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News Vista SP1 due in 2nd half of 2007

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Da Dego, 10 Jul 2007.

  1. cjmUK

    cjmUK Old git.

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    Almost certainlt isn't - more likely your gfx drivers.

    You can't move forward by standing still - otherwise we'd all still be running Windows 3.11. They've changed the way some hardware interacts with the OS but if anything, it's supposed to make it better. But hardware manufacturers have been very slow to react, and ultimately it's more their fault than MS's - they have known about the changes for 18 mths.

    MS can't publish roll-out dates until they are certain. They've been notorious for running late, so rather than be more realistic at the outset, or perhaps improve their performance, they've adopted the tactic (as have many others) of simply not announcing launch dates until they are 100% certain that they will be met.

    If they are saying H2 2007, they are thinking October but will probably end up releasing it in December.
     
  2. Delphium

    Delphium Eyefinity enabled

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    Correct me if im wrong but does this not only upmix a stereo signal to surround sound, ie the rear speakers doing exactly the same as the front efectively 2x stereo? Of which fortunately for me, my speaker amp has the ability to do already.
    Instead of true surround sound, where each speaker has a dynamic sound.

    [Edit..
    Ok so i read... Speaker fill will synthesize additional channels and direct them to the appropriate speakers, such as adding small delays or applying a filter]

    Do miss the ability of being able to hear peoples foot steps coming up behind me in lot of FSP games, and the ability to use traktor DJ as it requires multiple channels.

    This is of cause the drivers issue and not vista, though hopefully with the roll out of SP1 for vista, more people may jump onto vista and the manufactures will hopefully get there drivers sorted out :sigh:
     
    Last edited: 11 Jul 2007
  3. capnPedro

    capnPedro Hacker. Maker. Engineer.

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    Yes, it upmixes 2-channel sounds (i.e MP3s and other audio) so that all you left speakers play the left channel, all the right speakers play the right channel and your center speaker plays a mix of the two channels. However it leaves surround audio as it is, so it will not prevent you from hearing the footsteps behind you. Assuming that this actually works anyway.

    It just acts as a fix for playing audio, which is not in a surround sound format (i.e. almost all of it, excluding DVDs etc).
     
  4. Particle Man

    Particle Man What's a Dremel?

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    I bought a laptop with vista on it.... worst idea ever, almost nothing runs on it. I'm about to put xp on the damn thing a be done with it.
     
  5. will.

    will. A motorbike of jealousy!

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    You can if your on a bus, or a train, or on a conveyor belt :p

    Seriously though... I don't have anything serious to say...

    Pickles...

    Waffles...

    :rock:
     
  6. cjmUK

    cjmUK Old git.

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    Damn! I've no idea how to respond to that. You've got me cornered.
     
  7. completemadness

    completemadness What's a Dremel?

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    however OS's before Vista actually brought something useful to the party

    vista
    aero interface thing - been on Linux forever and there is another program u can get for windows if you really want it, in all a waste of resources, plus it means your gfx card is doing 3d 24/7 so it consumes more power and the fan runs faster
    UAC - not even worth me holding shift and pressing 3 other keys
    DX10 - technically could have been brought to XP

    in fact, screw the list, the only big changes Ive written above, and none of them are worth forking out £100 (or whatever M$ charges) to get
    95 brought a much improved GUI, and the start menu
    98 brought a better driver system, and networking was improved
    ME - well even M$ would deny they made it (also not worth the money it costed) although they did improve the driver database alot
    2000 - more an enterprise version, more secure and better networking, moving closer to the home version as well
    XP - good networking support (finally) improved start menu, NTFS, and many more features
    Vista - Another ME, hardly any benefits over XP

    Infact, looking at my own list, it almost makes me wonder why we ever needed to move from 3.1, i mean hell all its been since then are marginal improvements
    But in the general list of things, Vista is just like ME, it doesn't add much to the table over the previous version except an extra layer of bloat
     
  8. Veles

    Veles DUR HUR

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    I'm not up on all the features and improvements Vista has brought in, but from what I've heard they've brought in quite a lot of improvements and features, if you're saying Vista is like ME, then basically all the other windows since 95 have been like ME too.

