Windows Vista: more than just a pretty face

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-03-21 11:02am

ArsTechnica has published one of their in-depth OS articles for your perusal, this time on Vista under the hood. This is Part I, more parts will come and conclude with a full review.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-03-21 11:15am

Quite interesting, I might move my Vista adoptation date to this summer.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-03-21 11:41am

Their comments on 'Flip 3D' are pretty much what I thought when I first saw it in action - great, it's like Expose... only broken and clumsy. Why didn't they either have it as an option (like anyone who cares doesn't *already* think they incorporated OSX ideas) or at least let people implement it themselves. The article seems to suggest this isn't going to happen.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-03-21 11:44am

I wonder if PeterB will start talking about the Win64 API in a later article - he's blasted Microsoft's poor API design many times in Ars' OpenForum.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2007-03-21 12:13pm

Stark wrote: Why didn't they either have it as an option (like anyone who cares doesn't *already* think they incorporated OSX ideas) or at least let people implement it themselves. The article seems to suggest this isn't going to happen.

Microsoft already has a Flip3d replacement written by whatever team does the Intellipoint software which normally goes with thier optical mice they sell.

I guess it is the classical 'left hand doesnt know what the right hand is doing' type of thing.

Xisiqomelir · Post by **Xisiqomelir** » 2007-03-21 01:46pm

Destructionator XIII wrote:My god, Vista is awesome. The new graphics and sound foundations are things I really like, even as a guy who doesn't often use graphics and sound. Scaling is a good thing, and independent volume controls with low latency mixing? Mega win.

Welcome to 2002. Enjoy your stay.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2007-03-21 03:46pm

The scaling of text and stuff w/o pixelation on WPF apps is really what interests me about Vista- everything else elicits a meh....

AFAIK, MacOS doesn't do this until the next version

Independent volume controls

I thought all windows apps had their own volume slider- or does that only change the master? I know on Linux the volume slider on ALSA applications doesn't affect the master (unfortunately, audio on Linux is rather painful- on Ubuntu Feisty, once again, sound recording through the mike does not owrk w/ my onboard audio, and I never figured out how to record the output either- perhaps I need to grab an old sblive card - in addtion there are a slew of legacy OSS apps which lock the onboard sound card (not applicable if I use the sblive, but there are only so many PCI slots))

For low latency mixing, I suppose there is jackd, but that locks the sound card for everything that doesn't use jackd on Linux - not being an audio person, I really don't see the benefit over using the alsa dmix device .

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-03-21 03:48pm

Very few Windows applications have per-application sound sliders. Games and media players are the obvious examples, but other then that, I can't think of any. I can't count the number of times I've wanted something like this, when I turn up my speakers to hear a movie, only to get a giant BEEP from some IM program.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2007-03-21 03:50pm

Gaim has a volume slider (as of the latest beta which is included w/ Ubuntu Feisty), and there's a windows port.... I usually do the reverse and max out the sound on gaim and crank down my media stuff.

I haven't really encountered many other apps that I actually use that have sound and no volume slider (perhaps some minesweeper-like little games and openoffice, and I rarely encounter files that have sound in them (thankfully, it's annoying anyway)

I suppose one could hack up something using LD_PRELOAD for the apps that don't have volume controls, but of course, that'd be a hack...

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2007-03-21 07:04pm

Yeah, Vista got a huuuuge paynus. I've only had it for a week and am trying to work out the kinks, but the experience is... above average at least.

Fact is you don't need 2 gigs of memory for top performance in Vista, period. Just one G will do the trick. You need not a Core 2 Duo, an A64 Venice is working fine for me. I've seen Vista, Aero and all, running fine on laptops (and mass-market desktops) with 512 megs, low power Turion and 7300le. Integrated video might grant choppy performance. The cost for running Vista at full potential is not large at all.

Source engine performance in Vista vs XP is anywhere from 5 or 10% in my experience. This is when Nvidia's drivers decide to act right. I think that's the root of most people's performance problems: Creative and NV's drivers. I had to uninstall my X-fi because it was unloading everything onto the CPU, killing performance in games AND on the desktop. Though this isn't entirely Creative's fault, they were supposed to have a workaround, a Directsound wrap of some sort, but it isn't working worth dick.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-03-21 07:07pm

I'm curious about the 'lowend' experience myself. If it runs tolerably on 512mb that's much better than I would have expected.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-03-21 07:46pm

Stark wrote:I'm curious about the 'lowend' experience myself. If it runs tolerably on 512mb that's much better than I would have expected.

