Vista Resistance: Why XP Is Still So Strong

Sounds like you need to just stay away from computers.

What exactly do you need to do for computing? Type of Business?

 

Check my post here,
Welcome to "The Matrix"

 

I do large scale computations in finance. Been at it for just about 20 years. Very large scale computations compared to my previous work (computational fluid dynamics). The reason I have Vista 64 with 4GB RAM is in order to mess with little test cases of algorithms I develop.

 

Would Solaris(which has been 64 bits for years) be more suitable for this kind of job ?

 

It's what we do use. It's a cut above the rest of the choices. I'm not saying it's first rate - I don't know of a first rate OS choice, but Windows and MacOS pale in comparison.

We also use some 64 bit Linux machines but not for front line trading platforms. When stuff absolutely has to run, we are using Solaris. Note that the only time since 1994 (when my current fund started up) that we have missed a trade was during the great blackout of August 2003, where we ran off batteries until the bitter end, then all the way to cell phones and candles, until those batteries ran out, and we stopped trading. (We trade around the clock, not just New York hours). That is really an ironic situation because at that time we had just set up an experimental small scale second off site hot backup at my house, where I have a generator. We could have traded off that if I hadn't been on vacation in California. We do millions of trades every year, and we do NOT miss them for our technology reasons.

 

Know why XP is still so strong because MS did a good job. A little too good.

With XP they promised to resolve a crap load of problems from the 9x series and the incompatibilities and slight limitations from W2K.

SP2 for XP fixed a lot security problems. XP even in it's early days did deliver on it's promises. Sure vendors were slow to get drivers out, but eventually they got out. I got a printer from like 1996 that has support.

All Vista is now is a bastardized version of XP with hacked up code to get the prettiness of OSX in it. There's a few new things like the Readyboost and Superfetch. Readyboost is just a supped up version of the existing memory management that puts somefiles on to Flash memory. Superfetch again is an improvement on the existing prefetch but the cost in performance is high unless you got new gear where MS did a good trade off in the XP prefetch.

If you want the prettiness of Vista just skin your XP if you want 3DFlip there's an app you can buy that does the samething. Even loaded to look like Vista, XP will still run faster.

I did a test myself. A friend's laptop came with Vista Bus. I formatted and installed XP Pro skinned it to look like Vista with all the Vista crap and still starts faster than Vista, loads programs faster than Vista. Why do we have to use readyboost to get better performance when just going back to an older OS gives you that boost?

 

Totally agree!

and

"Readyboost" doesn't do a bit of good anyway! :laugh:

 

Sounds like you guys testing is flawed. If XP were to run some of the things what Vista runs (like Sidebar) it would be much slower and take up more CPU & RAM in doing so.

 

I want to try Vista but my computer cant handle it! I'm running P4 1.8Ghz, 256mb RAM, and a 40GB HDD...If only the minimum requirements were lower =( but i'm probably the only one on this forum that cant handle Vista =/...

 

I noticed many people are saying the Vista will do like XP in the next years but I completely disagree. Vista is to Windows ME like XP is to 98. Windows 98 was a great and stable operating system. Great features, great stability and good compability. But then, Windows ME was released, it was so unstable, it crashed often and the new features didn't even work and were useless. Well with Vista, it is the same story, XP was great, Vista promised new features that ended up being useless... AERO ??? I don't care about interface, I use the Classic Skin in XP.... MORE DRM ???? Now I have to like have certified video card, dvi connection and screen so I can watch my DVD... Slower file operations and slower gaming performance ???

Seriously take a look at it, Vista has no benifits over XP, all the features of Vista like the interface can be somehow available in XP. Its slower and less stable. Many people who had ME switched back to 98. Windows Me didn't last very long so why would Vista last any longer ? The only reason Microsoft is making money from Vista is because of those computer newbies who want to 'check their email' and 'surf the internet'....

 

...and the fact that it is forced down the throat of almost every singe person in the entire world the buys a new computer, every time they buy a computer.

I just read that the EU either has, or is in the process of outlawing the distribution of an OS with hardware, poor M$!

 

All major brands(HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer) along with others offer Windows XP based systems in their line up. They also sell systems with open source OS(Ubuntu, freeDos etc) as well. If thats not enough you can walk into an Apple store or go online and buy one with OS X. If that isnt enough of a choice for you MS is offering a downgrade program(with sertain OEM's) to XP for users with OEM Vista business/ultimate....I clearly dont buy into the argument of no choice or Vista being forced down consumers throats.

