What does Vista do better than XP?

If you have something legitimate to add to the discussion, please do so.
If you want to just complain for the sake of complaining, take it somewhere else.

And the personal attacks stop now.
 
griffinhart said:
How so? So far there is zero indication of what you are claiming at all.

As far as I know, you can not execute code on these protected paths. In fact, reading the white paper you linked, there doesn't seem to be anything that hackers would have a field day with.

Please, feel free to provide an example of the protected path being used to compromise a Vista install. The OS is well over a year old now, but as far as I know there are zero attacks. None, not real, not theoretical. If that is incorrect, please provide me a link.
Click to expand...

It not hard to find, just google. Here's one from a year ago!
"...all applications such as virus scanners, malware protectors, and any other kind of application that hooks all system processes, injects threads into them or even discretely reads their memory doesn’t work on Vista when it hits a protected process....I can make any application of my choosing protected, and thus undebuggable, uninjectable and with its address space secure..."

http://www.alex-ionescu.com/?p=34
 
vista vs xp never end well.

as a huge hater of vista for over a year, I have to say I'm never going back to XP. Vista is more stable, faster, and better looking. it has really key features like Start Search (finally something as efficient as KDE) which will change the way you navigate when you index your folders properly, I barely even touch my desktop icons or my computer anymore. I frequently have 20+ programs open at once, with encoding/decoding and torrent running, video editing software, security apps, media player, firefox with 50+ tabs and extensions, and Aero is perfertly smooth and doesn't strain the CPU at all allowing it to focus on the programs. Nvidia drivers are finally good and even my X-FI works relatively well when you ALchemy the necessary games. XP was better for a long time but that time is over.
 
It's funny how I remember how many negative things I've heard about XP when it first came out, and now everyone is using it. I really think it's only a matter of time.

DX10 is also going to play a big factor in this. Right now, DX10 is more of a luxury but eventually all games will be using it.
 
panhead said:
It not hard to find, just google. Here's one from a year ago!
"...all applications such as virus scanners, malware protectors, and any other kind of application that hooks all system processes, injects threads into them or even discretely reads their memory doesn’t work on Vista when it hits a protected process....I can make any application of my choosing protected, and thus undebuggable, uninjectable and with its address space secure..."

http://www.alex-ionescu.com/?p=34
Click to expand...

Interesting, but that specific problem was patched about a year ago. Apparently, If you ran Vista64, this wasn't an issue to begin with. You had to use a driver designed around this problem to start with.
 
shiznit said:
vista vs xp never end well.

as a huge hater of vista for over a year, I have to say I'm never going back to XP.
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I think this is classic example right here.
People bitch about it all they want, then they try it, and... "Wow, this isn't so bad after all!"
 
TechieSooner said:
I think this is classic example right here.
People bitch about it all they want, then they try it, and... "Wow, this isn't so bad after all!"
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you have a point, but I've actually been using vista since beta, it's just that it didn't all come together for me until nvidia released legit drivers.
 
NVIDIA drivers were the biggest headache for me, that and Creative... I'm sticking to Intel chipsets from now on, solves a couple problems right there :)
 
Sovereign said:
NVIDIA drivers were the biggest headache for me, that and Creative... I'm sticking to Intel chipsets from now on, solves a couple problems right there :)
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I've stopped caring about chipsets ;)

Used to be die-hard AMD, then I stopped caring, really. As long as it WORKS and GETS THE JOB DONE I can care less. My new notebook is a Core 2 Duo.

Of course a bit different with graphics since we had incompatibility problems... But I'm with you: Intel is widely supported.
 
I'm not a chipset fanatic, but nForce + SLI + X-Fi + Vista x64 was a pain in the butt. Never mind the drivers for said chipset... See, NVIDIA's chipsets have their features and their fans, but with Intel I found I had to install one driver for the chipset (which didn't require unchecking boxes to avoid installing drivers that make things worse) and one for the network. That was it. Oh yeah and no crappy network performance/cracking X-Fi because the PCI-bus network card and XFi don't get along. Though the abit IP35Pro has been dinged for having dual Gigabit ethernet implemented on the PCI bus (and rightly so for certain situations) for me it's never a problem because I'm on 100Mbps. Even with a bus-hogging XFi, I don't have near the problems I did with the nForce PCI-based network controller.

So my "liking" of Intel is more analogous to my dislike of NVIDIA chipsets right now...
 
I can't name one single feature that makes Vista a "must have". All the little bits and pieces come together to form a generally more pleasant, user friendly experience.

I only recently switched. Vista x86 drivers for my last piece of vista incompatible hardware was released about four months ago. Still waiting for 64-bit drivers. Upgrading to Vista on the release day must have been a hell..having to abandon half of your hardware just to get the shiny transparant windows...
 
