Vista question

[0thehero]

There's a lot of fud circulating still about Vista.

Agreed.  Especially about DRM and UAC, but that's mostly from the crusading idiot in New Zealand that wrote a manifesto about Vista without ever having actually used the OS in the first place.  And he's supposed to be an authority...whatever.

Networking is noticeably slower then with XP. Network file copy under vista moves at an snail's pace as compared to XP. Microsloth has realeased some patches to fix this, but it's still a lot slower.

You can fix that with a command in the Search window of Vista.  Just remember to reboot.  I forgot and couldn't figure out why the transfer speed was still lagging.  PBKAC.  

They blame us for the performance loss. Aero is the biggest boondoggle of all time.

But Aero is suspended when calls are made to DirectX through a game, and the impact of the DWM in Vista is under 1% of CPU utilization.  Now the Sidebar, depending on what you have running in there, can just hammer your CPU--sometimes more than 50% depending on the gadget(s) you happen to be running.  I like the Sidebar, but I turn it off for gaming sessions.  It's not hard to see how the difference between Aero and the Sidebar wouldn't matter to a regular user calling for support, however, since "it's all Aero" to them.  

For someone in Skuzzy's shoes, the issue with OEM drivers must be a living nightmare, since it really matters more than ever that you have Vista drivers worth a damn, especially given the new WDDM.  Ironically, the new driver model should improve security and performance in the future, but lots of IHVs are still playing catch up.  And so someone like Skuzzy takes the blame, unfortunately.

Must say AH ran fine first time out on a pair of Vista rigs here, one four years old and the other brand new, though neither were Tier One OEM rigs.  2GB of RAM should be the standard with Vista, to make best use of SuperFetch, but I see plenty of Vista rigs being sold with just 1GB, which is criminal in a day when you can buy 2GB of RAM for $50.

[Skuzzy]

Aero does hurt performance due to the resources it uses.  It is tied to DirectX.  When you use Aero, a portion of resources dedicated to DirectX are used all the time.  Just because it is not being drawn, does not mean it is not taking up resources.  Aero should not be allowed to run on computers with only 1GB of RAM.

Most games all suspend drawing when they are minimized, but that does not stop the resources from being used.

Everything in a computer comes at a price.  All the pretty wizbangs people like all cost something in terms of performance and/or resources.

I have Vista Ultimate on my box, but I have disabled many features and background processes, including SuperFetch.  SuperFetch was making my life miserable.  Took me about 2 hours to realize that had to go.  In my environment it was killing my ability to get my job done.  Constant freezes and long pauses all the time.  UAC is also another fiendish plot to curtail productivity, but I digress.

Anyway, I did a comparison on the same hardware against a clean Windows XP Pro installation versus a clean Vista installation.

The Vista installation was 25 to 35% slower.  Stutters were far more prevalent as well.  Overall, there really is nothing in Vista that warrants moving from Windows XP Pro right now.  Given the compatibility issues with Vista alone, makes it worth keeping XP Pro around.

I have never understood bloat for the sake of bloat.  But that is what Vista feels and acts like.  When we went from Windows 98 to Windows XP, there were some really nice technilogical reasons to do so.  Performance was pretty close to the same in applications and games, so it was not too painful to make that switch.

Going to Vista is nothing but painful.  I have so many problems I am finally going back to XP and we will just keep Vista around for test purposes.  I cannot print to our network printer.  Vista decided to drop me off the network neighborhood.  Heck, it decided to not even show itself anymore.  Makes it difficult to do my job.  I will be very glad to see it go and feel sorry for anyone stuck with it.

As far as DRM goes, even Bill Gates said Vista was far too entrenched in DRM.  Thank DRM for the lack of DirectSound.  MS killed that API in favor of the standrd Windows Sound API (which sucks) because they could not figure out how to make DirectSound conform to DRM.  There are things coming down the road which will make every Vista user cringe.

I get slammed a lot for my position about Vista.  The engineer in me just goes nuts when I try to rationalize the existence of this operating system.  There is just no real technical reason for this OS to exist.  The only thing that appears to have happened is people lost more control over what thier computers are doing and are capable of doing.

My skin crawls when I see someone claiming 'Vista is fine'.  I understand too much of what is happening in order to be okay with that.  Yet, it is the future.  Not a very bright one, but it is a future.  I just keep hoping MS will wake up and back off of this monster it created so people in the know can get back to enjoying thier computing experience, rather than fighting with it.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

While I agree on everything Skuzzy said about Vista, I have to comment that a new Vista installation will need about a week of self optimization before it starts running properly. Then it's more responsive than XP on commonly used programs.

But if you're like me that you constantly install/remove stuff, it will never get to optimized state i.e. will be stuttering and lagging on you.

Vista was designed after a survey of 200 000 computer illiterate American families. Their typical enviroment consists of IE, AIM, AOL etc. For a poweruser it's like trying to race in a winabego motor home.

Stay with XP Pro, it's not going anywhere unless M$ pays component makers to stop distributing drivers for their hardware.

XP support ending in 2014 does not mean it will not work after that. You can continue to use it for a lifetime if you just have drivers for your hardware.

[0thehero]

Aero should not be allowed to run on computers with only 1GB of RAM.

