Dark Bit Factory & Gravity
GENERAL => General chat => Topic started by: Jim on November 21, 2006
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My MSDN subscription entitles me to install the final version of Windows Vista. I'll be upgrading my XP install, so heaven knows how it'll all work out. See you on the other side, with luck!
Jim
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Hehe .. good luck, mate !
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It took 8 1/2 hours :(
It's just gone 2am and I've seen the desktop for the first time.
More later.
Jim
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Wow, that doesn't sound good. Let us know what you think.
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It took 8 1/2 hours :(
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:o omg ... 8 1/2 hrs are definately quite a long time ...
I guess I wouldn't have the patience to wait and I would have abort installation
after at least 2 hrs or so :D
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vista can go die as far as I'm concerned
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vista can go die as far as I'm concerned
Havent seen / read a lot of vista yet. But if I remember the big changes (in a positiv way)
after I upgraded from Win98 to WindowsXP ... I would generally give Vista a chance.
But time will tell ... or maybe Jim ;)
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What Slinks said with cursin'.
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XP gave me nothing but problems, I prefer DOS-based systems thankyou. And what kind of specs must be needed to keep up with that god-damned graphical interface? Oh look, I'm organising my files...in 3d!!! Yes it makes all the much difference! And hey, look, I can now rotate my windows a full 360 degrees! Yay! Just what I always wanted!
Only good thing is being able to 'dog-ear' a document in order to mark its importance, and scrunch it up to show it's worthless. But 've always managed to get around with having files labeled 'important stuff' and 'useless ****', so what gives?
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I really enjoy vista. It introduces a lot of small things, useless..but finally so usefull..... Now I really don't know if I'm gonna upgrade my main pc..my 2cents...
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XP gave me nothing but problems, I prefer DOS-based systems thankyou.
From my side, XP gave me a much more stable system than Win98!
...And what kind of specs must be needed to keep up with that god-damned graphical interface? Oh look, I'm organising my files...in 3d!!! Yes it makes all the much difference! And hey, look, I can now rotate my windows a full 360 degrees! Yay! Just what I always wanted!
Hehe ... I totally understand your side. Guess we all here are at least with half of our hearts
nerds who like the command shell. But on the other hand ... in the end a nice gui is advanced.
If we (the nerds) doesn't support new gui's - we will never end up with holo-displays and stuff ;)
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From my side, XP gave me a much more stable system than Win98!
Win98 FTW! At least back then when everything went tits up you could restart your computer from the ctrl+alt+del menu. And you could actually end the programs from there as well. Now if you try, it ignores your request half the time, leaving you with all kinds of broken stuff jammed and 'not responding'. And those yellow speach bubble pieces of **** that pop up every time you install a new program/somethings not working are irritating. And disabling EVERYTHING by default just so some ****s don't go and delete their system folders is really poor.
I'm very verbal on this topic, can you tell? :P
If we (the nerds) doesn't support new gui's - we will never end up with holo-displays and stuff ;)
By that point however, computers would be so powerful they could run 20 copys of half life 2, play 5 video files, alphabetize your folders, have 40 open browser windows, 6 msn windows and still have the RAM left over for a game of solitaire. Then the interface could be as advanced as they like, but right now I'm on a computer that was £300 LAST year, and can only just handle the graphical strain of micro machines V3, and I don't feel like upgrading my computer just to get a new interface.
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I must be a luddite because I stuck with Windows98 for donkeys years, I upgraded to XP and on this notebook there was an option to have an upgrade to vista but I decided not to bother.. Knowing M$ it will have lots of bugs, the install on your PC seems to be taking forever Jim. Hope it all works out nicely for you and that the upgrade will be worth it.
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And won't you agree 98 was more friendly shockwave? Like any long time windows user, I just had to have the original looks back, none of that fancy chunky button crap for me!
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Well, the first 3 hours of that were it refusing to install correctly at all...for some reason it won't install from DVD and I had to mount the ISO image on a virtual DVD drive using PowerISO...the rest really does take that long - remember though this was an upgrade installation, I'd expect a clean install on a blank disk to go a hell of a lot quicker than that.
So far I've noticed that I've had to replace most of my installed software.
VisualStudio2003 and Nero are incompatible. Sun Java and my video driver needed updating because they kept crashing explorer. The Vista ATA driver is now 103Mb to download!
So far, and it's early days yet, the only thing I've noticed is my Windows folder is 7.2Gb.
