The Windows Vista Experience, part 3

[cdybedahl]

If this machine is going to keep getting slower at the current pace, it'll be unusable by Friday. I'm already getting noticeable delays when moving windows, and (more annoyingly) a distinct lag between characters when typing.

Comments

[hanspersson.livejournal.com]

Friday is reinstall day. Every Friday.

[soren-nyrond.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember (back in the mist of time) that people said 3.1 had the same probelm, before they introduced 3.11. Soemthing to do with local and distant servers. Or not. As the case may be. YMMV.

Best of luck

Soren the Lurker

[dunv-i.livejournal.com]

*winces* mine does the same thing - I have to let it shut down fully around once a week or end up sitting there for five minutes waiting for Firefox or Word to load, rather than just letting it sit in standby.

[jthijsen.livejournal.com]

XP doesn't seem to have that problem, although it does tend to become less stable after about a month of continuous running. At that point a full restart does help.

My first reaction when I saw the Vista specs was: "I put a gigabyte of RAM in my computer to make sure all the programs could run smoothly, not just the bloody OS!" So far I haven't heard or read anything to make me change my mind about that.

[dunv-i.livejournal.com]

O.o I am running XP.

Yeah, that was the main thing I've been reading too - all of the current computers and a lot of the not-super-expensive computers just can't run Vista unless you turn it off all the features until it's Windows Original.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

This machine claims that 1.2GB of RAM (out of 2 total) is in use immediately after boot. I don't know how or what it measures, though, because sometimes when I start programs the memory used goes down.

[jthijsen.livejournal.com]

This may be because, unlike the guys working on windows, some programmers are intelligent enough to make their software free memory that's not being used. Are the programs in question from microsoft?

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

One of them is Word. It goes like: Meter shows 60% memory used. I doubleclick a Word document. When it's appeared, the meter shows 58% used.

This does not make sense to me.

[jthijsen.livejournal.com]

I'm totally guessing here, but this might be what's going on:

I've read somewhere that windows loads any commands that might come next into the memory, so that the computer reacts faster to any command that it does get (provided that it's one of those that were loaded in). A word document might have fewer "anticipated commands" than the OS without a document loaded.

Like I said, I'm totally guessing here, but it's the only thing I can think of right now that makes any kind of sense.

You would have thought that after years and years of using first Dos and then windows, I'd have learned better than to expect mickeysoft products to make any kind of sense. I guess it's a bit like picking at a scab. You know it's bad for you, but you just can't help yourself.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

DOS did make sense, at least mostly. But then, that was one of the (many) products that MS bought from someone else.

[jthijsen.livejournal.com]

The way I read it, what they bought was called QDOS: Quick and Dirty Operating System. They then let IBM use it after having changed almost nothing about it at all except for the name. Which ultimately led to the now famous quote: "640K ought to be enough for anyone." All they did afterwards was add bells and whistles.

So I guess you could say that DOS made sense in that originally it was not built with annoying features and that it had the advantage of being made by a programmer who wanted something he himself would find convenient to use. But it was also built with the expectation that it would be discarded after that programmer had had time to sit down and build a proper OS, and that showed.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

That's how I remember it too. And the 640k limit had more to do with IBMs original hardware design than with DOS, to be honest.

DOS made sense to me (and Windows doesn't) in that it acted mostly predictable. Repeating exactly the same actions over and over again until it works wasn't a viable strategy until Windows 3.0 came. Sure, DOS was ugly and crippled and stupid, but it was at least possible to understand. Windows is ugly, crippled, stupid and impossible to understand.

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

My boss sent me this today on the subject of Windows Vista:

• AERO is the name for the new User Experience of Windows Vista, representing both the values embodied in the design of the aesthetics, as well as the vision behind the user interface.


• Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and Open. AERO aims to establish a design that is both professional and beautiful. The aesthetic of AERO creates a high quality and elegant experience that users can be productive in and even fall in love with.

So what you are experiencing is professional and beautiful and you are falling in love with it, even though it might not seem so at the moment.

Or maybe it's rather like eating cheap and nasty chocolate.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Actually, to me the Aero look feels like somebody tried to copy MacOS but managed to miss the point to an almost cosmic degree.

Plus, it's about as energetic as a sloth on heroin.

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

I am sooo buying my next computer before XP is gone entirely. I haven't heard anything good about Vista from anyone but a Microsoft mouthpiece.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Have you tried a Mac? They really are a lot less annoying than Windows. Even things that I expected to work considerably better on the Windows machine here (like World of Warcraft) really are more painless on my iMac at home.

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

I tried them long ago, and liked them very much at the time. For the moment I'm stuck with Windows, though, as my network & repair guy only does Windows. But perhaps at some point I'll be able to have a Mac.

Re World of Warcraft; is there a version directly for Mac? Or does Mac have some sort of Windows emulator? Because I confess I would miss my Windows games.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

There is indeed a native MacOS client. It's even distributed on the same CDs as the Windows one, so if you have a WoW box you already have it.

WIth the current crop of Intel-based Macs, you can even boot Windows on them to run your games. There are emulators that can run Windows under MacOS as well, but I don't think any of them are up to 3D-accelerated things. But it was awfully convenient to be able to run two Windows instances at the same time while I was doing web development, since then I could have MSIE6 and MSIE7 running simultaneously. Speeded up testing quite a bit.

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

Ah, that is worth knowing. Thanks!