I'm still an XP user, what am I missing out on?

If you feel this thread should be closed - notify a moderator - but it is not for you to decide who may post and who may not.

Only Moderators (and Admins etc., the "higher ups") can close a thread, and on an "open topic" that conforms to the forum rules only the OP can ask for closing of the thread.

 

im relatively certain that the OP would not really appreciate his thread to be hijacked as it has. Since most of these posts had nothing to do with his question at all i'd like to point out that all of you (including me) have broken the rule of forum hijacking. You are both right I have no authority to "close" this post, but me asking that we not discuss this anymore (basically what i said) does not break the rules, it simply is asking that his go no more in the wrong direction. Again I was meanly trying to "end" this honorfully, quickly and respectively.

But to answer the OP. Not really you have missed this whole vista v xp v win7 conflict. My advice: Is to try them all. Find out which one you like, formulate your own opinion. Now im not saying buy them all. You already have experience with xp so i suppose u have done that much. Go to friends house who has vista and use his pc for a while. And win7 Rc is free at the current time so you can dl that and try that out so you have a full view of all the options.

-Cheers and have a Terrific Summer

 

Same here; although I would say that it wasn't so much that I disliked _Vista as that I was not particularly impressed with what I saw on other computers, certainly to the point where I didn't (and still don't) consider it worthwhile to purchase separately at retail. On the other hand, it came preinstalled on the new _HP I just bought to replace my late, unlamented 6 y.o. VAIO, and I've got nothing to complain about with it - I certainly am not about to dump it and try to get XP going on the new _HP.

 

It's from CD drive and ISO's.

 

i noticed slowdowns when i downloaded big executables from the web, f.e. ableton live setup from their page. it's around 130mb or so. after opening it, it took a while till it started the setup, but this indepenent on UAC actually. have had that behaviour on xp, too (after sp2). as it checks the file when it's marked to be a foreign file. UAC itself, never more than a sec to wait. normally mostly instant.

 

Dude, much respect for the posts and the rep power here.

Alot of people are doing this because they have problems with Vista, and because some power users had to develop work arounds and streamline the thing, and to their credit, have accomplished a decent operating system, some other power users have gone the other way and resisted, perhaps out of gp, embracing such a thing. You can't be fair and say that a & b are the main reasons, and vista having problems is not a key reason.

 

One of my main programs, are you arguing pro xp here?

 

An incredible amount of optimizing and polishing went into Windows 7, which so far is better than Vista be it RTM, SP1 and even SP2.

The huge amount of changes introduced in Vista was what lead to many hardware drivers not being available for Vista in the beginning. This is also because Microsoft wasn't able to finish Vista the way they wanted it to be, in the amount of time they wanted to.

Like I said, Microsoft screwed up managing the development of Vista. The internal employee communication and management structure has been changed after Vista, because it took way longer to develop it that they though it would. I'm not sure, but I think that this was due to the fact that for Vista, Microsoft has set new priorities which they weren't able to handle with the current way of management. Guess why Windows 7 will be finished even faster than they thought it would be!

Yeah, that's what I meant. They should have developed it even longer.

It'd be amazing if it was like this. Unfortunately, we're still far from that point. But technically, it's still a big step into the right direction for Windows. Even though it was clear from the beginning that it would lead to problems with all those XP applications taking administrative rights as given.

Please don't feel attacked by this: I would change this to say "people who think they know that what they're doing is all they have to look at tend to disable it." UAC doesn't try to babysit anyone, although sadly it feels like this for people who don't know enough about it. The thing is, stuff can happen that you're not in control of, and UAC will protect you then - if you know when you have to click "cancel" on a UAC prompt.

That's odd, I never had a single BSOD with XP and neither Vista (which I'm using since last December). And I have rarely seen both of them BSODing at all anywhere so far if there wasn't a definite specific problem with the hardware or some driver(s). Are you sure this isn't due to a particular setup you have?

There's ASLR as well as Service Hardening, for instance. Actually, the problem that Microsoft has is to set the right priorities and stay focused on them. They could have included even more security features (and they first wanted to, anyone remembers the "Palladium/NGSCB/TCPA/TCG" debate?), which would have lead to even more restrictions (security means restriction). They didn't do it, because UAC already is such an invasive experience for users and there have been fears by people that Microsoft could have used this for controlling the users and implementing hard DRM - which they would probably have done some time after that.