Well, certainly Vista shouldn't--it's just wrong, at least as wrong as XP machines only running 256MB (or even 512MB).  I remember more than a few Dell specials-of-the-month shipping that way.  Penny-wise...

Everything in a computer comes at a price. All the pretty wizbangs people like all cost something in terms of performance and/or resources.

I wouldn't say that--that was proven not to be the case in Aero right after release, and with the very early Vista display drivers, too.  And Lost Coast is considerably more graphically demanding than AHII.  I've tried seeing a performance difference on my main Vista gaming system between the old-school Classic interface and Aero, but it's just pegged at 60FPS (LCD sync) with an 8800GTX.  I have a lower-end rig (1.6GHz C2D, 1GB RAM, Nvidia 7300) and was interested in trying to find a bottleneck there, using the new PerfMon data collector sets in Vista.

Not sure if you've tried it, Skuzzy, but the Performance Monitor data collection functions in Vista are pretty amazing in their breadth and depth and their recording options--I'll try to post up some of the graphs this weekend for AH.

As far as DRM goes, even Bill Gates said Vista was far too entrenched in DRM. Thank DRM for the lack of DirectSound. MS killed that API in favor of the standrd Windows Sound API (which sucks) because they could not figure out how to make DirectSound conform to DRM. There are things coming down the road which will make every Vista user cringe.

Eh, we all know why DirectSound went away--same reason the WDDM changed so completely; Vista cut off kernel mode access to the audio stack (like the rest of the hardware drivers) to address complaints about bad drivers of any kind crashing the system.  I don't think that was a bad move in the least if it addressed longstanding stability issues with IHVs.  The resulting DRM options were merely a side effect of that, courtesy licensing requirements from RIAA/MPAA/HDCP protocol.

UAC is also another fiendish plot to curtail productivity, but I digress.

I do wish there was more granularity in the UAC functionality so that dumb things like renaming desktop icons didn't initiate a UAC prompt, but other than that type of heavy-handed intrusiveness, I don't find the UAC concept any fundamentally different than su credentialing in OS X or Ubuntu.  It's certainly better than giving admin rights by default a la XP.

SuperFetch was making my life miserable.

I don't get it; the prefetch in XP was the precursor to SuperFetch.  Do you kill prefetching in XP too?  Or does AH require a specific page file setting that I missed in the setup?  I imagine you're recommending killing the indexing functionality also?

I get slammed a lot for my position about Vista.

I would be the last person to slam you; you're in a support role (been there before and still on occasion), and when you can't see what's on the other end of the phone--especially on a new Tier One system that's generally bogged down with third-party adware/bloatware right out of the box--it's damn frustrating.  Thank God for PC Decrapifier!  Great, free software for purging new PCs.

[Skuzzy]

Actually, I do kill indexing services and anything to do with prefetch in XP as well.  I really do not care how long it takes to load an application.  I care about what the application runs like after it is loaded.  Once loaded, as long as you do not swap, the application executable stays resident in the OS cache.  You cannot stop that.

Idle apps are at the mercy of the OS simply continuing to load memory with what it thinks you might need someday down the road in the future.  Then when your idle app needs a big chink of RAM, you have to wait for the OS to deallocate space it took away from you on an arbitrary whim.  Bah!

Now to create a fairly normal installation of Vista at work, I had to relegate the computer to 1GB of RAM as that is what most OEM's are shipping with Vista.  In its default configuration the performance was horrible.  I managed to get Vista's footprint down to 360MB of RAM, or so.  In the process I it became inherently more stable as there was simply less of it running.

On those WEB sites Aero tests, you realize the funny thing about those tests that claim Aero does not impede performance?  They used graphically intensive applications to demostrate no performance loss.  Whoopee.  Applications like Aces High use more CPU than video card and that is where Aero hurts.

When I tested XP on my current hardware, I disabled vertical sync to see how fast the game loop could run.  Did the same thing in Vista.  XP was running 25 to 35% faster.  Aero actually only made about a 10% difference.  But Aero did cause more stutters in the game than without it.  Understandable as Aero is still running its loop, even though it is not drawing anything.  It still has to maintain its resources.

And because it is running through DirectX, another instance of the DirectX layer is present.  In DX10, this means some video card resources will be allocated and dedicated to Aero, regardless of Aero's active state.

If Aero did not reserve resources, it would take forever for it to return to its active state once it went to sleep, as it were.

MS killed DS so sound drivers could not violate DRM as they have been doing for years.  Do not think for one minute MS killed it because audio drivers were crashing the OS.  Microsoft is one of the biggest violators of using undocumented features of the OS in thier applications to get directly to hardware.  The marketing department did thier job.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

And in the end, what is the most common reason why Vista installs fail on users? Drivers. Bluescreens galore due to the new improved driver model.

[SunKing]

Originally posted by MrRiplEy[H]


Same happened to 2-3 other game titles that were 'DX10 only'. They were hacked to work in XP in a couple days with no loss in image quality.
S.

Link me the Gears of War and Unreal 3  DX10 in XP links please?

I looked up this thread trying to decided if its time to jump to Vista now that the DX10 games are hitting the shelves.