What is Digg?185 Comments
- Yarnage, on 10/12/2007, -60/+351You sir, are an idiot.
First off, Vista is not a memory hog. If you have the Aero effects on it's only natural to expect it to use more ram than Windows XP. If you turn the Aero effects off, the ram usage is very similar to Windows XP.
Secondly, if you look at the bench marks or actually use Vista RTM, you will find that not only is it faster than Windows XP in many situations, but it much more reliable.
I had Windows XP on my work computer for a long time. When my hard drive died our IT department put Vista on my machine and not only does it boot faster than XP did (both had same software, no junk slowing them down) but it's very snappy. Vista is definately worth a look not just because of Aero but all of the great features it includes including instant search (works much better than spotlight, IMO and I'm a Mac user too), new Applications including a Calendar that not only look good but function well plus the major application updates like Windows Mail, Explorer has a more intuitive crumb navigation and also allows you to change quick shortcuts on the left as well as higher quality icons and folders as well as other file types give a much better preview of the file contents than previous versions of Windows and OS X, Windows Media Center in Vista now includes support for CableCards which means you can get hi-def programming through Media Center; something most software lacks that have TiVo like capabilities, drivers are now in user space, hibernate and sleep work correctly across all computers (I wish OS X had the same hibernate feature), IIS7 (works so much better than IIS 5 or 6), and you can't forget that huge parts that exist in Windows 2003 and XP have been re-written to avoid becoming bloated and slow including an improved TCP/IP network stack that can give you more detailed information about a computer (very useful in a corporate environment).
I could go on for quick a while about the benefits of Vista. Now, I know this is Digg which means I will probably be dug down for not only talking about how great a MS product is but I also put down OS X in the same paragraph but remember, I am a Mac user as well as a PC user. Comparing Windows XP to OS X, I'd say OS X is great competition. Comparing Vista to OS X... well, OS X really doesn't have much to compete against in Vista as Vista as just about everything OS X has and more and does it better. I'm sure Leopard will help in this regard though but saying Vista "is really not work the hassle" is very ignorant. - CraigCarlyle, on 10/12/2007, -8/+121Wow, I was the one who captured and uploaded the video. Cool to see it on the front page :)
- CorpT, on 10/12/2007, -10/+69I love how any who likes Vista is a paid for shill, but anyone who likes Mac or Linux is a free-thinking smart person. Very classy.
- TomMcBaum, on 10/12/2007, -3/+44Parent poster basing his opinion on RC2 is a worse offence than Yarnage's mostly accurate gushing, IMO. RC2 sucked. The RTM is much faster on my 1GB machine, and works well on 768MB, where I'm sure ReadyBoost will help. I wasn't aware that it worked with SD cards. Thanks to the OP.
- Pigeon, on 10/12/2007, -6/+41My god, what the ***** is wrong with you people constantly moaning "Its using all my RAM!"? That is what it is there for! To be used!
- Stalks, on 10/12/2007, -6/+38castrox said -> "... Firefox, running Total Commander, Outlook 2007, Excel 2007, Command Line: 450 MB used RAM and 1.5 GIGABYTES of swap! ... "
Well, I was surprised at that, so I decided to run the same test, using Vista RTM. Firefox has several tabs open, and I'm running the demo version of Total Commander, and my total ram usage is 308mb with 112mb used swap. My PC has 2gb of ram if that makes any difference. Doesn't seem that much of a memory whore. - chucker, on 10/12/2007, -2/+32That's spelling, not grammar.
- cardoso, on 10/12/2007, -2/+30Because as we all know notebook RAM is far cheaper than those expensive SD cards.
- joeshlub, on 10/12/2007, -4/+30His name is 'trollenlord', what do you expect, and why would you even bother replying. Either laugh at his antics, or block him.
I for one choose to laugh. - mfearby, on 10/12/2007, -13/+37@yarnage: I agree with most of what you say, particularly the sentiment. I was hostile at the thought of Vista but having toyed with the RTM on my work laptop over the Christmas break, it really isn't that bad. Vista does seem to be very snappy, which I really didn't expect. Now, if only I could turn off the stack buttons, get rid of the left-column and re-instate the full folder treeview in explorer windows, and maybe even turn off the full-row-highlighting of file names, I could maybe tolerate Vista sooner rather than later (when hopefully some tweakui thingy is released to get rid of the few annoyances, and I have to admit now that they are very few indeed; user account control can be disabled, too, if I am not mistaken). Oh, and it would be nice to have "classic menus" always at the top instead of the toolbar we now have full of things I probably will never use.
