DescentBB

Posted: **Thu Sep 06, 2007 2:06 am**

To be honest, really starting to regret going to vista regardless of whether it was 32 or 64 bit.

Had to post a huge rant about it.

http://www.korrupted.net/blog/?p=228

Sometimes I get caught up in the latest and greatest toys and the most capabilities when building a new pc that sometimes I can make some pretty bonehead decisions.

Has anyone else here made the initial move and now starting to regret it?

Posted: **Thu Sep 06, 2007 6:51 am**

Not I, I knew better.

You forgot one:

10. System is infected with with DRM.

Posted: **Thu Sep 06, 2007 9:33 am**

64-bit is really pointless on the desktop.

that being said, vista isn't really there yet, 32 or 64-bit.

Posted: **Thu Sep 06, 2007 9:40 am**

fliptw wrote:64-bit is really pointless on the desktop.

that being said, vista isn't really there yet, 32 or 64-bit.

Well, in a 32 bit environment, a program can only address two gigs of memory. Under a 64 bit environment, it can access much more. My reason for choosing 64 was primarily this reason. Photo editing, and in the near future, video editing as well. But man, talk about icing on the cake. It only took one small thing to make me flip

Posted: **Thu Sep 06, 2007 9:47 am**

for both video and photo editing I'd get a mac before getting vista.

Posted: **Thu Sep 06, 2007 11:27 am**

I have Vista, though for free from my university. I have a second hard drive set up with it so I can go in and play around with it ever once in a while as a computer enthusiast. I cant see myself using it as a primary OS because the bloat is just unbearable. It took Vista half an hour to shut my computer down before I finally resorted to hitting the power button instead. It required some research and tweaking to get Vista to behave the way I want it to behave, but in doing so Vista no longer works as advertised. It merely became a more bloated and broken version of XP. Innovation is at a minimum. Out of the box it is very bloated and its development has been hampered by internal company politics. 5 years, a total re-write of the code, and *this* is the best they can come up with?

Until Microsoft gets its management together and cuts the bloat in their development process, dont expect anything better to come out in the future. They made fun of IBM for being a fat corporate pig in the early 90's, and now they have become that very pig.

I could instead see myself using the latest Linux distro as my primary OS, thanks to the latest advances on Wine and a feature which was FINALLY implemented after so many years of Linux where if your graphics settings failed, instead of being dumped at a command prompt and not knowing what to do, you are presented with a \"safe mode\" GUI. If Linux will keep on making these kinds of advances, then Linux will be a very potent threat to Windows.

The Linux people should thank MS, as they are drawing Windows users to explore Linux as an alternative.

Posted: **Thu Sep 06, 2007 1:09 pm**

I'm learning Ubuntu linux right now, and loving it. Only have one program I can't do without that I can't get to run under wine yet.

When MS shoved \"Windows Genuine Advantage\" onto my XP desktop during an update, I decided that was it. Time to switch operating systems.

When the WGA glitch threatened to shut down a bunch of innocent users computers for piracy, just because there was a glitch on microsoft's side, I felt quite affirmed in that decision.

I will NOT be using Vista ever, it's just XP with even MORE built in DRM.

Posted: **Thu Sep 06, 2007 2:41 pm**

Just read that Microsquish is already working on a new OS for release around 2010? or so. Thankfully many computer makers are still installing XP upon request. Most gamers think Vista is a dog and Gates can't wait to unload another bloated OS on us in the near future.

Even worse, he wants to go to an annuity model for his software, where you pay to rent it monthly!

Posted: **Thu Sep 06, 2007 3:04 pm**

rumor floating that the new windows is going to be called simply Windows 7

Posted: **Thu Sep 06, 2007 3:22 pm**

I think that's just the code name, IIRC... I can't imagine Microsoft doing an OS well enough to get away with just giving it a relatively insignificant number.

Posted: **Thu Sep 06, 2007 3:39 pm**

ahh okay

Posted: **Thu Sep 06, 2007 4:31 pm**

tunnelcat wrote:Even worse, he wants to go to an annuity model for his software, where you pay to rent it monthly!

Hmm... so its forging its own final nail in the coffin, nice...

