XP to Vista, but it's staying in the box. More headaches I don't need.

Try removing unnecessary auto start programs

Disconnect unused network connections

De fragment your computer,

Do complete virus scan

Test hardware and software that may be ready to crash

Check for patches and updates for programs and hardware.

Branson

Many registry-called routines don't show up on the start menu. Auto-update, even non=auto, have routines in them that aren't mentioned in the description MS supplies. Some snarky WGA type routine was added somewhere in an update about January. I have to hibernate most times, as a boot takes forever to clear whatever routine they added.

RichH

....maybe its a trick to get us unhappy with XP and make us move to Vista!!!

I may be totally ignorant, but correct me if I'm wrong here:

- DOS was actually IBM's property, only later called MS DOS

- Windows 3.1 was not an operating system but a DOS-run application with mouse-driven graphics called GUI

- Windows 95 was a rip-off IBM's OS2 Warp, with different graphics

- Windows 98 was an actual OS2 Warp's kernel with Windows 95 graphics

- Windows Millennium was Windows 98 with Windows 2000 graphics

- Windows 2000 was NT 6 with "improved" Windows 98 graphics

- Windows XP was Windows 2000 with "improved" graphics

- Windows Vista is Windows XP with Mac's OSx graphics

Did I miss some critical mention?

Hi Yuval,

Just one error: "Windows Vista is Windows XP with Mac's OSx graphics"

The Mac's graphics use MUCH less processor, and are still miles ahead. MS, as always, are just playing follow-my-leader.

Have you tried fast user switching on a Mac? - maybe MS will catch up in the next OS (assuming they're still around then - seem to prefer playing games these days [using chips which have been superceded in Macs])

...Just one error: "Windows Vista is Windows XP with Mac's OSx graphics"...

I was actually corrected even further, and the second reminder should read:

"- Windows 3.1 which was sold concurrently with IBM's OS2 Warp, was not an operating system but a DOS-run application with mouse-driven graphics called GUI"

I kind of lost track at the end, but at the beginning it was PC-Dos proprietary to IBM and ran on IBM PC Computers. Then the rest of the world wasn't gpoing to stand by for that so they stripped away the propritary language of PC-Dos which then became MS-Dos (as in Microsoft) which ran on IBM PC Compatibles, for less money of course. IBM tried to hang in there with their proprietary PC_Dos and the more expensive hardware, but over the course of a few years, by the mid-later 80s, they went kaploowey. HP I think is the only major PC company still around from those days. Except for Apple of course. Even HP walked away from the PC Compatible market for a few years.

...Even HP walked away from the PC Compatible market for a few years...

Only now Apple build their Intel-based Pentium PC and interpreted OS with Intel mnemonics, with an open provision to run Windows and apps.

Don't be surprised if and when they'll flip to AMD Athlons or whatever, since their OS mnemonics no longer use Motorola or RISC technology.

Cheeeeese... Eventually? - They all roll belly-up to mediocrity.

The fear of being excellent.

Oh, how soon we forget...

MS-DOS was originally called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) by Tim Paterson, who wrote it in 1979 for a small company called Seattle Computer Products. Bill Gates, by concealing his relationship with IBM, managed to buy all rights to QDOS for $50,000... one month before IBM released the PC in 1981. He then turned around and licensed QDOS non-exclusively to IBM, who called it PC-DOS 1.0 and shipped one with every IBM PC they sold. Meanwhile, Microsoft called it MS-DOS and proceeded to sell several hundred million copies at prices ranging up to $30 each.

And Tim Paterson? Well, these days he works as a programmer in the Visual J++ group at Microsoft...

To paraphrase Nietzsche: Microsoft is the coldest of all cold monsters, and everything it says, it lies, and everything it has, it has stolen.

That account is very much consistent with my recollection. I just might add that somewhat later IBM tried to shift the standard (after all they were the standard setter) to their own PS2 OS. It didn't survive.

Actually, Bill Gates never intended to license MS DOS to IBM. Going to Boca Raton for that first meeting, he only expected to get one, maybe two million. His newly founded company was selling MS BASIC and electronic highway signs at the time, and had grown to around 2 million a year in gross revenue. IBM's upper management felt the PC was a fad and didn't want to buy an OS. If the product flopped, a lease would be much less of a loss. So, they approached Gates with the lease.

Bill didn't do anything that any other Harvard drop out couldn't have done, given the same circumstances.

Let's not be bitter!

• "Bill didn't do anything that any other Harvard drop out couldn't have done, given the same circumstances."

But he did do it. He was the one who maneuvered himself into a position to do it. He took advantage. He had the insight and perception and opportunity to make it happen. Subsequently he knew how to put together a team, hold that team together and make MS what it is today for which he has been justly rewarded.

Does everybody love MS? Hardly, but they do a pretty damm good job.

Sorry if it sounded bitter. Was just echoing the facts as I remember them. IMHO Bill has quite a legacy to look back on, but he fell into the financial wherewithall to fuel his accomplishments through mostly luck. He's no genius. People give him too much credit.

You know, most Harvard drop outs are still pretty smart!

