I now have Vista...

[Zachron]

...or Vista has me. Whatever the case, it's a new experience for me, and I'm fortunate enough to have it with a computer that supports it, and I'd have to say it's pretty nice so far. Best I can tell it's not that Vista is a bad OS so much that it wants a high end machine to have it. Since I have said machine, I'll put off "upgrading" to WinXP for a while. Though there are some questions it raises, one of which I can think of off the top of my head. Does Wesnoth do too well under Vista? The last time I played Wesnoth it was under WinXp, so I can't be sure. If this remains an unknown I might just give my input.

[ADmiral-N]

I don't know about Wesnoth on Vista, but about the experience:
Just wait until you have to confront a legacy application with Vista's User Access Control (or whatever it's called)

[Buddy Jimm]

I know a guy who's using 1.4.4 under Vista. Shouldn't be much trouble.

(Famous last words)

[Dave]

Vista is an "okay" OS, but does it really compare to the latest versions of Ubuntu or MacOSX?

Also, even if Vista is "okay", I wonder if it signals problems with Microsoft's entire model of trying to rebuild an OS every five years or so. Vista is clearly a step down from XP, and a major disappointment in terms of features. Whatever comes next is likely to be worse again. I don't know how sustainable the entire process is.

David

[Jodwin]

Just wait until you have to confront a legacy application with Vista's User Access Control (or whatever it's called)

Of course every smart Vista user would disable UAC if they are going to stick with the OS. After disabling UAC and Aero it's not much different from XP running on classic theme (save for system requirements).

[Livor]

Best I can tell it's not that Vista is a bad OS so much that it wants a high end machine to have it.

High end is a bit of a stretch. http://shop3.frys.com/product/5622601
One problem is that you will need administrator access to write to Program Files. Since Wesnoth writes the user data to your program files in Windows, you will to ok it with UAC.

Of course every smart Vista user would disable UAC if they are going to stick with the OS.

I don't really understand this attitude. To me, UAC is a feature that Windows needed to catch up with every other operating system. UAC serves the same function as su, but you don't hear people complaining about having to type su or sudo to write to anywhere else but the user directory.

[dontano]

Surviving at Vista won't be an easy task... at all. And I was the one who rejected XP without knowing what the future was bringing on.
In my opinion, Microsoft is good just for making Xbox 360.

[AI]

Adding a sudo-analogue was long overdue, but UAC is the most braindead implementation of sudo ever created.

Just wait until you have to confront a legacy application with Vista's User Access Control (or whatever it's called)

Of course every smart Vista user would disable UAC if they are going to stick with the OS. After disabling UAC and Aero it's not much different from XP running on classic theme (save for system requirements).

So why run vista?

[Lizard]

I run wesnoth under Vista and it never crashed (1.4). But When you install wesnoth on c:/programs/wesnoth/ the UAC will save you userdata to C:\Users\Zachron\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Wesnoth, that's quite annoying for making UMC.

[Sangel]

From what I've seen, the new service pack makes Vista pretty much useable - fairly stable, reasonably fast, with a decent mix of modern features. When it came out, though, it was a nightmare. One of my college roomates installed it, ran one of his old XP-compatible programs, and found his hard-drive completely corrupted. Thankfully, he kept a backup, but when he reinstalled his OS and programs, he sure didn't install Vista.

As Dave points out, Vista simply doesn't add enough important features, especially compared to truly modern operating systems like Ubuntu or MacOS X. Thus, Microsoft has been forced to implement questionable tie-ins ("Halo" games which only work on Vista, for no apparent reason, etc) to try and channel people into upgrading.

[Ken_Oh]

Best I can tell it's not that Vista is a bad OS so much that it wants a high end machine to have it.

High end is a bit of a stretch. http://shop3.frys.com/product/5622601

Sure, that machine could run it, with a -whole- GB of RAM to run everything else other than the OS.

I do have a friend who's running Vista fine. He's got 6 gig of RAM. On the other hand, I know someone with a new laptop with Vista and it works a little slower than my old machine that's running Windows ME.

[Livor]

Sure, that machine could run it, with a -whole- GB of RAM to run everything else other than the OS.

Hopefully, it would use all of the available RAM. http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/vista ... hood.ars/4

Here's a paragraph from the article:

Vista has a prefetching mechanism of its own, called SuperFetch. It's far more aggressive than XP's prefetching. Where XP would arrange files on disk to ensure that they can be read quickly, Vista will go ahead and read files into memory preemptively. For example, if it sees that at 9:00 AM on a Monday morning you log in and start Outlook to check your mail, Vista can preload Outlook; it will read all the programs and libraries that Outlook needs so that they're resident in RAM. This means that when you click Outlook's icon to start it, most of the data the operating system needs is already available in memory, so you no longer have to wait so long for the program to load. The downside to this? Vista shows much higher RAM usage numbers than its predecessor.

There's no point having unused RAM when you can be using it all.

[AI]

It's called "disk caching" in *nix and linux has had it for ages.

It's listed separately in many tools:

Code: Select all

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        503192     482048      21144          0      16128     236404
-/+ buffers/cache:     229516     273676
Swap:      1052216     149896     902320

And it's quickly reclaimed if another program needs it.

[Livor]

It's called "disk caching" in *nix and linux has had it for ages.

It's listed separately in many tools:

Code: Select all

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        503192     482048      21144          0      16128     236404
-/+ buffers/cache:     229516     273676
Swap:      1052216     149896     902320

And it's quickly reclaimed if another program needs it.

I think the problem is that Vista does not report it separately. It leads to confusion about how much memory a program is taking up. I realize that all operating systems have a page cache. I'm talking about Vista loading programs into the cache in advance. In XP for example, programs are only added to the cache after they have been started for the first time. Are there any other operating systems that do something similar to "SuperFetch"? This is not a rhetorical question; I am interested in any other operating systems that do this.