But Microsoft does have the knowledge to make things secure! For example, the Xbox 360 has one of the best security concepts in the world. I can remember that when it had been hacked for the first time a year or so after it had been released, the guy who demonstrated it at 23C3 used some kind of wrapping costume to hide his identity and did not say a single word throughout the whole demonstration: http://www.h-online.com/security/Xbox-360-hack-was-the-real-deal--/news/85998

The problem with anti-virus and anti-spyware is that they are mainly reactive security reasons, which means that they can only react bot not protect in advance. There's heuristic analysis, for example, but the main characteristic of anti-virus products is still their signature-database-based scanning. And malicious malware is more and more made to not be detected by anti-virus vendors and to sneak around specific heuristic products, so while signature-based scanning is a very, very good idea to further shrink the risk, it is not a proactive security solution and therefore by design will no longer be able to withstand the changing world of malicious software in the not too distant future. If anti-virus software vendors don't find more ways to proactively detect malicious software (and they're working hard on that), they're doomed.

In the past, many malicious software epidemics wouldn't have happened had everyone installed the latest Microsoft updates in time, because they had often released patches in advance before the epidemics even began. (I'm aware it's complicated for some people to install these updates immediately for various reasons). However, these security updates are also mainly reactive instead of proactive. Releasing critical security updates once a month is not often enough, but again: Microsoft set the priority to release them only once a month to help companies install the updates without problems. They should set the focus on security instead, as companies that have an IT department should be able to handle this themselves, whereas for companies that don't have an IT department this will simply not be a big problem and instead make them prone to attacks because they likely don't have enough knowledge about security.

Also, the time of such epidemics is over, because of the changing, professionalizing world of malicious software.

When Vista was released, it had already gotten so much bad press coverage due to the numerous delays and feature cuts that people hesitated using it. This caused hardware vendors to wait a bit until they made drivers for all their hardware, which caused more hesitating GOTO 10.

I hope you are satisfied with my way of communicating here. And thank you for reading this post!

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4910504#post4910504

Windows 7 RC is already very stable for a release candidate, as was the beta for a beta. The did not want to repeat any of the mistakes they did with Vista by releasing something that is not polished enough.

It'd be great if you used proper English, thank you!

Hmm... what software do you use to mount the ISOs as a virtual drive? Could the ISOs be fragmented on the HDD? I can remember having to wait for a UAC prompt about a minute once when I launched an application while my HDD (yes, HDD, that was when I didn't have an SSD) had a lot to do.


And again:

One of these long posts again. So thank you for reading.

 

It should be noted that certain installers will decompress their contents to a temporary folder in the user directory, and THEN launch a setup.exe process that requires UAC. This explains why certain installers prompt immediately, while others grind the disk for a minute or so, and then prompt.

 

Makes sense - an abnormally long delay in that instance might then have more to do with the condition of your drive and/or file system than with anything specifcally UAC-related, no?

 

Well, I have to admit, I have a hard time making sense of why certain installers decompress to a temporary directory first.

I believe the slower process is as follows.
Run setup.exe, which is really just a self-decompressing executable that dumps its contents to [userland]/Appdata/Local/Temp or something, and then runs another setup.exe (which spawns the prompt), which attempts to copy the decompressed files to Program Files, register the appropriate DLLs, write reg entries, etc.

It should be trivial to repack the file into a new setup package that immediately prompts the user for administrative privileges, and write all files directly to their final destinations.

 

Pardon me for being off-topic, but I would really like to know you can mute one specific program. Thanks so much!

 

In Vista yes, natively.

 

can you back up with vista home premium ?

 

Not natively - you'd need an third party application.

 

Fair enough. Unfortunately, "should be" usually translates into "couldn't be bothered to do it" - with the frequency of translation proportional to the ease of the subject under discussion. Quite frankly, I would prefer to keep that option away from most coders, as it would merely present many with just one more way to write a sloppy, ill-behaved installer (yes, I'm a cynic - I know the vast majority write good code, but there are still too many bad apples out there).

 

_Vista Home Premium (at least in the 64-bit edition) contains a built-in backup function. On my system (still a standard OEM install w/ no tweaks) it's located at: Start > All Programs > Maintenance > Backup and Restore Center

 

I thought the complete PC backup was only available in Business/Enterprise/Ultimate??

 

The "Complete PC Backup" functionality is only included with the Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate versions of _Vista; however, all versions of _Vista contain a basic files backup functionality which, according to the help file, is used for the following:

The difference between the two backup versions appears to be that, with the "Complete PC Backup" you can make a complete image of your system, as described in the help files thusly:

The ability to make a complete image of your system would be convenient for a home installation of _Vista, but isn't really necessary given that (a) you'd have the original installation discs if you bought the retail version, and (b) you'd generally have the ability to burn a set of recovery discs allowing you to do a factory image recovery with an OEM version of _Vista (I can't say for sure that all OEMs that use image-only installations provide the ability to burn recovery disks, but I haven't run across an OEM image-only installation that doesn't contain that functionality).