[mtripoli]

I'm catching up on this link... First question: All those that are bashing Vista, have you even used it? I mean for more than the ten minutes you stood in front of a machine in CompUSA?

I installed Vista about three weeks ago. I also installed PhotoShop CS, Macromedia DreamWeaver and Fireworks. MS Office 2003, Adobe Audition, Lightwave 3D 9.0.

I have a P4 3.2Ghz, an nVidia FX1100, 2 GIG RAM. An ASRock motherboard (so you can see already, this is one "top of the line" machine)...

That being said... so far I have had ZERO problems with Vista. I have a small IT biz, and installed Vista as it comes out of the box, much the same as one of my clients might. Installation was handsfree... once installed (which was faster than XP Pro) the system was totally up and running. I have a Linksys wireless, everything was configured properly.

I've installed the aforementioned apps, and have been running each on a daily basis. I have had NO PROBLEMS, even though some are not "supported".

I have tried DreamScapes Stardock (the Vista video "wallpaper"). The animated wallpaper is very cute, but not of much interest to me. However, it did it's thing in the background as I used apps...

I've been using the gadgets, though I thought I would get rid of these immediatley...

I find the interface to be well thought out. It takes some getting used to the way things are grouped in Control Panel - however once you know where things are, it's no different than any previous versions.

The Aero interface (I'm running Ultimate) though not earth-shattering is very responsive. So....

As far the security stuff and how much of a pain in the ass it is, let's get some perspective: NONE OF THIS WOULD BE NEEDED IF PEOPLE WEREN'T SUCH JERKOFFS! You are killing the messenger. Microsoft has been under attack since the very beginining. So, they try to implement something that protects the "average" user from having their machines brought to a crawl. Bitch all you want about it. If you don't like having to deal with this, tell your government they need stronger laws regarding perpurtrators of the viruses, pop-ups, etc. Until then, wait until the ONE TIME you get a virus on your machine...

I have a machine with swappable drives. I fully expected to have to "play" with Vista and do my work on Xp Pro. Since installing everything, I haven't used XP.

Happy user of Vista....

[NicoR44]

Cool Mike, this makes me even more confident to use Vista in the near future

[Mihai]

Mike, can you comment if the applications you use often start up faster than in XP Pro? The superfetch thing in Vista is supposed to utilize your full ram as a "flash drive" so it can start applications much faster. Have you seen an improvement in that area?

[mtripoli]

Yes, apps start much faster...Working in Word today, I was impressed with how quickly it loaded.

Last night, I spent about three hours in Lightwave. I tend to have multiple windows open when using it. I also had PS-CS running. Switching between is immediate. The only lag in response I have seen yet is when there is something doing a scheduled update.

The only app that I use that I am most interested in running is SolidWorks 2007 (not supported yet). I haven't tried, but I may install it on here just for laughs...

[ivox3]

Personally, ...it's nice if apps open faster, ..but what I really need is for them to perform at least the same speed, ...but not slower.


...from the Tom's Hardware link posted early in this thread.

Conclusion: K.O. For Windows Vista?

Windows Vista clearly is not a great new performer when it comes to executing single applications at maximum speed. Although we only looked at the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Enterprise, we do not expect the 64-bit edition to be faster (at least not with 32-bit applications).

Overall, applications performed as expected, or executed slightly slower than under Windows XP. The synthetic benchmarks such as Everest, PCMark05 or Sandra 2007 show that differences are non-existent on a component level. We also found some programs that refused to work, and others that seem to cause problems at first but eventually ran properly. In any case, we recommend watching for Vista-related software upgrades from your software vendors.

There are some programs that showed deeply disappointing performance. Unreal Tournament 2004 and the professional graphics benchmarking suite SPECviewperf 9.03 suffered heavily from the lack of support for the OpenGL graphics library under Windows Vista. This is something we expected, and we clearly advise against replacing Windows XP with Windows Vista if you need to run professional graphics applications. Both ATI and Nvidia will offer OpenGL support in upcoming driver releases, but it remains to be seen if and how other graphics vendors or Microsoft may offer it.

We are disappointed that CPU-intensive applications such as video transcoding with XviD (DVD to XviD MPEG4) or the MainConcept H.264 Encoder performed 18% to nearly 24% slower in our standard benchmark scenarios. Both benchmarks finished much quicker under Windows XP. There aren't newer versions available, and we don't see immediate solutions to this issue.