If that is true, I would expect it to affect one rather noticable competitor to MS who like to sell their own OS with their hardware only.

 

I don't think Vista is as bad as ME(which tried to squeeze the last drop out of the Windows 3 family) though its advantage over XP is very very limited(I see some minor improvement here and there), not the kind of jump from 95/98/ME to XP.

However, from Microsoft's perspective it is a must. XP is already long in the tooth so they need to have a new base for the next 10-15 years or so, just like NT. How many people have used the first version of NT ? It is until XP SP2we have finally seen a fully polished NT.

The only problem I see is as mentioned by other posters, XP is so successful that there is not that much motivation to try something new. This include linux or OS X. And the trend to move to a network centric environment also plays a role.

What I would like to see is a new approach to OS, especially for the coming 64 bit/ultrafast network connection era. Something like Next or Smalltalk where the idea of boot/shutdown is blurred, so is the concept of "load program from file then run". Everything should be kind of an object of the OS and persistently stored, be in on HD or somewhere in the internet cloud.

 

Or not. Way way not. That sort of idea has a long history, and usually comes to tears. There are a lot of numerical computations where you want to manipulate a lot of objects without ever allowing them to get committed to any persistent store.

The other thing that can go wrong is that the idea succeeds. IBM had this problem with (if memory serves) the System/32. They decided it would be really great if every object of the operating system would have a unique ID number. They made it so a single instruction could get you one of those unique ID numbers so the OS could be fast. After all, it was just a counter in the hardware that was read out to give you your ID and incremented so it wouldn't get reused. Now in order to make this work, there would have to be no way to reset the counter, otherwise that could create the problem of two objects having the same ID. So they made the machine with no way of resetting the counter, and used a 48 bit counter to make sure that would not be a problem - this is long enough ago that there was no way to have that many of anything on a computer.

So it was really confusing at IBM when they started getting customers complaining that their systems were not working at all, with an error code. IBM quickly realized that this was the code for the unique ID counter having used up all it's values. What was confusing was how this had happened.

It happened that programmers had realized how convenient it was to use that ID not just for the "intended" purposes like files, etc., but it made for some very efficient algorithms if you used that counter in loops. So instead of lasting the life of the machine, the counter got exhausted in months. IBM had to send engineers out to each machine to reset it. And then when it was reset the problem arose of what about the values that had been used for persistent things....

The moral of the story is that if you create a resource that is really convenient, then it will get used a lot, and not necessarily in the intended way. For example a large amount of e-mail messages are spam - a massive use of a resource in an unintended way.

There are lots of security issues that can arise from "everything persistent" and even more from "in the internet cloud".

 

Isn't modern language like java or python or c# basically doing the same thing ? In other words, a long running java server daemon would face the same issue ? There are many intermediate objects that don't need to be persistent and get garbage collected from time to time. So what I mean persistent is the state but not necessary once they are created, they live forever.

 

This just in!

Quoted from here.

Main article here.

 

Apple makes money on hardware. They have the highest profit margins in the computer industry. If they were not overcharging the hardware, then OS X would be much more popular.
Is OS X "better" ? Dunno, right now its supported on a very narrow set of hardware. Linux could do better if the hardware was so limited. The question is how would OS X fare if the platform was opened up.

 

Think of it from MS's point of view. XP as good as it is, was getting old - from our perspective, if it isn't better, don't put it out.

From their perspective they need a fresh product out there. Think of the disaster if all we had was XP, until 09 when the next Windows comes out, and then it's not as great as everyone thinks? That will severely cut into market share.

With Vista, you have Vista adopters, you have XP faithfuls, and a very SMALL percentage of people who will dump MS. And the next OS will probably be brilliant.

That's the choice they went with, and from a business point of view, I think they made the right choice. They're a very smart company, they knew the quality of the product, but it fits in line with their long term plan.

 

I disagree. I don't think they are such a smart company, they are just a monopoly, riding it out for all it's worth, while becoming a more bloated, arrogant, and self absorbed one. The passion for real meaningful and relevant innovation has long since gone. They are just a big, overgrown monstrosity now, and so many have been assimilated into it as it grows, and others have been crushed under it's weight. This is not a good situation for anyone, especially consumers.

 

I have read through anumber of these threads and have to laugh. There are so many who have newer systems who really dont realize the true fact of it all.

Your system today is as powerful as it is simply because of MS forcing Vista in existance. Whether we like it or not its the truth.