Posted: **Thu Sep 06, 2007 5:18 pm**

My buddy has a hacker version of Vista 64 without the DRM, the backdoors, and snooping/deleting. The core concepts of the OS with the money grubbing aspects removed, (once all his drivers were available), actually made for an noticeable difference in performance over XP. Add the crap and voila a performance hit.

I too am exploring Linux... I like it.

Posted: **Mon Sep 10, 2007 10:57 am**

We've been getting new Lenovos in at work preloaded from the factory with Vista (and I'm happily wiping them and putting XP Pro on

)

Anyways, we timed one of the Lenovo X61 laptops from power on to desktop... Took 10 minutes with Vista Business.

Posted: **Mon Sep 10, 2007 11:21 am**

Don't let me stop you from ranting about Vista, but your arguments against 32 vs 64 bit seem a bit off.

Most 32 bit applications will install, but they can’t address memory in excess of 2 gigs.

Correct. That is the difference between 32-bit addressable space and 64-bit. With 32-bit, I have 4 bytes for a pointer. The first bit is used by the OS, which leaves 2^31 or 2 billion individual bytes I can address. Without changing the size of pointers at compile time, there is no way to get more addressable space here. This is true of Vista, XP, Linux, Mac, Fantasy OS 12.0

Try coming up with just ONE operating system next time. Intel and AMD have processors that run either 64 or 32 bit code, yet you can’t do that with your operating system and drivers and certain software.

That's what the 64-bit version of Vista is. It will run 32-bit code under a 64-bit OS in what's called Windows on Windows (WoW).

You can't wave a magic wand and have 32-bit applications address more space. If you could, there wouldn't be a need for a 64-bit OS.

Internet explorer 7 crashes ALL of the time.

Try this:
Start (Vista Button) -> Type solutions -> Select Problem Reports and Solutions.
Click View problem history and scroll to IE.
Right click and choose \"Check for Solution\" and then \"View Solution\"

If IE is crashing all the time, chances are you've installed a bad add in.

Posted: **Mon Sep 10, 2007 1:45 pm**

i thought 32bit could address something like 3.2 GB of Memory?

Posted: **Mon Sep 10, 2007 2:32 pm**

There's a boot flag you can set to let you do it in Windows but not every application plays nice with it so it's off by default.

Posted: **Mon Sep 10, 2007 3:36 pm**

i didnt want to know how to do it, i was just inquiring that i thought it was like 3.2GB of memory

Posted: **Mon Sep 10, 2007 7:22 pm**

Gee, lot of half-knowledge here

Here's an excerpt from a book called "Inside Windows 2000". This is still true for XP & Vista 32.

Chapter 1 - Concepts & Tools wrote:Windows 2000 implements a virtual memory system based on a flat (linear) 32bit address space. Thirty-two bits of address space translates into 4 GB of virtual memory. On most systems, Windows 2000 allocates half this address space (the lower half of the 4-GB virtual address space, from x00000000 through x7FFFFFFF) to processes for their unique private storage and uses the other half (the upper half, addresses x80000000 through xFFFFFFFF) for its own protected operating system memory utilization. The mappings of the lower half change to reflect the virtual address space of the currently executing process, but the mappings of the upper half always consist of the operating system's virtual memory. Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Datacenter Server support a boot-time option (the /3GB qualifier in Boot.ini) that gives processes running specially marked programs (the large address space aware flag must be set in the header of the executable image) a 3-GB private address space (leaving 1 GB for the operating system). This option allows applications such as database servers to keep larger portions of a database in the process address space, thus reducing the need to map subset views of the database. Figure 1-2 shows the two virtual address space layouts supported by Windows 2000.

[X]

Figure 1-2 Address space layouts supported by Windows 2000

Although 3 GB is better than 2 GB, it's still not enough virtual address space to map very large (multigigabyte) databases. To address this need, Windows 2000 has a new mechanism called Address Windowing Extensions (AWE), which allows a 32-bit application to allocate up to 64 GB of physical memory and then map views, or windows, into its 2-GB virtual address space. Although using AWE puts the burden of managing mappings of virtual to physical memory on the programmer, it does solve the immediate need of being able to directly access more physical memory than can be mapped at any one time in a 32-bit process address space. The long-term solution to this address space limitation is 64-bit Windows.