...most Harvard drop outs are still pretty smart...

As in "Smart enough to drop out"?, you have those too, you know.

Well, I was thinking along the lines of, if you're smart enough to get into Harvard, that doesn't go away just because you drop out.

I wouldn't attach any special smartness to the act of choosing to drop out of Harvard, especially in this case. Bill just dropped out to help his buddy start a business selling electronic signs. He later added the selling of MS BASIC and was making a modest living. If his Mother hadn't spoke on his behalf to IBM's upper management at a charity fund raiser, IBM might have not known who to go to for a BASIC interpretor. If they hadn't gone to him for his BASIC interpretor, he wouldn't have learned that they needed an operating system.

Connections. He had connections and education. His connections were through William and Mary Gates, and his education had prepared him for Harvard.

But, he's certainly no genius.

Spoken like a true Ferengi!

As long as companies like Microsoft exist and behave as they do, capitalism will remain an unrealized ideal, and Joe Public will remain a slave in fact if not in name. In order for capitalism to exist, competition must be possible. But the entire purpose of companies like Microsoft is to make competition impossible. See

http://www.dicosmo.org/HoldUp/English/Hijacking_the_World.pdf

Due to companies like Microsoft, what we have is oligopoly. Not capitalism. We have an aristocracy of money which is dressed up to look like capitalism.

To praphrase Henry Ford: If the general public knew how the economic system really works, there would be an armed revolution by morning.

The question is: Is oligopoly that bad?

Henry Ford might have been right, but it is now 100 years later and we are the only superpower. Is that the only measure of success? No, but it is one. Everything has its pros and cons. Oligopoly and capitalism. I don't know. Time will tell. Survival counts big in my book. Power corrupts. We are not in an ideal world. We are not ideal people. How can ideals possibly work for us? Dreaming is nice but unrealistic. I guess you have to shoot for the dream to end up a little further from the bad end of the curve.

Wasn't MS at one time funding Apple to keep it alive so that MS wouldn't be deemed a monopoly?

...Wasn't MS at one time funding Apple to keep it alive so that MS wouldn't be deemed a monopoly?...

What are we, retarded kids here? MS funded Apple to ensure there is no competition. As if...

In contrary to it's policies over twenty years, the made the charity of the century, not for PR, but to encourage it's main competitor? Give us a brake here. Please.

And De-Facto - is there competition?

I'm not by the least convinced even you believe this fairy-tail spin.

Hey, I'm just Joe Public. What do I know?

So it wasn't clear from your staement...why did MS fund Apple? to ensure there is no competition? what does that mean?

...to ensure there is no competition? what does that mean?...

What, like, charity for the poor? to get a Mother-Theresa salute?

Are we still talking capitalistic practice here or what?

Once a company funds another company it's only charity in fairy tales. You either get leverage in it's management decision path, or you fund it as a part of a joint-venture to influence it's management decision path for your benefit. Are we not talking capitalistic practice here? I thought so.

You name it at your convenience.

There seem to be 2 reasons for Microsoft to want Apple to remain in the game:

1) as long as Apple have 5-10% of the market, the courts will not demand that Microsoft is broken up.

2) Microsoft needs to get ideas from somewhere - and everything they do has been taken from someone else's work.

(MS never seem to do it as well, though)

The only novel thing about Vista I have seen is the ability to disect Word documents, and replace images, etc. without opening the document..............They think it's a good idea LOL

You just bluntly named two strong selfish reasons to fund for your relative advantage and leverage in a competitive market.

Any of those being a charity?

I sometimes find it hard to distinguish between an attempt to get rid of a foe and an attempt to keep a foe idle, but as you mentioned, the second reason is far too slick to ignore.

Especially when being MS with it's "patch-to-improve" reputation.

Wasn't MS at one time funding Apple to keep it alive so that MS wouldn't be deemed a monopoly?

That is a misconception. Microsoft bought $150M of non voting stock as part of a larger settlement of a lawsuit. Microsoft has made their money back many times over.

However, it was disclosed recently that the $150M part of the settlement was forced on Apple by Microsoft, perhaps to give the appearance that Microsoft was coming to Apple's aid. Apple accepted the terms under threat that Microsoft would discontinue development and support of their Office product for the Macintosh.

Apple was nowhere near going bankrupt. The company was nearly debt free when Steve Jobs returned, and became debt free shortly thereafter, no thanks to Microsoft. At this time, the company holds somewhere around $9B in cash or cash equivalents and zero debt.

Interesting to see the share prices for these two companies: Apple shares keep going up, even though they don't pay dividends.

I need to make a correction from my previous post concerning Apple's cash and cash equivalents.

Apple reported earnings today and in so doing stated their cash currently stands at $12.6 billion.