    People don't like ME because it didn't bring much to the table, people don't like it because it is utter crap.
     
  9. cjmUK

    cjmUK Old git.

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    I'm calling your bluff - install Win3.11 and I'll take you seriously.

    Remember: we had to go through ME to get to XP. Likewise, we have to go through Vista to get the next version. Each one is incrementally better than the last. But each of us sees different things of worth; you rated XP, I know a guy who has just jumped from Win2k to Vista (albeit with a new PC).
     
  10. will.

    will. A motorbike of jealousy!

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    I've just thought of another nice thing they could do to vista with SP1. Tabbed folders. ALA firefox and IE7 (and Linux i believe), but for folders...

    why isn't firefox in firefox's spelling dictionary, but Microsoft is?

    oops... that was a brain fart 'n' a half!
     
  11. capnPedro

    capnPedro Hacker. Maker. Engineer.

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    it wants to apply the proper capitalization.

    If you're counting the start menu as a valid improvement, check Vista's new start menu. It's 100 times better than XP's.

    And check the searching in Vista, it's absolutely ****in' A.
     
  12. DXR_13KE

    DXR_13KE BananaModder

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    the searching in vista and the start menu are very nice... shame google wants MS to take out the searching capabilities.
     
  13. Veles

    Veles DUR HUR

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    What I'd like to see is the removal of the folder system and them bring in WinFS (and it be awesome) in SP1.
     
  14. completemadness

    completemadness What's a Dremel?

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    true enough, but at least on the start menu point, all they've done is added a search, I'm pretty sure that is an easy addon that could have been made to XP, other then that the start menus are still the same
     
  15. capnPedro

    capnPedro Hacker. Maker. Engineer.

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    No more expanding menus. A scrollbar for scrolling through programs. A proper folder system that makes sense. recent Items actually works for me now.
     
  16. cjmUK

    cjmUK Old git.

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    They haven't just added a search function to the start menu. The Vista search functions searches more, searches faster and yet needs less muscle. It's completely different under the bonnet.

    Yes you could probably add it to XP in a SP.

    The will no doubt be other Vista features that you also like, We could add them in an SP too, perhaps.

    But then your SP would become Frankenstein's monster, and XP would be slowly screwed. Isn't it better to clear the decks and start again?

    Vista is just the latest in an evolutionary line. Some features are similar, but plenty are improved (and some regress perhaps?) - You are not going to like all of them, but on the whole they are a significant step forward.
     
  17. Ramble

    Ramble Ginger Nut

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    Uh-huh, can you give me an example of hardly anything new? Massive sections of the OS have changed.
    ME was awful because virtually nothing was changed and it was so buggy and unstable no-one wanted it. The idea of ME was pretty good though.
     
  18. completemadness

    completemadness What's a Dremel?

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    Yes you could add them in a SP, whats the difference between a slipstreamed copy of XP, or a new disc of vista - none - it would be the same thing if they put it in a service pack

    So instead of getting a few hundred MB's of service pack, you want to pay £100 ish to be forced to re-install

    I'm not saying they haven't improved some things, but the improvements could all have been implemented in XP, there is not £100 worth of improvements

    You can enable these options in XP

    proper folder system ? what does that mean
    Recent items works fine for me, what didn't work for you ?

    So what if something does or doesn't change under the hood, if its buggy and unstable, its crap
    Vista is the same, they may have improved lots of things under the hood, but the visible changes are pretty slim

    Vista has some nice extras, but if you line a vista system up next to an XP system, the changes are pretty hard to justify

    Plus MS forced DX10 on vista, another way to muscle a new OS onto the consumer, and pretty soon they their support for XP will drop

    I don't like the way MS do business, and vista is no exception, if they wanted to add new features and stuff to vista, fine, i don't mind
    But forcing people like me, people who want to play games, to pay £100 (or whatever) to play the latest games, when my OS is perfectly fine, and i have already paid for it once, and i don't want vista, is wrong, and its just another example of M$'s bully boy tactics
     
  19. Khensu

    Khensu likes to touch your special places

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    My biggest problem with Vista is that it takes up about 8GB... No matter what the standard hard disk size is nowadays, I find it disgusting and definately not worth it.