Recall that a process's virtual address space is the set of addresses available for the process's threads to use. Virtual memory provides a logical view of memory that might not correspond to its physical layout. At run time the memory manager, with assistance from hardware, translates, or maps, the virtual addresses into physical addresses, where the data is actually stored. By controlling the protection and mapping, the operating system can ensure that individual processes don't bump into one another or overwrite operating system data. Figure 1-3 illustrates three virtually contiguous pages mapped to three discontiguous pages in physical memory.

[X]

Figure 1-3 Mapping virtual memory to physical memory

Because most systems have much less physical memory than the total virtual memory in use by the running processes (2 GB or 3 GB for each process), the memory manager transfers, or pages, some of the memory contents to disk. Paging data to disk frees physical memory so that it can be used for other processes or for the operating system itself. When a thread accesses a virtual address that has been paged to disk, the virtual memory manager loads the information back into memory from disk. Applications don't have to be altered in any way to take advantage of paging because hardware support enables the memory manager to page without the knowledge or assistance of processes or threads.

Details of the implementation of the memory manager, including how address translation works and how Windows 2000 manages physical memory, are described in detail in Chapter 7.

Posted: **Mon Sep 10, 2007 9:35 pm**

yeah but all that is talking about virtual memory is it not?

Posted: **Mon Sep 10, 2007 10:00 pm**

ok, this is how it works.

yes 32-bits maxes out at 4 GB, and if it was the only thing running on a computer, a single program can access all of it. provided it could fit all it needs inside that 4 GB.

however, we are talking a multi-programing operating system, at any given time there the kernel is running, and another program. the kernel needs its own memory to do its work, most operating systems by default give it 2 GB on 32-bit processors, leaving the 2 GB for each program to use all to itself.

Thats the mini-coles notes version, if you want to, go read up on virtual memory.

Posted: **Mon Sep 10, 2007 11:07 pm**

AceCombat wrote:yeah but all that is talking about virtual memory is it not?

The physical memory is under total control of the OS. Virtual memory is the only memory any application ever gets. Still is addressed the same way physical memory is, actually for an app there's no way to tell the difference (hence "virtual")

Posted: **Tue Sep 11, 2007 5:05 am**

ahhh okay

im just a hardware junkie

Posted: **Tue Sep 11, 2007 9:14 am**

There was a really good article about 32 bit operating systems, how much of the 4 gigs it takes up, and then reallocating the other 2 gigs to apps. Maybe not exactly, but pretty much along those lines. Found it when doing some research for a solution to my supreme commander crashing once it hit 2 gigs of memory usage.

I'll see if I can find it again. Right now, I'm installing vista 32 bit in a virtual machine so for these apps that are throwing a fit, I can just run them in there. I also have a hard drive in the system that I originally meant to use as a mirror raid, but didn't set it up before I installed. And once you enable raid after you install vista, it bluescreen's immediately.

A lot of my problems aren't entirely Microsoft's fault. Especially when it comes to this Asus Extreme motherboard. Blue screens were VERY common until I tamed the motherboard with some bios flashes. Haven't had many issues with the blue screens relating to my memory after I applied a fix from Microsoft.

I PRAY that all of the fixes that I've installed from Microsoft are rolled into the service pack.

Posted: **Tue Sep 11, 2007 12:36 pm**

Shades of Granite Bay and ATI here. My gad I can't imagine patching 200+ systems like that.

Posted: **Tue Sep 11, 2007 1:12 pm**

But wait, theres more:

http://slashdot.org/articles/07/09/11/1615211.shtml

Posted: **Tue Sep 11, 2007 1:46 pm**

what a crock of horseshat

Posted: **Tue Sep 11, 2007 9:36 pm**

Top Wop wrote:But wait, theres more:

http://slashdot.org/articles/07/09/11/1615211.shtml

Hoax: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/ ... vista.html

Microsoft knows that if they lose their monopoly, then they lose their business model.

Posted: **Fri Sep 14, 2007 9:49 am**

Something some of you might be missing about 32bit address space limitations is: each application gets it's own 2/4 GB of virtual memory, the system doesn't share the same 4 GB for everything. It is virtual so each process gets its own, this is why you can run many programs that each use up to 2 GB of virtual address space in windows with no problems (other than it will probably be slow).