Sovereign said:
I'm sticking to Intel chipsets from now on, solves a couple problems right there :)
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I ventured to an Nvidia chipset because of a great deal, and ended up going back to Intel within a month. I had too many odd issues that weren't there on my Intel boards.
 
JimmiG said:
Upgrading to Vista on the release day must have been a hell..having to abandon half of your hardware just to get the shiny transparant windows...
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I had 100% hardware functionality in beta. Release day was no problem.
 
JimmiG said:
I can't name one single feature that makes Vista a "must have". All the little bits and pieces come together to form a generally more pleasant, user friendly experience.

I only recently switched. Vista x86 drivers for my last piece of vista incompatible hardware was released about four months ago. Still waiting for 64-bit drivers. Upgrading to Vista on the release day must have been a hell..having to abandon half of your hardware just to get the shiny transparant windows...
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DeaconFrost said:
I ventured to an Nvidia chipset because of a great deal, and ended up going back to Intel within a month. I had too many odd issues that weren't there on my Intel boards.
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Am I the only person who had no problems at all with Nforce 4 and/or did Nvidia's chipsets get worse? My DFI Nforce 4 Ultra has been rock solid for over 3 years, but I wasn't dumb enough to install the nforce firewall though, pointless if you have a router anyway.
 
shiznit said:
Am I the only person who had no problems at all with Nforce 4 and/or did Nvidia's chipsets get worse? My DFI Nforce 4 Ultra has been rock solid for over 3 years, but I wasn't dumb enough to install the nforce firewall though, pointless if you have a router anyway.
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My spare PC (used to be my main rig for a few years) is still chugging away nicely too. It's got an ASUS nForce4 board and an AMD 2800+. My main rig's running perfectly fine and fast too (see sig)

Edit: I should add that my nForce4 board is still running XP Pro, but my main rig is running Vista Business. Not because it can't run Vista, but because it's an old less-used PC and not worth upgrading. I'm quite confident the nForce4 PC can run Vista smoothly albeit being 2800+ and having a Geforce FX5600 256mb card.
 
A few months from now, when support for XP stops, will you still be using it?

I still use win98 on a celeron 400mhz system. The reason I can do that is because it's not hooked on to the internet, so there are no security vulnerabilities.

Even nicer is this Pentium 200 that runs win95 but boots in DOS. It loads in under 10 seconds. Beautiful system, but only functional for DOS-based apps. The CPU also consumes something like 20W which is a thing of beauty.

This Vista vs XP is entertaining since all points are valid - it's just unfortunate when users get condescending and attacks get a little too much. But, the fact of the matter is:
- XP support is supposed to end
- Businesses are not embracing Vista so businesses, not end-users, have quite a bit to 'lose' if forced to go to vista
- end-users are going to be alright since new systems are dirt cheap and running vista is a non-issue in terms of performance. Laptops, though it seems, might be a different story.

Windows themselves appear to be acknowledging the failure of Vista - it remains to be seen whether Windows 7 will be the OS to focus on in 2009.

I think that MS should think about how to market Vista: maybe they need to push vista x64 because memory is dirt cheap, and if I had >3.5GB memory and couldn't use it, i'd opt to get an x64 OS i.e. vista.
 
chrispycrunch said:
I think that MS should think about how to market Vista: maybe they need to push vista x64 because memory is dirt cheap, and if I had >3.5GB memory and couldn't use it, i'd opt to get an x64 OS i.e. vista.
Click to expand...
Glider is the only reason I still have a 32bit OS on my hard drive.
 
At this point, nothing is set in stone. Microsoft could, because of enough demand, change the currently "posted" policies about the June cutoff date and long term support. Let's hope they do...
 
chrispycrunch said:
I think that MS should think about how to market Vista: maybe they need to push vista x64 because memory is dirt cheap, and if I had >3.5GB memory and couldn't use it, i'd opt to get an x64 OS i.e. vista.
Click to expand...

Vista is a media player OS. The kernel re-architecture to support DRM is not needed in a corporate environment and the bloat associated with it is a huge performace hit as well as a security concern.

Corporate, developers and gamers demand performance from their hardware/software and currently XP provides that.
 
Joe Average said:
At this point, nothing is set in stone. Microsoft could, because of enough demand, change the currently "posted" policies about the June cutoff date and long term support. Let's hope they do...
Click to expand...

MS will still offer the Vista downgrade to XP but only for Vista business and ultimate.
 
Like I said, nothing is set in stone. There's two months to go, and word floating around the rumor mills is that Microsoft will make changes to it's current plan if the demand is there and the desire is there to extend XP's usable lifespan in the marketplace.

They're big, they're huge, they're not everyone's favorite company, but they're not totally stupid either. You don't get to be big, huge, and disliked by so many by being stupid... takes brains and guts to do that.
 