- keyrat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+20Yea my Nintendo DS boots in about half a second, but who the ***** cares?
I hate to be so hostile but I'm sure there's a million OSs out there that boot fast. There's no need to name them all (and I'm posting from PCLinuxOS so don't give me any anti-flavor of the day bs.) - trollenlord, on 10/12/2007, -4/+24I don't know about this.. But my 2.8G P4 with 2G of DDR-400 memory and Raptor as HDD boots up Windows XP after bios phases in rougly 3,5 seconds. The logon screen is visible at that time and the HDD has stopped working already. When you logon and wait until everything is ready again it has taken in total roughly 8 seconds and it's all peaceful again.
The trick is to buy good quality hardware (the sum of them is more than them alone when it comes to real performance), remove some of the unnecessary services and load drivers in correct order. Seriously, Windows doesn't understand all by itself how to load drivers in the best order. It might for instance load the drivers that enable full speed of hard disk controller the last. It also doesn't hurt to hand build the pre-made cache image (of drivers and such) the XP uses when it boots up. - Stonekeeper, on 10/12/2007, -10/+27My Ubuntu takes 3 secs to get from login to desktop. Am I the only one?
- technophobe, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17
I use ReadyBoost on a networked Vista PC (on a domain) and there is no difference as the boot time is slowed by the network.
It is a bit disappointing that there is no general speed improvement from ReadyBoost when using the Vista after bootup - I've not noticed any improvement anyway. - adriyel, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18RC2 definitely sucked. RC2 crushed my soul.
RTM is definitely an improvement. Whether Vista is worthwhile for you depends on how you use your computer. While Vista certainly does require beefier hardware than XP, it can be trimmed down, and when on the proper hardware is capable of running similarly/faster than XP. - Livert, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17Is that the party boy music from jackass?
- coredump0x01, on 10/12/2007, -8/+23My Arch Linux install gets from login to fully loaded KDE in about that time. If I'm loading Beryl, It takes about 4 seconds, cold start. And this is on my aging AMD Athlon XP 2400+ with 512mb pc2700 + nVidia 5200 from 2004. But it doesn't matter, We'll both get dugg down for even talking about evil Linux with the MS bloggers out in full force.
- neko, on 10/12/2007, -5/+19My Debian system takes about a minute to boot. And I really don't care, because I don't need to boot it often. It's not about how quick you can get it up, it's how long it stays up that counts ;)
Edit: oh, although my laptop comes out of hibernation pretty quickly. - MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11But if you had used the December CTP, The February CTP, Beta 2, etc. RC2 seemed like a godsend.....
- ClayDragon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Ever since I've heard about this technique I was a bit skeptical. Flash memory has a finite number of write-erase cycles, doesn't this just ruin your memory card/stick more quickly?
- sirdaz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Coat of paint, and new networking, and new simpler control panels, and increased stability, and new fancy volume controls, and, and, and, etc.
Try either using it instead of booting then shutting it back down again. Or even better yet, read what it can do? Then, and only then, you can start making your comments about what is new with Vista. - Goatman, on 10/12/2007, -5/+15OSX is just as RAM hungry.
- subxero37, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12Gah, not *all* of it -- that's why we keep having to buy more, is because some jackassed programs (usually ones we need -- Windows, our favorite games, some killer apps like Photoshop) keep using it all. I've stuck to using older versions of Windows for a long time (I posted a few days ago that I have only recently switched to Windows XP.) I've pretty much stuck to old versions of almost every program (Winamp 2.95, Nero 6, Acrobat Reader 5.0...)
The average computer user who thinks, "Oooh, new version, I'll upgrade" doesn't understand that he/she may need to fork over more money for stuff called RAM. They may be afraid to attempt an upgrade themselves (another Digg user put it, "people think computers are magic boxes, and if they open them, the magic will leak out.") They'll get it done somewhere for a hell of a lot more it would cost to DIY, and in the end, a simple upgrade for a program can cost a user a lot of money. It's an overall bad experience just from memory hogging programs.
Yes. It is there to be used. But it is there to be used *efficiently.* - Chakz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11When a load is put on my video card my laptop heats up and the fans get faster/louder. Will this happen when just doing basic tasks on Vista using the Aero Interface?
