Windows Vista: Will you install it?

[Mikesoft]

First thing, I do actually love linux but I also have many issues with it which prevents me from switching:

1) Unsupported Hardware

I have a Creative Sound Blaster 24bit card on my system. It took about 2 minutes to set up on windows. However Linux cannot use it. If I wanted linux to use this sound card it would mean typing in code and downloading stuff and crossing my fingers. Even if I did get the sound card working it would not work as well as it would with the actual creative software.

2) Unsupported Software

I am a real gamer. All games now usually require Microsoft Direct X 9.0. Linux does not use direct X which means my 15 odd games I have would not be able to run. Emulators such as WINE very rarely are able to run a program as well as it could have been run on windows. Another program I use is photoshop. WINE cannot run this (I have tried).

3) Lack of decent programs

There are only some decent programs such as inkscape. However lots of the programs I very simple and do not come at a high level of quality.

4)Speed of OS

If you know how to run windows well and use a decent firewall and virus checker then windows will run very effeciantely.

5)Theft

Windows is not the only company that has copied stuff! The KDE menu looks very similar to the windows menu and so do the file searching utilities.


Windows is far more powerful than linux currently and IS used much more than far basic home use. All of the game designing companies use windows for their game programming, professional photographers use windows for editing images etc... At the moment linux is not used widely in bussiness as it does not supported the latest programs and has bad hardware support.

As I have said I do love linux! However at the stage it is at the moment it is to hard to run and does not offer all of the things I need.

Micrsoft are bad as they have become money hungry. As soon as any company begins to make more money then they will become money hungry and start to do bad things. Suse linux I think is on the verge of becoming money hungry. At some point so many people will be using their OS they will stop their OS being downloaded for free and instead you will have to pay for it.

BTW: I don't like the big START sign on the windows tool bar. I prefer the KDE icon by choice.

 

[Quantos]

BTW: I don't like the big START sign on the windows tool bar. I prefer the KDE icon by choice.

Then Skin your windows

 

[WalksWithChrist]

Then Skin your windows

Heh heh No thanks. Windows is slow enough without being skinned.

 

[rdale]

Then Skin your windows

Whenever you have a few free days... wanna post how you did this, nice job!

Heh heh No thanks. Windows is slow enough without being skinned.

Just feed your Windows lots of ram

 

[Quantos]

Whenever you have a few free days... wanna post how you did this, nice job!

Background -> New Hubble Photograph
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/37/image/a

Skin -> "Encoded"
http://www.wincustomize.com/ViewSkin.aspx?SID=1&SkinID=5142&LibID=1

Skin Program -> WindowBlinds
http://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/

 

[WalksWithChrist]

Whenever you have a few free days... wanna post how you did this, nice job!


Just feed your Windows lots of ram

heh heh I'm giving Windows 515mb of DDR and that's it! My budget doesn't allow for more feeding of the Windows bloated code.

 

[Quantos]

heh heh I'm giving Windows 515mb of DDR and that's it! My budget doesn't allow for more feeding of the Windows bloated code.

2G on my systems, and I still run out of memory at times

But then again I'm working with High Poly meshes that Eat the ram for breakfast.

 

[Mikesoft]

I have tried windows blinds. It was good but a pop up appeared everytime I started windows so I uninstalled it. One of my mates suggested that I try litestep. I have not tried litestep yet but it is meant to skin better than windows blinds.

I have 512mb or ram at the moment. I am hopefully going to upgrade to 1gb soon. Games these days really want lots of horse power!

 

[Quantos]

I have tried windows blinds. It was good but a pop up appeared everytime I started windows so I uninstalled it. One of my mates suggested that I try litestep. I have not tried litestep yet but it is meant to skin better than windows blinds.

I have 512mb or ram at the moment. I am hopefully going to upgrade to 1gb soon. Games these days really want lots of horse power!

Don't know why you were getting popups, Were you using the full registered version ?
(I'm using 4.5 now, will upgrade to 5 this weekend, it's supposed to use the Windows Interface better, and improve system speed, and use less resources)

 

[rdale]

2G on my systems, and I still run out of memory at times

Yikes, I only have 1 gig, but don't mess with meshes... Quantos do you know if desktop images can be pngs, jpgs, etc - internally w/WindowBlinds or does it automatically convert to bmps like Windows? Seems that if it could, that alone could save quite a bit in resources. Silly windows.

Getting close to Christmas, might have to ask Mrs Clause for some more ram...

 

[Mikesoft]

Were you using the full registered version ?