As soon as Vista became a reality, not only were hardware and software manufacturers forced to go to the chalkboard and re-invent the wheel, but also, PC manufacturers are now forced to sell what was considered a monster system yesterday at todays standard prices.

Do you really think we would be getting systems at these specs for these prices if not for the pressure exerted by MS??

Let me spell it out the simplest way possible... Bill says, "My OS will go into these systems and be sold so your going to have to keep up."

The consumer should be thanking MS for this. Technological advance in the past two years has been FORCED down the throats of all those hardware and software manufacturers that were sitting on their a.s.s. before.

So we see just like a deer hunt. MS has culled the herd of the weaker as one might say.

There we go...said.

Oh I almost forgot...to all you XP groupies that dont require it for network use or business, look in the mirror. XP has never, can never, and will never be able to stand up to Vista (as it is now) in any department.

The only thing needed for Vista to surpass was very simple and accompished, a way to step out of a crash without having to reboot the whole system.

 

The "internet cloud" is sort of an interesting venue to do garbage collection.

I'm not a big fan of garbage collection in the first place. It was never the best model as far as I can see, but it did seem to take over quite a few worlds. One of the basic facts of our life is making sure that nothing like garbage collection is involved in our large scale computations. We handle the VM resources at the level of the OS, even to the point of keeping the pager on the reservation. It's pretty much a Solaris based strategy because, for reasons I do not understand, other Unix flavors ended up with much less sensible paging strategies. The reason that something like Superfetch cannot compete with this approach is that as far as I can tell Superfetch can't really cope with large anonymous objects which are not persistent.

 

Actually, it's a proposal by the 'European Globalisation Institute' (think tank/policy institute, not a part of the EU Commission).
Pre-installation of any OS should be banned according to the report .
As mentioned earlier in this thread, it would also apply to Apple/OSX.

 

I can understand that is more likely than not suitable for your case but for most typical desktop where there is a lot of resources sitting idle, it may not be a concern.

Of course, the current hardware and infrastructure is still not there yet but if Moore's law can continue for another 10 years or so, "the cloud" may be just like today's 10Gbit LAN with each node having some 80 cores.

 

Not pointing fingers, but half of the comments in this thread are complete gibberish. And not not even a expert.

 

You know what's funny you're wrong. I have sidebar and 3DFlip running on XP and it's still faster than Vista.

After 2 days it got annoying and I removed them.

 

We'd all like to believe that they are bloated, arrogant, good for nothing company that is only as successful as it is because they have this "monopoly". MS is a marketing genius. They are VERY smart and to think they are dumb is dumb in itself.

Nobody in the past however many years you want to go back has been so successful at deploying an OS. People spend years arguing MS is not the best, its slow, crashes, etc etc. Yet, it is the most widely used OS in the world. You do not get there and stay there at that status for 20 years by being stupid.

I hate the fact that so many of us use MS, but I need to stay compatible with my work so I use windows. The world of computing has never been about the best product, its been about adoption. Nobody has driven this point home better than MS.

Look at ICQ back in 1999, the BEST chat program in the world, the most users by FAR and it had features that MSN has yet to incorporate 8 years later. Yet MSN leads worldwide usage of any IM client at 61% globally. I hate MSN, ICQ was fantastic, but MS did a fantastic job of making it easy for the masses of us to adopt MSN. It's the same with the OS. Microsoft's products are not genius, and that's not where their intelligence lies, it lies in getting us to use their products, and they are exceedingly efficient at it.

If you need further proof - look at how many of us dislike MS, yet still use their products! I'll be the first to admit that.

 

Um, what is Jobs then ?

 

I also have Sidebar on XP and it makes boot up time much slower. Also uses more RAM on XP than on Vista. Not saying my XP is slow, but Sidebar runs much more smother & efficient on Vista. 2 days is not decent grounds for comparing.

I never cared or even use 3dFlip on Vista or use it on XP.

 

Personally i hated ICQ, preferred old school AIM over it, but you can only blame AOL for the demise of ICQ lol.

And tebore, most likely the diff in speed for Vista/XP is due to the whole pre-fetch setting in Vista that takes like a week to calibrate. I got a notebook and a desktop basically configured the same, and they boot up simultaniously. Desktop runs XP SP2, Laptop runs Vista Ultimate x64

 

Where you write about adoption, I think the main issue is integration.
MS is big because they integrated Internet Explorer, MSN, Media Player etc. into their OS, thereby making XP/Vista an all-in-one package.
The masses don't care about their OS and most programs.
Most people want to switch on their PC and Google something, chat, write a letter, watch a video or play a game.
Most of the time everything will work and if they can't watch some movie file, they assume the file is crap instead of the media player.