Apple Reports Second Quarter Results Earnings Grow 88 Percent Year-over-Year

signifigantly wrong

windows 3.1 was based on the dos kernel but was a seprate operating system as were 95 and 98 and me also dos based

windows 95 was actually a rip off of microsoft and ibms project NT that woudl later be seperated into os2(only the last revision was actually warp) and windows NT the graphics were pulled directly from windows NT4.0

windows 98 and 98se were incremental updates to windows 95 as were the multiple windows 95 releases (osr2 ect)

windows millennium was a stopgap measure simply designed to improve the 9x line of operating systems although was a total flop forcing the cancleation of the neptune project that was suposed to replace it and rush xp into service.

there was no windows nt6 until vista windows 2000 is technically NT 5.0 and respectivly xp is NT 5.1

the graphics in vista were demonstrated before the release of mac osx Tiger in 2005

I have been not worked in the computer industry for quiet a while but when I was there was a big difference between the architecture of the processors in a MAC and those in a PC running Windows or DOS used.

MACs all use RISC chips while PC did not. The difference is the way instructions are stored in memory and decoded by the microprocessor. With PCs an instruction can be a variable length and can take up a number of bytes. With a RISC processor all instructions are 32 bits or four bytes long and all start at 0 or 4 byte boundaries after that. This means with a RISC processor you always know where the next instruction starts.

Both systems have their pros and cons. The non RISC chips need to have a block of circuitry that needs to assess the length of the instruction and as systems have become faster and more complex this chink of circuitry has been getting larger. RISC chips on the other hand can waste memory as with short instructions you can be wasting up to three bytes of memory but they do not require the complexity and can run faster.

There was also a big difference in the way MACs and Windows system handled virtual memory. Windows used a true virtual memory system that used a portion of disk space as an extension to the RAM. MACs on the other had used a system, where if virtual memory was enabled a portion the disk space as the primary storage space for all program and data. The information was then copied from the disk into memory as it was needed. The result was that if you were running programs on a MAC that were too large and had no option but to use a paging file, the system was terribly slow. As far as I know this is no longer the case and both systems now work as a proper use on demand time based virtual memory system.

Going back even further in time there was an agreement way, way back when DOS was very young that DOS and UNIX would appear to be the same. There was evidently a falling out and the two have drifted further and further apart but you can still see the commonality that was there in the beginning.

There is a little trick that was used in super mini computers that gave them astronomical performance when running in a multitasking environment. It was sometimes called vectored processing but what it really entailed was multiple register sets within the processor. A simplified explanation was that in an environment where there were multiple active programs each program could be assigned a register set. This meant that whenever a process exchange (stop running one program and start running another) took place, it was just a matter of switching to that processes register set. With a single register set machine (that's all of the microprocessor based systems and all but a handful or really special machines) you need to write each of the registers to memory and then read back the values of the new register sets. This takes a lot more time and was not a problem back when a PC only ran one program at a time. Run the Windows Task Manager and have a look at how many programs that now active simultaneously and you will get the idea how often the system needs to do a process exchange.

I have no idea why they havn't used multiple register set systems but from my experience they can give phenomenal performance in multitasking environments where process exchanges are common. Considering how little extra hardware they require I am surprised they are not used more common. Just my opinion for what its worth.

Thanks for a clear, definitive post. Thumbs Up, masu.

Macs have been running Intel processors for over a year now.

http://www.apple.com/intel/

It is even possible to run Windows XP and OS X natively on the same computer. The software that makes this possible is being distributed by Apple for free. It is called Boot Camp.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/apr/05bootcamp.html

The upcoming version of OS X (due in October) is projected to include Boot Camp features within the OS.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

Will Mac and PC software become interchangeable so that OS X .5 will run on a native PC?

It is highly unlikely that Apple will license its OS to any other hardware manufacture under the current circumstances. However, it could happen in the future.

Since the company is diversifying its product base to already include the highly successful iPod and will soon include the to be released iPhone, one could expect that Apple might look at OS licensing as a means of further increasing revenue. The risk associated with licensing would be lessened, and their computer products are gathering sales momentum any way.

If the tide of consumer and corporate sentiment should turn against Microsoft's OS, (and it may once XP is discontinued next year) Apple may want to take advantage and make available an OS only version of their software to other hardware manufacturers. The Macintosh would still be a different experience with its full complement of bundled software and fancy design. And, the availability of the Unix based OS with it's Apple designed GUI would open up sales to corporate IT departments.

But, don't hold your breath.

Actually it is possible (but you aren't supposed to) to put OSX on a PC. Namely a pc with the same processor and similar hardware as a new Mac with the dual core Intel processors. My brother was able to put OSX on a cheap dell with no problems except a few driver issues (just the sound drivers). It's not supported by Apple of course, and it probably breaks the license in one way or the other.

-Nick

Right. It is possible to install OS X on a Dell, but unless you love to write your own drivers, it's not very practical.

Vista is bloatware that serves no one but Microsoft and their manufacturing partners. It looks cool like OS X, but that's just a coat of paint. And, this coat of paint, without the underpinnings, drags down performance to the point of requiring the latest hardware.

I think that Vista is Apple's golden opportunity to grab some significant OS marketshare if they do it right. They would have to license the OS to do it, but I think they could get as much as 50% of the OS market if timed right.

If you google well enough, the way to do it is already there - just not authorised by Apple. (Anyone can buy the software - there is no restriction just to Mac owners)