XP Pro worked alright with a few issues until SP2 made it stable. Only one hardware issue dealing with a Packard-Bell made prior to XP being released. Got a new sound card and the problem was solved. Vista would have still balked on even the newer hardware! Look at the Creative disputes all over the web.

Vista caused more headaches due to driver issues, print spooler going bad, network disappears, boot time to the login screen being as good as WinME, freezes for 3 seconds whenever.
 
Creatives drivers suck in any operating system... This IS Creative Labs we're talking about. It's not Microsoft's fault that people can't write drivers.
 
Joe Average said:
Like I said, nothing is set in stone. There's two months to go, and word floating around the rumor mills is that Microsoft will make changes to it's current plan if the demand is there and the desire is there to extend XP's usable lifespan in the marketplace.
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It's quite obvious the demand is there so I don't even see why they even need to think about it. Just do it if they want to keep the status quo with their customers.
 
panhead said:
Vista is a media player OS. The kernel re-architecture to support DRM is not needed in a corporate environment and the bloat associated with it is a huge performace hit.
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Evidence doesn't suggest so; most of the information about how the DRM in Vista is so terrible is from an outdated document by Gutmann, which was written before Vista came out based largely on speculation. I've not seen any data which supports the suggestion that CPU utilisation is significantly higher in Vista.

As regard to driver issues generally - XP had it easy, because it wasn't really a new OS, but a point release of Windows 2000, and most hardware already had 2000 drivers which would work with little or no effort. XP->Vista is a much bigger change than 2000->XP, so it's not surprising that there were some problems with drivers, and kernel-mode driver backwards compatibility is not particularly simple. Not having drivers available might well have been a reason not to migrate to Vista in the early months, but it's not really the case now, and it certainly doesn't make Vista a bad OS. (If poor driver availability makes a bad OS, then OS X and Linux are terrible OSes.)
 
milkweg said:
It's quite obvious the demand is there so I don't even see why they even need to think about it. Just do it if they want to keep the status quo with their customers.
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Vocal minority != "the demand".
 
I think from this point on that I will simply dismiss any person or comments made by a person that even mentions DRM in a post, regardless of how intelligent and thought-out the post may be aside from the ridiculous focusing on something that is there for a reason and Microsoft didn't really have much choice.

Having said that, ever since Vista really started to get a lot of public notice the concentration of comments has been on bashing it, save for some intelligent discussion that happens from time to time. In this thread, now well into 5 pages, it's been nothing but the same old shit regurgitated back and forth over and over again. Some people can make their points and move on, while others just can't budge a smidgen and will constantly reiterate their arguments, as lackluster and silly as they may be (at times, and on grounds that are even more dull and even more laughable).

I think it's safe to say that both OSes have their merits, both have some modicum of usefulness based on what they were each designed to accomplish, and both have a "look and feel" that is relatively unique to each. There really is no legitimate way to compare them aside from benchmarking them for direct comparison on a side-by-side basis since you can have a static hardware platform - the same PC, even - and then install the OSes, then the applications, and run some tests. Wipe the drive, reinstall the other OS, the same applications, and redo the tests.

In that way you have some basis for comparison, but as the upper crust of us understand: XP typically gets slower over time, whereas Vista typically gets faster. If you happen to be one that hasn't noticed such results when using XP, fantastic, consider yourself one of the lucky ones. If you haven't noticed Vista getting quicker and snappier over time, well, I'd suspect something is wrong considering that probably ~95% of the people running Vista will almost always say "It just keeps getting faster..." - and that comes from my experience of using it, installing it, supporting it, and testing it since long before it was called "Vista."

As for the basic question of "What does Vista do better than XP?" you'd have to define what "better" means in the context of the question. As I've learned over the decades, "best" or "better" is a purely subjective thing, and almost always it's severely tainted by personal opinions, tastes, and which way the wind happens to blow at the moment the question is posed. In other words, "better" isn't really something that matters to all - it only matters to the person asking the question when proposed, and as such, none of us can truly provide an answer that will suffice.

And that's all I have to say about that... Mr. Gump be damned... ;)
 
Mithent said:
I've not seen any data which supports the suggestion that CPU utilisation is significantly higher in Vista.
Click to expand...

I am not referring to higher CPU utilization, but to the kernel code bloat to support the DRM 'features' and the new kernel protected process. These are not needed nor wanted in a corporate environment and are a security threat since antivirus software cannot probe protected processes. Adding these features to Windows is the biggest mistake MS has made since they 'intergrated' IE into the windows.
 
panhead said:
I am not referring to higher CPU utilization, but to the kernel code bloat to support the DRM 'features' and the new kernel protected process. These are not needed nor wanted in a corporate environment and are a security threat since antivirus software cannot probe protected processes. Adding these features to Windows is the biggest mistake MS has made since they 'intergrated' IE into the windows.
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/sigh..