The MS integration strategy has indeed been extremely succesfull, most competition has been pushed into the abyss of oblivion.
This type of integration (OS/MediaPlayer) has been deemed illegal in/by the EU and MS will have to pay a fine of about € 500.000.000.
More EU court cases against Microsoft regarding fair competition are to follow.
In the US they got off with a slap on the wrist eventually and their promise to behave.
MS is big because of integration and their lack of respect for plain ordinary laws.
And because Bill Gates knows the level of ignorance/lack of interest of about a billion people or more. So maybe he is a genius.

I don't hate Microsoft. Have been using XP for years and will continue to.
Just don't like most of their other programs. And their tactics.

 

I should have been more specific, i was referring to laptop hardware and software.

Thats not a very good argument, and it never seems to go away. The majority of people aren't exactly power users, they can do with Apple or Windows or Linux, but out of ignorance or out of fear they don't switch. Sometimes i think the majority of people don't even know they have a choice. Despite its numerous blunders, Microsoft has shown just how dominant they are in the market and in peoples minds. Its very sad.

Apple's sales have been increasing steadily in nearly all areas so i don't think they'll be out of the computer business just yet.

More pompous garbage that no one has time to read.

 

I'm with ya on this one. Just face it. Vista is here to stay. While it's not even a year old yet, people are already declaring it dead. It's like those linux folks who keep declaring this is the year that linux will come into its own. Not until the fat lady sings....

 

Vista = ME, Mac OS ripoff....


btw
LINUX ROX MY SOX OFF BABY!

 

And yet you found the time.

 

Comparing Vista(as it is today) to ME is just plain ol' hating.

I understood at Pre-Release Betas and the first couple of months of release because of the serious Driver problems/adjustments & a few Major software problems, But 90% of Software is upgraded and/or compatible now, and Vista seems to be the best I have ever seen at detecting/Finding Drivers for hardware.

 

I 100% agree with that statement. Vista has found around 90-95% of all my drivers from a fresh install. On that note I bow to Vista because it does that very well. I also want to mention that in the past 3-4 months Vista has been getting much better with regards to software compatibility. Some of the more recent updates show Microsoft is addressing performance and compatibility issues for Vista.

One thing Vista does poorly is booting different OS's like Vista and XP. I had to find a program called EasyBCD which allows me to boot more than one OS especially if Vista is installed first. And it also requires you to repair the Vista boot startup file.

 

I hope that Vista SP1 will make things better, but I'm thinking that SP2 will be the one to really get it right.

 

How can you tell? Why couldn't XP run an equally efficient sidebar? (someone already claimed in this thread that it actually *was* more efficient under XP, which you brushed away with a wave of your hands. But even if you're right, and it isn't, why couldn't it be? What makes you think that Vista magically supports lightweight sidebars that XP could never compete with?

What's more, just because Vista decides to run a dozen more features, that doesn't justify the higher resource consumption if you don't actually *need* those extra features.
I don't care what extra Vista decides to run in the background. if I don't need it, then it shouldn't slow down my system.

Is it? I'm sure if you ran ME today, it'd run pretty well too. They've had time to patch that up as well.

90% is still a major step backwards. But why do you only consider compatibility?
What about ease of use? Higher system reqs? Vista is, in my opinion (and for my purposes) a step backwards in many ways. Not particularly compatibility. But they have made a conscious decision that it's more important for Vista to *look new* than that it's actually efficient to use and does its just quickly and quietly.
Some of us don't have the patience for an OS that artificially slows us down with fancy animations and graphical effects that are there only to look pretty. If I want pretty, I play a game. I don't minimize/maximize windows so I can go 'oooh' at the transition effect.
And the couple of new features that I actually care about, are so badly implemented that I'd have to disable them anyway.

I don't care whether you call it ME or ME2 or "awesomest OS ever". It's still not a clear win over XP. They might have fixed most of the technical problems by now (which took them almost a year), but that still leaves all the "by-design" problems. And the depressing lack of improvements over XP.

There's just no compelling reason to upgrade. Sure, some switch because they want a prettier OS, and some switch simply because it's new. And some switch because it comes bundled with their computer.
But for the vast majority, there's just not much reason to bother.