There is good news as well: we did not find evidence that Windows Vista's new and fancy AeroGlass interface consumes more energy than Windows XP's 2D desktop. Although our measurements indicate a 1 W increase in power draw at the plug, this is too little of a difference to draw any conclusions. Obviously, the requirements for displaying all elements in 3D, rotating and moving them aren't enough to heat up graphics processors. This might also be a result of Windows Vista's more advanced implementation of ACPI 2.0 (and parts of 3.0), which allows the control of power of system components separately.

Our hopes that Vista might be able to speed up applications are gone. First tests with 64-bit editions result in numbers similar to our 32-bit results, and we believe it's safe to say that users looking for more raw performance will be disappointed with Vista. Vista is the better Windows, because it behaves better, because it looks better and because it feels better. But it cannot perform better than Windows XP. Is this a K.O. for Windows Vista in the enthusiast space?

If you really need your PC to finish huge encoding, transcoding or rendering workloads within a defined time frame, yes, it is. Don't do it; stay with XP. But as long as you don't need to finish workloads in record time, we believe it makes sense to consider these three bullet points:

* Vista runs considerably more services and thus has to spend somewhat more resources on itself. Indexing, connectivity and usability don't come for free.
* There is a lot of CPU performance available today! We've got really fast dual core processors, and even faster quad cores will hit the market by the middle of the year. Even though you will lose application performance by upgrading to Vista, today's hardware is much faster than yesterday's, and tomorrow's processors will clearly leap even further ahead.
* No new Windows release has been able to offer more application performance than its predecessor.

Although application performance has had this drawback, the new Windows Vista performance features SuperFetch and ReadyDrive help to make Vista feel faster and smoother than Windows XP. Our next article will tell you how they work.

[Rochr]

First question: All those that are bashing Vista, have you even used it?

Yes! And i´ll stick to what i´ve said before.
C4D, high poly scenes and Vista is a bad, bad match.

[mtripoli]

I didn't want to bloat this by quoting the Tom's Hardware report. However, there are glaring problems with it.

First, how many of you spend your time bench-marking your system? If you really have nothing else better to do than count clock cycles, well, let me send some of my work your way... I see these reports of over-clocking and water cooled systems and bench marks... Damn, are these systems used for work or just to bench mark? My take on all that crap - there is NO WAY you would spend a minute doing this stuff if your lively hood depended on your system running, and running right all the time. Miss a deadline because you were playing with getting your bench mark up... And while I'm ranting - unless you're rendering or something, what do MOST COMPUTERS DO MOST OF THE TIME? Fire up Task Manager and have a look...

As I've said before, I've installed and have been using Vista daily with the apps I most commonly use. So far, I do notice a speed improvement. No, I have not tried to load a quad-drillion poly scene. Then again, I never needed to do that in the past. Games? Sorry - forget it. I spend enough freakin' time in front of this thing that the last thing I want to do is use it for "entertainment"...

The opening paragraph about not expecting to see 32 bit apps running faster on a 64-bit machine... well...uhhh...duh! OK, hands, who remembers when computers went from 16 to 32 bits? How many remember hearing the SAME freaking statements? And all the hype about "for Windows XP"... people saying "I'll never give up Win2k over XP, XP sucks"... yeah, ok...

And I'm sure I'll take shit for this: this is the FIRST TIME since using Windows of ANY kind that I can honestly say that the interface feels "tight". I've always been the first one to switch everything to "classic" mode to get rid of the overhead of the XP bubble-gum interface. I find that to be clunky and awkward. I find Vista to be very smooth... again, running everything straight out of the box (all of the cutesy stuff still turned on).

All the transcoding stuff talked about in the Tom's H... well, if you are doing enough of this sort of thing that this is a huge issue, my opinion (not humble, btw) is that you should have a dedicated system set-up for running only that. If you're doing encoding, transcoding or rendering and you still want to run AIM in a chat-room...

Lastly, remember, I'm running a crappy ASRock MB with a 478 socket P4 3.2G. Video card is a Quadro FX 1100 - I suspect you can get better performance than this with a new card from CompUSA. 2Gig RAM. This is, comparatively speaking like running a P3 next to the systems out now... I just set up a friends office with 5 new systems (a mortgage biz). The systems were purchased at CompUSA for $600 EACH! They have dual-core CPU, gobs of hard drive, memory, yadda, yadda... more power than they know what to do with...

I'd recommend the following; do what I did. Spend $30 on a swappable hard drive bay and load up Vista. Run it with your apps... See how many times you want to swap back to XP...

Damned if history doesn't repeat itself... I heard all these same arguments going from Win 3.1...Win98...NT...Win2k...XP...