- 7952, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11I think the faster possible boot times on vista are really exciting. Whenever I want to play a game I hibernate Ubuntu and dehibernate XP. The faster I can do this the better.
- alexace, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9@sammy
I believe that there was a hint of sarcasm there. - Detritus, on 10/12/2007, -7/+16Well it looks like I'll finally have a use for these SD Cards again, since my new phone uses miniSD I haven't had any use for them at all. I think this is a pretty nifty feature and I appreciate what the video is really demonstrating.
I am a little alarmed by the over-zealous moderation going on here, too. shad0walker and koloss deserved to be dugg down, but castrox seems to have been dugg down just for sharing his observations and learned opinion. I'm annoyed by Anti-Microsoft zealots too, but that doesn't mean that everything Anti-Microsoft isn't valid. Castrox comment was not zealotry; people digging him down was. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8It is!
- eddieo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8What is a "Demonstation" anyway? Is that where Satan goes to get gas?
I'm impressed with the "ELASPED" time of 43 seconds without ReadyBoost. - dane0, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10This definately looks good, not that I'd care since I switched to Mac a few months ago. I simply couldn't put up with the idiocy of XP. As big a step forward as XP was at the time, it's simply antiquated by now...
Anyway, one of the big letdowns about XP was how you had to reinstall the system every few months just to make the OS start in just a reasonable time. Sure the first few months start-up times would be fine, but then after a while it'd just take longer and longer, so I really hope that isn't the case with Vista. All that being said, on my Macbook, with specs that are reasonably similar to those in the video, start-up time of Mac OS X from the time I press the power switch to the time it's completely ready is about 24-26 seconds without any need for specially dedicated memory cards etc. so I don't know how revolutionary this is at all? Vista seems to be yet another big step forward for Windows, but the real test is to see how it performs in everyday use and how it holds up to being used for years on one installation as that's really how the majority of people use computers... - ouorama, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9They have what's called wear-leveling where they distribute the wearing of the flash memory. Your flash cards are good for many years. Besides, they're very cheap.
- nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8And by "dehibernate" you mean "wake up".
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Some of you are so full of FUD. I got an AMD Athlon 2600 with 1gb ram and a 150gb sata drive, and an ATI 9600 pro video card. My Vista RTM partition right now is running FF with 4 tabs open, Quicken2006, Outlook, AVG Free, VMware workstation with Ubuntu and I am looking at a swap file of 809mb and 53% of my physical memory still free. Vista RTM boots faster and is snappier than my XP partition or my Ubunutu install in VMware or on it's own partition and i'm running default Aero theme. Vista boots in about 30 seconds for me and that's without readyboost.
You may not like Vista. Thats fine, but stop the Memory hog FUD. - sirdaz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Play games...
But no seriously, I didn't mention OSX once. Why? Because I wasn't comparing it to anything. If I wanted to join the everlasting, no-point Apple / Microsoft arguments, then I would use OSX to actually know what it can or can not do. Please do not shove apple in my face when not needed.
Why do I mention so little, and odd new things like the volume control? That's because things like improved kernel drivers, api calls being sent to user-mode instead of kernel-mode to increase stability, reduced reboots, etc, might have been a little in depth for somebody that only states it is a "copy of Windows XP with a shiny new coat of paint".
But on a lighter note, Happy New Year!!
(Please don't try and get an apple argument in there as well, I would just hate you even more)
-sirdaz - cr3ative, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Ah, there's something quite important we aren't told in this video.
Were they both from cold boot? If not, it's highly inaccurate - if you log out and in again, it is much much faster than an initial log in, even on XP.
This is only valid if both logins were performed from a cold boot. - wnl7prince, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7No, you probably won't be able to (or want to) run Vista on either of those systems. You would at least need a RAM upgrade in your desktop to run Vista.
- subxero37, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9I don't think you realize how much 512 MB actually *is.* My friend's brand new Dell laptop (one hell of a laptop, might I add) has only 512 MB of RAM. Most new computers still have only 512 MB of RAM. It's still a large amount. It's ridiculous to call it a "small amount" in any way. Hell, I was using 128 MB for yeeears until I finally got 256. I'm at 768 MB now, and I still do a lot of work to optimize my services, my drivers, et cetera, to conserve it. I know how Windows works. Trust me, it's much faster for an app to just grab *free* memory than it is for it to request free memory, have Windows look through all of its internal handles, then figure out which ones aren't "important", then throw them away or save them to the paging file, then give that block of memory to the app. Really.