 

Jalf that argument could have been applied to Win XP as well. Dont you think?? I mean it was slower than 2k or 98se with the same hardware, had much higher system requirements(256MB min, ran like crap with 128MB), less efficient, ran more things in the background and not all users needed them and last but not the least the default UI Luna was cheesy. Improvements over 98se - yes but over 2000 - not much. It wasnt as if it was the worlds best OS from the get go. It even had major vulnarabilities pre SP2. But it still managed to do well and mature over the years. Vista is just coming up to a year. So, what makes you think that it wont be more efficient than XP

BTW, since you asked try running Google desktop(which includes a sidebar and search indexer) in XP and then check your memory usage.

 

Whatever the hell it is, I'm not using it. Compared to Ubuntu and XP, Vista is disgusting.

 

"Would Solaris(which has been 64 bits for years) be more suitable for this kind of job ?"

Somebody said this, but I don't know who. Solaris doesn't support SATA drivers. In fact, Solaris is quite restricted in terms of hardware, so much so that running it on a laptop wouldn't be practical in any sense of the word.

 

I'm going by my experience after months of having Sidebar on XP compare to that guy only testing it for 2 days.

That statement is SO Incorrect!! ME sucked to the bitter end.

 

The Sidebar didn't work out so well for me. You think your Sidebar is super badass on Vista. Guess what the reason why it takes up less ram is the same reason why IE7 takes up less RAM than FF. It's all hidden in SVCHOST and Explorer processes.

You go on loving your Vista and hugging it and loving it and let it tell you that it's the best thing since sliced bread.

XP is better in many ways. I deploy XP clients, and I prefer their smaller footprint to Vista's.

And who was the idiot that said you'll need Vista to get advanced networking? If Businesses' NEED Vista so bad why are more and more corporations staying the hell away from it. Vista offers nothing businesses need that XP doesn't already have.

Am I bashing Vista yes. Because if you followed the development of Longhorn Vista doesn't deliver at all. MS already has a Business and Server OS in the pipes following through on Longhorn. Vista is a bastardized XP stop gap OS. It's not here to stay, I have a copy of Vista Ultimate, Office 2007, Server 2003, Exchange.. etc sitting right here from all those launch parties. MS seriously doesn't care about Vista. Their real child for this period of time is Office 2007.

 

That's just plain romantic right there.

 

Solaris does support SATA.

It can run on some x86 laptops, and obviously, it runs on the SPARC based laptops.

 

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sol/
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/search.jsp

Solaris simply isn't practical for mobile usage. It's not even designed for mobile computers. Look at the list.

 

Well, yeah, go look at that list.

That's a Lenovo laptop.

Do you have a point?

By the way, I am not suggesting people switch to Solaris for laptops; I was asked what we use for serious computing and we use Solaris. Solaris is, by any computation dependent measure, a better OS than anything from Apple or MS.

And, if you want to, you can run it on laptops.

 

Nothing is better than Vista! Nothing!

 

I like this quote. Unlike Office 2007, Vista does fail to deliver real productivity changes. There was much resistance at first to adopt the Ribbon. But look at Office 2007 now. This new version of office is much loved. I especially like the way they have hotkeyed all the Ribbon buttons now.

 

http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/9/

"Solaris 10's unique features are only useful if the operating system will install and run on your computer. Sun is not known for supporting a lot of x86 hardware, and Solaris 10 does not alter that reputation. You're pretty much limited to the hardware in the hardware compatibility list; I've tried to get several different custom-built systems to work with Solaris Express over the past few months, and none of them has functioned fully, with the usual suspects being ATI video cards and integrated LAN chips. Unlike previous releases, Solaris 10 supports a fairly wide range of UltraSPARC hardware -- especially systems that use the newer IIIi and IV processors. The 64-bit AMD64 edition of Solaris 10 will not be available for another few months.

Solaris 10 will not tolerate Linux partitions on the same drive, so if you want to dual boot, you'll need a separate hard drive. Speaking of hard drives, I was not able to get an SATA hard drive to be recognized by Solaris Express 10/04 on any of my test systems. Sun told me that Solaris 10 would eventually have SATA support, but didn't have specific dates or details on which SATA controllers would be supported."

Yes, Solaris could run on a laptop, but the operating system has little or no power management tools as it was designed for server use on very specific hardware. It can run on about 10 various SATA controllers, but they are for desktops, not laptops (source: http://blogs.sun.com/nachiketa/entry/general_notes_on_sata_support)