No, I was using the shareware version.

btw, Does anyone know any good agp graphic cards costing about £100?

 

[JordanF]

First thing, I do actually love linux but I also have many issues with it which prevents me from switching...

I never switched until I was able to solve the issues you list.

1) Unsupported Hardware

I have a Creative Sound Blaster 24bit card on my system.

Ahh a sound card. That's why many systems have built-in sound chipsets.

It took about 2 minutes to set up on windows. However Linux cannot use it.

The 24bit Soundblaster card is supported by Linux. Chances are that ALSA is not properly configured for the card. Note that [K]ubuntu isn't very easy to configure at the low level you need to. Setting up multimedia on Linux is probably the hardest part.

If I wanted linux to use this sound card it would mean typing in code and downloading stuff and crossing my fingers.

That's what you have to do. I ended up downloading about 30 different source packages to get my system to work perfectly. Sound works, perfect multimedia, USB, ieee1394, all network cards work, touchpad works, function keys work...

Even if I did get the sound card working it would not work as well as it would with the actual creative software.

That's not really true... The chipsets among many Creative cards are identical -- this is all that matters. In the case that the Linux driver isn't good enough for you, you can just install the Windows driver and emulate with NDISwrapper (that's what I had to do for my WLAN card).

2) Unsupported Software

I am a real gamer.

lol For gaming Linux SUCKS. For everything else it is ideal.

All games now usually require Microsoft Direct X 9.0.

The programmers are so lazy that they need to use libraries.

Linux does not use direct X which means my 15 odd games I have would not be able to run.

This is part of Microsoft's strategy (which is fine -- competition)! They make something that game developers will use and does not run on Linux so that Windows will be the ideal gaming platform.

Emulators such as WINE very rarely are able to run a program as well as it could have been run on windows.

Usually WINE cannot replicate network or filesystem environment as there is on Windows.

Another program I use is photoshop. WINE cannot run this (I have tried).

There have been people successful in getting PS to run under Wine. http://www.mirabilis.ca/archives/000958.html

3) Lack of decent programs

There are only some decent programs such as inkscape. However lots of the programs I very simple and do not come at a high level of quality.

Hmm.. There's linux support for Mathematica (CAS). Or for open-source you could just use octave, a high-quality CAS. There's always blender, a high-quality CAD program. Electric VLSI is very good for circuit design. OpenOffice surpasses MS Office, especially in reliability. There's this astronomy program that can actually interface w/ telescopes w/out paying a large sum of cash.

4)Speed of OS

If you know how to run windows well and use a decent firewall and virus checker then windows will run very effeciantely.

I'm rather experienced in Windows system administration and have gotten systems to run efficiently. The only problem is that performance degrades with time as Windows puts all of its temporary files and other junk on the system. BTW Linux kernel has a built in firewall and malicious code protection.

5)Theft

Windows is not the only company that has copied stuff!

Referring to the company Microsoft... not the product Windows in particular.
Microsoft's C# language is almost an exact copy of Sun's Java. Microsoft's .NET is almost a copy of Sun's J2EE. Microsoft decided to implement LDAP, which is an open standard, even though Microsoft despises open standards and source. Palm PC is a copy of the Palm Pilot. Internet Explorer is a rip of Netscape -- in fact Microsoft at first thought the web would not make it off the ground -- now they think they pioneered it. If you know anything about the history of Windows and Apple, you'll remember that Microsoft literally STOLE Apple's user interface (GUI) after Steve Jobs gave Bill Gates a contract to improve it.

The KDE menu looks very similar to the windows menu and so do the file searching utilities.

The Windows "start menu" began with Windows 95 as a copy of Apple's idea of a menu. Microsoft's Vista OS has similar characteristics of the OSX interface.

Windows is far more powerful than linux currently...

Gravely incorrect. Windows currently does not have 64-bit support -- it's only a patch. Windows has a very terrible/low limit of CPUs and memory. Linux has very high memory and #CPU limits. Windows is a memory and resource hog, leaving less for the applications that you actually want to use. The biggest and most powerful servers run Linux. A number of supercomputers run Linux (the rest have their own OS). As mentioned many times Linux is the choice for scientific and medical applications for obvious reasons.

...and IS used much more than far basic home use.

Correct. Most people don't want to attempt to get Linux to work. They could always try Apple though.

All of the game designing companies use windows for their game programming...

Because their games run on Windows! Why? The majority of customers use Windows.

...professional photographers use windows for editing images etc...

Professional artists (photographers, musicians, etc.) use Apple's OSX because it's excellent for multimedia. Hmm... OSX and Linux have the same roots: UNIX.

