izanbardprince
April 17th, 2008, 06:31 AM
After using Vista on my new system for several days now, and downloading the SP1 upgrade, I have to say I'm starting to warm up to it a little bit.
When I last tried it on my old system with a gigabyte of RAM and a single core processor, it was horribly slow, but then again, thats what everyone said in 2001 with Windows XP when your typical system had maybe a "fast" Pentium 3, and 256-512 megs of RAM, but as faster CPU's and more RAM becomes a cheap commodity, the benefits of the new OS become worth more than the performance penalty, case in point, just a few years ago when I bought a gigabyte of RAM it was $75, where the 2 extra gigs I got for this system cost me a whopping $32 ($20 after the rebate), so with 4 gigs, who cares if Vista wants to munch on 600 megs at startup?
I also do like the ability to run my video games without something like Cedega that may or may not run them, and doesn't support the latest pixel shaders and other GPU features on my card even if it does, it's also nice to have my XBOX 360 controller automatically configured, the best I could do with Ubuntu was to hack in a kernel module, then configure the buttons that weren't digital (which was both of the triggers and bumpers).
The Games Explorer is a nice feature, it lets you have all your games in one listing without having to go searching through a million start menu entries.
The new audio stack is very nice, especially if you listen to high bitrate files or CD's.
The Aero Glass compositing window manager is very nice to look at, and takes some load off the CPU, and doesn't slow down your video games; in Ubuntu I noticed that with Compiz enabled, I'd lose about 20% of my video game performance when it was enabled.
Overall Windows Vista and Mac OS X are pretty much on par, the only thing that REALLY made me grind my teeth was the UAC pop up, even when I was doing benign tasks for which it had no reason to challenge me.
That having been said, I'll probably keep Ubuntu around on my secondary hard disk, mostly in case I screw something up in Windows, or they have another WGA outage or something, plus there are a few things that I use that can run better in Linux.
I don't really mean to jab at Linux so much, but until most distributions stop requiring the end user to know every little arcane detail about it, and until some commercial software vendors start putting out some neat stuff for it, I just don't see it going anywhere...besides, I can't even teach my mom how to use Windows, I could only imagine the horrors of trying to teach her a Linux distro.
When I last tried it on my old system with a gigabyte of RAM and a single core processor, it was horribly slow, but then again, thats what everyone said in 2001 with Windows XP when your typical system had maybe a "fast" Pentium 3, and 256-512 megs of RAM, but as faster CPU's and more RAM becomes a cheap commodity, the benefits of the new OS become worth more than the performance penalty, case in point, just a few years ago when I bought a gigabyte of RAM it was $75, where the 2 extra gigs I got for this system cost me a whopping $32 ($20 after the rebate), so with 4 gigs, who cares if Vista wants to munch on 600 megs at startup?
I also do like the ability to run my video games without something like Cedega that may or may not run them, and doesn't support the latest pixel shaders and other GPU features on my card even if it does, it's also nice to have my XBOX 360 controller automatically configured, the best I could do with Ubuntu was to hack in a kernel module, then configure the buttons that weren't digital (which was both of the triggers and bumpers).
The Games Explorer is a nice feature, it lets you have all your games in one listing without having to go searching through a million start menu entries.
The new audio stack is very nice, especially if you listen to high bitrate files or CD's.
The Aero Glass compositing window manager is very nice to look at, and takes some load off the CPU, and doesn't slow down your video games; in Ubuntu I noticed that with Compiz enabled, I'd lose about 20% of my video game performance when it was enabled.
Overall Windows Vista and Mac OS X are pretty much on par, the only thing that REALLY made me grind my teeth was the UAC pop up, even when I was doing benign tasks for which it had no reason to challenge me.
That having been said, I'll probably keep Ubuntu around on my secondary hard disk, mostly in case I screw something up in Windows, or they have another WGA outage or something, plus there are a few things that I use that can run better in Linux.
I don't really mean to jab at Linux so much, but until most distributions stop requiring the end user to know every little arcane detail about it, and until some commercial software vendors start putting out some neat stuff for it, I just don't see it going anywhere...besides, I can't even teach my mom how to use Windows, I could only imagine the horrors of trying to teach her a Linux distro.