It isn't like windows has 2 GB of address space for itself and 2 GB of address space for all applications. Each running process has 4 GB of address space that windows reserves 2 GB of for itself and leaves the remaining 2 GB for the application.

Yeah, that means if you have 64 processes running, in theory you could be allocating up to 256 GB of memory even in a 32 bit OS.

Posted: **Sat Sep 15, 2007 9:16 pm**

Well, after all of my troubles with 3rd party (and some Microsoft applications), I decided to go back to a 32 bit operating system. Here's one of the first things that I noticed about the memory that the system see's.

Whereas, Vista 64 can see the full 4 gigs of ram. Ouch!

Posted: **Sun Sep 16, 2007 2:45 am**

Yep, the "missing" memory is overlayed by the I/O address space -- it's how the system interfaces with devices like the chipset, video card and such. There are tricks to shrink that a bit, can't remember the details tho.

Krom wrote:Yeah, that means if you have 64 processes running, in theory you could be allocating up to 256 GB of memory even in a 32 bit OS.

As the sum of all Virtual memory, yes, sort of. IIRC there is only one system address space. So it's really only 2Gb * processes + 2Gb system. And of course there's still only 2Gb per process usable and max. 4 Gb physical memory (- I/O space) at all.

Posted: **Sun Sep 16, 2007 3:45 am**

PAE can raise the physical memory limit, I thought?

Posted: **Sun Sep 16, 2007 10:11 pm**

I think I read something in either PC Magazine or The Code Project: you know your new OS is in trouble when people are still coming into stores begging for a system with XP installed. People are also having trouble installing the downloaded Vista; it gets to a certain point, a reboot I believe, and the best the MS tech recommends for the repair is to put in the Vista DVD (which the user doesn't have, of course) or get one from a friend (many of which don't have it yet). Also, MS really blew the opportunity to do anything really big with the new OS, save maybe for DirectX 10 or the pretty Aero interface--woo. I'm just wondering how long my 7-year-old system can hold out.

Posted: **Mon Sep 17, 2007 8:00 am**

Almost every comment on Vista these days makes me more and more glad I hoarded a bunch of the XP Pro licenses that had eventually drifted my way...

Posted: **Mon Sep 17, 2007 8:31 am**

Krom wrote:Almost every comment on Vista these days makes me more and more glad I hoarded a bunch of the XP Pro licenses that had eventually drifted my way...

But unless you can keep automatic update and WGA off of those machines, MS has the power to turn them off remotely when they decide to force people to switch to Vista.

We don't KNOW that they will do that, but it bugs me that they can.

Posted: **Mon Sep 17, 2007 8:33 am**

Vista and XP

If you get Vista - get it with a New computer
Keep your old one with XP for the real work

If you can Not but you still want Vista - make sure your PC has 2 HDs (500gb/1Tb) Install XP on 1 Drive then Install Vista and Second Drive

IMHO Vista = Windows ME (NT FLavor)

Posted: **Mon Sep 17, 2007 3:33 pm**

Kilarin wrote:But unless you can keep automatic update and WGA off of those machines, MS has the power to turn them off remotely when they decide to force people to switch to Vista.

We don't KNOW that they will do that, but it bugs me that they can.

If they tried to do that, I guarantee lawsuits would fly faster than someone tripping in a wal-mart parking lot. Everyone would get involved, especially since the vast majority of the federal, state, and local government is still using XP (or even older versions of windows).

Posted: **Mon Sep 17, 2007 5:49 pm**

Krom wrote:If they tried to do that, I guarantee lawsuits would fly faster than someone tripping in a wal-mart parking lot.

Possibly, it depends on how many XP users are left by that time.

Also, on what tactic they take. If they just decide they won't allow XP to install, and claim they are doing it to "protect the web", who knows?

Hopefully thy won't try anything like that, BUT, I'm moving to Ubuntu anyway. I'd rather use software where I don't have to trust a corporation to behave rationally and benevolently.

Posted: **Mon Sep 17, 2007 9:09 pm**

You have to make an image of an xp install while the activation servers are still running, activate, and burn the image.

Vista will sit on a spare machine and only used for writing/testing .net code.

Posted: **Tue Sep 18, 2007 12:47 am**

DescentBB

Really starting to regret going vista 64.

Really starting to regret going vista 64.

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