At the moment linux is not used widely in bussiness...

Linux currently owns the server market. Over 70% of the WWW runs Linux. Small businesses who do not use servers rely completely on individual Windows workstations, which is very unreliable. Medium companies often have Windows workstations and most have Linux servers. Sun's JDS (based on Linux and compatible with Sun networks) is actually becoming the choice for corporate networks because of its security and wide range of compatibility.

...as it does not supported the latest programs and has bad hardware support.

When you refer to "the latest programs" I assume you mean the ones designed for Windows? The OS developers don't choose to have support for hardware... the hardware vendors choose who they write drivers for.

However at the stage it is at the moment it is to hard to run and does not offer all of the things I need.

Understood. Linux won't be very popular until a user-friendly and easy-to-use edition is released.

Micrsoft are bad as they have become money hungry. As soon as any company begins to make more money then they will become money hungry and start to do bad things.

This is expected in a business.

Suse linux I think is on the verge of becoming money hungry.

Novell, which owns Suse Linux, is still a very trustworthy company. SCO on the other hand...

At some point so many people will be using their OS they will stop their OS being downloaded for free and instead you will have to pay for it.

Linux will always be open-source and the kernel will always be free.

 

[rdale]

... I'm using 4.5 now, will upgrade to 5 this weekend...

Just came from their forum, you might want to hold off on v5 until they get a few kinks worked out. From the sounds of it, they are having quite a few issues with the new version. Wonder if you can get an older, say, v4.6 still?

 

[Overtime_man]

Market dominance? Since when is that a mark of quality?

Good point. If market share and popularity where the only factors, then Brittany Spears would have to be proclaimed the best singer of all time. I think that quality has to enter the equation at some point.

In any event, I'm sure that Vista will be an improvement over XP, but I certainly have no plans to switch; I'll stick with Mac OSX.

 

[WalksWithChrist]

If you know anything about the history of Windows and Apple, you'll remember that Microsoft literally STOLE Apple's user interface (GUI) after Steve Jobs gave Bill Gates a contract to improve it.

Do you have a link for this? I did a while back and it's dead now. Thanks!

 

[rdale]

Do you have a link for this? I did a while back and it's dead now. Thanks!

WalksWithChrist, is this what you're talking about? :
http://www.jmusheneaux.com/9000b.htm

also, from:
http://digg.com/design/Of_Mice_and_Menus:_A_History_of_Designing_the_GUI

I found:
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/articles/ofmiceandmenus

and to Quantos... the curiosity got the best of me decided to try v5 WindowBlinds, here's a screenie:

funny thing is, XP is running much snappier after installing, much better/faster than using the default themes... so far, so good.

 

[Quantos]

WalksWithChrist, is this what you're talking about? :
http://www.jmusheneaux.com/9000b.htm

also, from:
http://digg.com/design/Of_Mice_and_Menus:_A_History_of_Designing_the_GUI

I found:
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/articles/ofmiceandmenus

and to Quantos... the curiosity got the best of me decided to try v5 WindowBlinds, here's a screenie:

funny thing is, XP is running much snappier after installing, much better/faster than using the default themes... so far, so good.

Sweet, though the Clock dont look too good (lower right corner)

 

[troglodyte]

did they remove the sidebar from longhorn? cause they had an actual clock on it

 

[rdale]

Sweet, though the Clock dont look too good (lower right corner)

It's true... tweaked it a little, I just like the functionality of TClock Light, plus I use Oscar's Multi-Monitor TaskBar for the second monitor. It is not repainted with WindowBlinds, but I can live with it...:

did they remove the sidebar from longhorn? cause they had an actual clock on it

This is just XP revamped visually with WindowBlinds...

fwiw... I'm in WeakButHopefull's camp regarding waiting... think I'll wait till WinFS is part of Vista...
movies (wmf) that you can download/check out at Channel 9 (Microsoft):

Sean Alexander (and others) - Windows Vista Sidebar and Gadgets
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=128231

Vista Transactional File System: ...haven't view it yet, just downloaded...
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=142120

Windows+Vista:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showforum.aspx?forumid=14&tagid=9

MS+Office:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showforum.aspx?forumid=14&tagid=34

Julie Larson-Green - Diving into the new Office 12 ...this one is pretty good, lots of cool features:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=114720

 

[somedude]

I might consider switching to Vista real quick if it doesn't break my game compatibility and if it includes a shiny new command line like they promised. Otherwise, i might wait a year or two until it is required for new games.(Quite happy in Gentoo)