Vista on 512MB is painful.

Pint0 Xtreme · Post by **Pint0 Xtreme** » 2007-03-21 08:32pm

I've been testing Vista on my old machine and it's pissing me off. The Vista compatible sound card drivers aren't ready yet and the XP ones are crapping out my sound at the moment. Vista occasionally freezes up. Most of the time, I have to restart the computer and on a few occasions, it's recovered from it citing a video driver problem. So I decided to update my video drivers (GeForce FX5600) from the NVIDIA website but during the install, it says it cannot find the drivers for my configuration. I mean, WTF?

The machine that I'm using Vista on is a P4 2.7G with 1G of memory. I'm currently running Vista Business 32-bit.

Einhander Sn0m4n · Post by **Einhander Sn0m4n** » 2007-03-21 09:00pm

Ace Pace wrote:Very few Windows applications have per-application sound sliders. Games and media players are the obvious examples, but other then that, I can't think of any. I can't count the number of times I've wanted something like this, when I turn up my speakers to hear a movie, only to get a giant BEEP from some IM program.

I cannot stress enough how overdue this feature is, IMO. I usually turn all IM sounds off to avoid this, but it's still annoying all the same to have to do this.

Yes, I want my game and music to be loud almost to the point of clipping (so I can turn down the volume on the speaker itself) and not have Explorer or IE7 (should I decide or be forced by some stupid anti-firefox-bigot website to use it) make a shit-ton of racket when I navigate around. That's what the computer case fan is there for

Resinence · Post by **Resinence** » 2007-03-21 11:58pm

Right now with aero and the sidebar, dreamview etc turned on my Vista is using 364mb. If you set it up properly I can see it working on 512mb, not very well though. Also, I run all of my games in Vista without problems, only thing you have to remember is when you install a game set it to "Disable desktop composition" so that aero is turned off while you're running it. I was expecting vista to suck terribly performance wise, but I must say; I'm impressed. The new graphics and sound system actually appears to work

Glocksman · Post by **Glocksman** » 2007-03-22 01:51am

My gripes about Vista have more to do with petty annoyances that individually don't mean very much, but taken as a whole just piss me off.
Two examples are the networked printers bug that can (and has in my case) make Windows Explorer crash and the bug where it won't remember my folder view preferences when I hit the 'Apply to all folders' button WRT using the 'open' command in apps. What it does is bring up a file browser dialog using fucking icons, not detail view, and I can't find a way to set it to use detail view only

Frankly, if I wanted a Fisher-Price Activity Center OS, I'd drink the Kool-Aid and buy a Mac.

And before anyone asks, yes, this install is a 100% legit install of Vista Business 'Express Upgrade'* on a Dell Latitude D820 laptop.

The minor annoyances bugged me so much that I wound up going back to XP Pro.
Thank God I imaged the XP install before trying Vista, otherwise I'd have spent several hours putting everything back on instead of 15 minutes.

It's too bad, because there's a lot to like about Vista, but I got the distinct impression of using a work in progress instead of a finished product.

*It's a clean install after a format of the drive, so any lingering XP issues aren't the problem

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2007-03-22 03:06am

To be honest, there are a few areas where its easy to get that impression (yeah, shock horror considering my previous defense of Vista and all). For example, the shell slideshow (used in Gallery and in the default picture viewer) can easily get screwed up to the point of crashing on changing of any setting or attempting to exit. Not really that huge a deal for me since I do the three finger salute to it (ctrl-alt-del, task manager, kill process), but it would be interesting to see how a novice would deal with it - he would probably consider it a system crash since it doesn't respond to alt-tab or the windows key or anything else to get back to the taskbar.

This instability seems tied to the crappy thumbnail generator which they still haven't got right for movies and so it crashes on basically anything not in MS's codecs - the worst part being that I can't seem to find a way to kill just the movie thumbnails and not all thumbnails (picture thumbnails work reasonably well). There was a way on XP by unregistering the movie thumbnailing .dll, but I've yet to find a similar method for Vista. Besides Slideshow, it can also cause big problems if you want to do anything to the file it crashed on (move, delete, rename, etc.), possibly necessitating a reset to release the file from the generators clutches, since none of the deblocking programs seem to be able to release it.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2007-03-22 06:44am

I haven't had that problem Netko. I don't know if this would be a solution for you, but I've installed both the 32-bit and 64-bit (I'm running 64-bit Vista) versions of ffdshow, which has codecs for damn near everything under the sun. The thumbnail generator should be able to handle non-MS codec files after you install those two.