    Also, the new "features" annoy me - hiding or cutting up options, the fact that when I click anywhere near a folder or file it selects the entire line, ... Bah.
    The only positive thing I find is the improved driver support (i.e. no need to search for the printer CD), but I really doubt that justifies the extra four to five GB. "It's not because you can, that you should". 8GB for just an OS.... Bah.
     
  20. tzang

    tzang Traditional Nutter

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    "been on Linux forever", true but how stable is it on Linux? Projects like Beryl are fantastic but are buggy as hell. In fact, there are plentiful features in Linux that Vista now implements but is it stable on Linux? No. Aero's code is also optimised and does not consume much power, as evidentally seen on my power hungry laptop managing 2 and a half hours. Compare that to Linux and my laptop battery is dead within an hour.

    I personally keep UAC completely disabled but I find it handy for users who aren't very computer literate. I've spent years fixing computers because users feel the need to change something they shouldn't, which initiated the on-site callout for me in the first place. UAC has its advantages and disadvantages.

    DX10 could be brought into XP and I won't disagree, but I can probably see why Microsoft didn't. They don't want to provide support for XP any further (see below).

    OS support is provided as a limited service. You wouldn't run a company that provides a lifetime support service for its products, the same tactic is applied by Microsoft for its support on XP (which will be dropped as of Jan. 2008, I think 7 years of support is quite a long time). If Renault provided a lifetime warranty for its cars, they'll be spending all their time fixing their ridiculously unreliable cars instead of selling new ones.

    Microsoft has forced no one to pick up Vista but those wanting access to the latest and greatest or want to run certain software that requires Vista will have to pay for it. It is a business tactic in the same way when Intel or AMD releases a new CPU that requires a different socket, you are forced to upgrade your motherboard. The same happened to IDE and SATA, ISA and PCI, AGP and PCI-E, etc...

    For any business to survive, for the economy to thrive, you need to bring something onto the market to drive it forward. If you keep promoting the same thing, only improved slightly, the market will slowly wither away. It isn't just Microsoft but they just happen to be a nice, big corporate to bash on. Technology cannot advance without improvements over time and improvements can't be made if there is no demand for it nor if there is no competition. If humans lived with no improvements, we'll all still be in stone age :p


    One of the most space consuming problem with Windows is drivers. That huge driver library takes an awful amount of space and Microsoft has worked to ensure they can keep as many people happy as possible with the millions of different hardware combinations out there. You can literally plug any hardware (I use the word any rather lightly here :p) and it will work straight away. You then need to consider all the programming code that powers Vista, ranging from the huge amount of improvements on security and networking to user friendliness. Vista was built to target a huge target audience, not just you and me, for that reason, Microsoft have stuffed a huge load of features into Vista. Sure, quite a lot are useless to some of us but other users will differ in opinion.


    [EDIT] A lot of issues with Vista is down to drivers. Microsoft did a complete overhaul on how hardware functions on Vista. Before Vista was officially launched to the consumer market, Vista was already released to developers (known as RTM) about 4 months prior to the official release. This gave hardware manufacturers plenty of time to sort out their drivers but how many manufacturers actually did? nVidia have done virtually nothing to sort out laptop drivers and it took them 3 months to release something partially functional on the 7-series Go model. It also took them 7 months to get SLi working.

    This doesn't even take into account the release candidate testing period (RC1 & RC2), manufacturers could have done something then but for many months, they did nothing.

    On a side note, some users have mentioned problems alt+tabbing in and out of games, that is a driver issue, nothing to do with Vista.
     
    Last edited: 15 Jul 2007
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