It's like talking to a brick wall.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=284

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=673
 
Vista pwns XP in:
DX10
Looking pretty.
Pissing people off.
:p

I have Vista on 2 of my home PC's. I'm torn. In one way I like it a lot, in the other, I get annoyed with it. Maybe VistaSE will be better? :D
 
griffinhart said:
/sigh..
It's like talking to a brick wall.
Click to expand...

/sigh.............

I am not referring to the doom and gloom that Gutman wrote. I would like all the code removed from the windows kernel that supports protected processes, because this is a huge security problem and hackers have and will exploit it. The only purpose of the protected process is for DRM and it is not needed in most environments.

Why do Vista supporters like giving programmers the ability to run processes on their computer that cannot be independently verified through debuggers and antivirus software? Wasn't Sony blasted for the rootkit that their CDs installed. At least it could be determined what the rootkits were doing. With Vista, you have to trust the developers that the code is OK.
 
panhead said:
/sigh.............

I am not referring to the doom and gloom that Gutman wrote. I would like all the code removed from the windows kernel that supports protected processes, because this is a huge security problem and hackers have and will exploit it. The only purpose of the protected process is for DRM and it is not needed in most environments.

Why do Vista supporters like giving programmers the ability to run processes on their computer that cannot be independently verified through debuggers and antivirus software? Wasn't Sony blasted for the rootkit that their CDs installed. At least it could be determined what the rootkits were doing. With Vista, you have to trust the developers that the code is OK.
Click to expand...

/sigh

This wasn't a technological decision, it was forced by the studios to use hi-def content. What else was Microsoft going to do? You can't play BluRay discs legally without this type of technology.

If you don't like this, and I'm no fan of DRM either, then run Linux and steal the content. Teach Sony a lesson and Microsoft at the same time!:p
 
heatlesssun said:
This wasn't a technological decision, it was forced by the studios to use hi-def content. What else was Microsoft going to do? You can't play BluRay discs legally without this type of technology.
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MS wasn't forced to do anything. Media Center is perfect for this DRM technology. All Windows environments should not be corrupted just for BR playback.
 
panhead said:
MS wasn't forced to do anything.
Click to expand...
If they wanted to offer high-def playback ability, they were forced to include the protections mentioned above. They had an option to not comply, but how happy do you think people would be finding out that their media center PC couldn't play HD content to their HD TV sets?
 
panhead said:
MS wasn't forced to do anything. Media Center is perfect for this DRM technology. All Windows environments should not be corrupted just for BR playback.
Click to expand...

thats a weak excuse. you know if that happened people would be whining why their 'brand new windows vista' can't play bluray discs

don't kid yourself
 


/sigh


Look at that... A MS developer who was the first to identify the Sony rootkit fiasco. Guess all MS employees don't want to feed off the brains of little bambinos.


Joe Average said:
I think from this point on that I will simply dismiss any person or comments made by a person that even mentions DRM in a post, regardless of how intelligent and thought-out the post may be aside from the ridiculous focusing on something that is there for a reason and Microsoft didn't really have much choice.
Click to expand...

Thank you, bbz. I came out swinging, a little too aggressive, a few days ago, about that. But I was beginning to think I was the only one who noticed this shallow attempt at attention by tossing around three letters.

The fact is, countless features have been named, discussed, debunked, and boasted in this thread--all of which fall inline with the thread discussion.

Yet, time and time again, one member here is repeating the same exact FUD over and over, has yet to show any concrete proof, and none of it is ON-TOPIC in the slightest. What makes it worse, is I will probably get reported to the mods once again by this poster for pointing out the obvious..

I'm gonna take a note from the gamers forums: "Screenshot or it didn't happen."
 
DeaconFrost said:
If they wanted to offer high-def playback ability, they were forced to include the protections mentioned above. They had an option to not comply, but how happy do you think people would be finding out that their media center PC couldn't play HD content to their HD TV sets?
Click to expand...

Deacon is correct. And to add to this, this DRM is not a microsoft thing. It's a MPAA thing. The same DRM requirements also apply to a set top player and a TV. Both must support HDCP and use HDMI/DVI. If the DRM on the discs ask for it the content could be down rezed if using component cables.

Apple will have to include the same thing if they want blu-ray playback as well.

All this is is support for protected content playback. If you never play a Blu-Ray disc in your computer you will know the DRM support is there. It will never affect you. You can play unprotected HD content all you want. You can rip a Blu-Ray, break the copy protection and still be unaffected by the DRM support.
 
Is Mark Russinovich a MS employee? He certainly wasn't when he discovered the Sony rootkit. Microsoft bought out his company later.
 
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