512 MB is still the standard. Most power users do, indeed, have more, but power users aren't the standard.
(And a good stick of 512 MB isn't "$20" -- it's quite a bit more, especially if it's new [not used] and it's DDR400 or DDR2. You get what you pay for.) - LeeJunFan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Man, the quality of that video is so poor it could be AmigaOS for all I know.
- TimRogers, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6You're commenting on a Digg story, not writing a poem.
- nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8HDDs are so slow compared to your CPU and memory that upgrading to a 10k RPM Raptor makes quite a noticeable difference. I have 2 of them and they just scream (Windows, Linux, whatever you do with them or run on them).
I've only seen XP boot that fast on a fresh install, like the first one or two boots. Must be nice to have it like that all the time. - pabster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6First of all, ReadyBoost doesn't write everything to the card. It isn't a "swap file" as people are mistakenly saying.
It only writes selected data there. And as for "wearing out the card", get with the times. All modern flash media has technology to spread out writes to prolong the life of the device, and these thumb drives and SD media cards are so damn cheap now...This is really a non-issue.
I really think ReadyDrive will be the better option, and we'll see it in laptops next year. - blanski, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6To answer your question. No. My ATI Mobile x1600 does not do it while just running Vista.
- MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6"But Mac OS X uses it efficiently. It remembers what apps you use most often, and keeps those in ram, while those that haven't been used for a while get sent to the HDD, all automagically."
Vista's SuperFetch accomplishes the same thing. It intelligently caches documents and applications in free memory. Keep in mind that XP's memory management was mostly written well over 5 years ago, and is for the most part the same as Windows 2000's. That's why it seems a little primitive today. - busta, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I rather cringe at the thought of "simpler" control panels. Every time Microsoft tries to implement something simple they piss off loads of people who don't want simple and want to have control over their system.
Think about "Simple file sharing" in Windows XP (i.e. default). In order to do anything semi-useful with networking you have to turn this "feature" off. - Yarnage, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@Everyone saying I got paid or am a MS employee for that...
I wish!
@Cytranic
What are you talking about? I've been using the RTM for weeks and have had several betas and RCs on my desktop. I've been using it for months. I never have any issues with any of Microsoft's management applications, nor has my IT department and they're working with AD, Exchange and IIS all the time (they've completely transisitoned to Vista).
I am logged into different virtuals all throughout the day through RDP and never have a hiccup. In fact, it works better than the previous verison in that you can set it to remember your passwords for logging in.
I'd say you have some hardware issues or you're just an idiot. - MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Many memory cards have lifetime or 5 year warranties.
- C2H5OH, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@pabster
People do not discuss it because it is not something new. ASR has been in BSD for a long time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBSD_security_features#Memory_protection), and speed-up boot time using cache has been in mainstream source tree of Linux kernel since like v2.6.19 (https://blueprints.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/fcache), with a patch available even earlier.
As for the "boot" time, Vista is simply fixing the problem of its predecessor. (I have never used a non-windows OS which needs 40+ seconds from login window to a usable desktop, even with dozens of autostart applications.) This is pretty much the same thing as releasing a patch for a vulnerability. Fixing one's own problem is something normal and something that should be done, but not something worth much praise. Adding innovative features is something worth discussion. - Pigeon, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8Coredump:
It uses half of _your_ ram because you don't have very much. 512mb costs about $20. Go get more. As of now I have 2x VS2005, 2xFirefox (about 17 tabs), my opengl app running, word, acrobat, msn + 3 convos, steam, aero, sidebar + 6 widgets open and its using about 600mb of my 1GB. Which is fine.
Plus, are you an operating system expert? Do you know how they work? Do you know how _Windows_ is written to work internally? Thought not. Often if Windows has taken a large chunk of memory it will keep it to use at a later point, however if an application needs more it will free it (if its not being used).
To steal a quote from a Adobe programmer:
A computer system is most efficient when it has nearly no free RAM - there really is no point in having RAM sit empty. - tpetru, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7will MS Vista run on my 1.3Ghz/256Ram fast? Or on my notebook celron:800Mhz/64mb ram?
No?
So I need buy new hardware if I want office machine with latest security updates? -
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