[mtripoli]

First question: All those that are bashing Vista, have you even used it?

Yes! And i´ll stick to what i´ve said before.
C4D, high poly scenes and Vista is a bad, bad match.

From MAXON'S website:
Problem
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Is CINEMA 4D compatible with the Windows Vista OS?
Solution


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CINEMA 4D does work within a Windows Vista operating environment, provided OpenGL drivers from your graphics card manufacturer are installed.
Users should be aware that changes in the graphics architecture and the relative immaturity of drivers may cause editor performance to suffer dramatically. To achieve any usable performance, the advanced Aero graphics system must be disabled. Also, some graphics redraw issues will likely occur. MAXON expects these issues to be resolved as the graphics drivers mature.

Also note that Vista transparently remaps much of the preference and registration information previously stored on a system basis to individual user profiles. The mapped location of the preferences is: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\MAXON

Registration information is stored per user, and Administrator rights are not necessary to store the registration information.

Within a 64-bit environment, the automatic remapping does not occur and registration and preferences cannot be stored. Users can work around this issue by installing CINEMA 4D outside the Program Files structure, in which case no folder remapping will be performed.

Any further issues experienced while using CINEMA 4D in conjunction with Windows Vista should be referred to MAXON's technical support staff.

My take: Yes, ANY application benefits from updated drivers; this is not Vista specific. If that were true, you would not see various flavors of drivers recommended to run certain apps. nVidia cards running SolidWorks or Pro/E come to mind. I wonder... when new and "mature" drivers are available, will C4D then perform better... Let's see what happens. I'll venture a guess: when Maxon catches up and re-codes to use Vista, they will announce with all sorts of press releases saying how great C4D is running under Vista...

The rest of it? Well, I'd say that Maxon is pointing the finger. They didn't jump on the Vista bandwagon, so they blame poor performance on Vista. Funny, Lightwave doesn't seem to have a problem, even with Aero and all it's nuances running...

[ivox3]

It's cool Mike, ....it's just counter-point.

btw: Tom's Hardware is about as close to gospel as a geek can get.

[glypticmax]

As a test, I just cranked out a 36 million poly displacement (15 x 25 mm single surface) with C4D R10 64 bit in XP Pro 64 bit.
Kindly let me know when Vista can do that.
Until then Vista is way beneath my radar.
Obviously Vista will mature. But in the mean time, I haven't seen anything that suggests it does what I need.

[michaelplogue]

To be honest, I did wait approximately two years before I moved from Win98 to XP Pro for most of my machines - though I did keep my system with 2K until it died. However, when XP64 came out, I jumped on that almost as soon as it was released commercially - despite the fact that hardly anyone had drivers available.

There is a possibility that I'll give Vista a whirl if I put together a new box in the future. I'm not really pleased with the pricing though, and I'm not sure which version I'd need. But I'll jump that hurdle when the time comes.

[mtripoli]

SolidWorks 2007 a dog... unusable... new patch to support Vista...

[Rochr]

ANY application benefits from updated drivers.

I fully agree. However my primary issue is with RAM consumption. You may not work with highpoly scenes, but i do.

It´s up to each own naturally, but there´s simply no chance i´ll ever waste memory on something as pointless as a pretty OS and some equally pointless gadgets and functions. Give me an OS that looks like Win3.1, and i couldn´t care less. If it works well, i´ll use it.
Unfortunatly not even the new "classic" mode does that.

Vista may work well in some distant future, but that remains to be seen.

As far as the rest goes, i´ve yet to find anything that would make me want to use Vista. If anything, my "Vista experience" has helped me to appreciate XP even more.

[pluMmet]

NONE OF THIS WOULD BE NEEDED IF PEOPLE WEREN'T SUCH JERKOFFS! You are killing the messenger. Microsoft has been under attack since the very beginining.

That's simply not true!

The whole reason MS OSs are so messed up with all this "Security" is that they have intentional back doors into their OSs. Doors designed for the NSA, DOD and now NATO and the U.N. with Vista.

The problem they have is giving access of your computer to those entities that they have chosen and not the "Hackers."

It would be very simple with a combination of hardware and software to keep unwanted people out of our computers. The problem is as I mentioned that that is not MSs intention. It's just to keep you out! To the point now with Vista that you are locked out of your own computers kernel. "For your safety" and their access of course.

[-Adrian]

That is correct. Unix is safe by default and can be opened as necessary, Windows is unsafe by default and can be patched as necessary. Whitelisting or Blacklisting, take your pick.