Aero desktop looks pretty though :D
Jim
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My god Jim from the way you describe it, it sounds postively awful! It reflects that fact that Microsoft know that there will be relatively few upgrades compared to clean installs (by Dell etc). Its long been said that Intel have benefit from making software "advance". The more demands it makes on the CPU, the more intel sell CPUs. Now graphics card manufacturers are in the same position with the alpha heavy desktops. So Microsoft concentrate on support for OEMs instead of the home user, make Vista easy for them and you can sell lotds of new PCs. It makes sound business sense (from a Cartel point of view) but doesnt help me at home. In essence they dont want you to upgrade, there is instead a wider interest in you buying a new PC.
I'd prefer to stick with XP, really I cant afford to buy Vista and I agree with slinks that things are getting a little out of hand (though thats not how you put it :-). I just upgraded and bought Windows XP Home so I wont be shelling out for Vista in the near future. My god! 103Mb for drivers? I mean OK sdk, but a fundamental thing like drivers! No. It means you need a good cpu, a good gfx card, and a fast internet link. Its getting expensive.
On the other hand I heard Vista was stable and more secure than XP (but it would be, without being in huge numbers, its not a target yet). Also I guess Breakpoint will run compos on vista :-( meaning Ill be forced to upgrade or at least find somebody with vista locally. I'm cynical about the hollographic displays and such argument. Displays will develop anyway - its a very different market - but even if the argument is generalised, I see the point from a processor point of view, more power -> new techs, but O/S? I mean my compuetr seems to install dozens of processes which I have no idea what they are doing but they go off upgrading software for me so I'm forced to learn a new interface whilst gaining support for ISO-78987/IC-XX which I never use and mean time, I can no longer use the bloody thing I was using (thankyou Nero).
Uh rambling. Stop now.
Yeah so I agree with the ludites. Give me some spanners.
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Some vandals broke my windows. Does anybody know if Micro$oft sell double glasing?
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Haven't used my PC that much since I installed Vista. But I keep getting 'COM Surrogate Error' messages - God knows what that means, and about every 10th thing I click in control panel thingies either doesn't do anything at all, or explorer crashes and restarts. I think I've got rid of the BSOD though, and my remote access ssh and IIS server are working again now.
Thing I'm battling with now is two days in a row in the morning the screen's been off, deactivated, yellow LED, and it won't come back on again, despite the fact the PC's still running.
At the moment it's a debacle. Teething problems I hope.
The extra security is only really evident in the 64bit Vista apparently, which I don't have. The biggest problem with that version is it won't run 16bit apps though, so no .com files. Probably have to install MSDOS on VirtualServer to get them to run.
On the plus side, the tiny OpenGL demos and stuff posted here still works.
Jim
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SOunds like a nightmare.
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On the plus side, the tiny OpenGL demos and stuff posted here still works.
Jim
Fabulous! Best news I've heard this week - thanks Jim. Hope you get thrpough the other issues one by one. Keep us up to date please, its quite fascinating.
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On the plus side, the tiny OpenGL demos and stuff posted here still works.
Jim
That's definately an interesting news. I guess even if you do not like vista - while developing for
windows machines - it's about time to at least check if your productions works on vista.
Thanks for the info, Jim!
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every 10th thing I click in control panel thingies either doesn't do anything at all
Fixed this one. I had Firefox 2.0 active when I upgraded. I think this was a bad idea. What's happened is there was no default application set for http:// or https:// or ftp:// protocols, or .htm or .html files. Looks like MS use a lot of html to do things. So basically nothing happened. I fixed that, and more things are working :D
I'm back on IE instead of Firefox again for now...IE7 seems a lot happier under Vista, and I much prefer the way IE handles streaming video - Firefox doesn't seem to handle that at all, it just downloads files entirely and plays them, which is crap.
think I've got rid of the BSOD though
That was a modem driver that's not working properly - disabled it, no more BSOD.
Thing I'm battling with now is two days in a row in the morning the screen's been off, deactivated, yellow LED, and it won't come back on again, despite the fact the PC's still running.
This is due to accessing the PC with Remote Desktop while the monitor is off in powersave mode. Looks like either a Vista/RD bug or an ATI driver bug. I'm talking to an MVP on Usenet to address that one.
'COM Surrogate Error'
Been uninstalling a lot of crap things, especially codecs. I managed to butcher Nero 7 off the machine too, with a combination of Safe Mode and regedit and Ahead's own Nero Cleanup tool. Also ran a regclean which found about 3000 errors. Haven't seen this bug for a couple of days now. Yay! Also Explorer's crashing a lot less, but really it should be crashing NOT AT ALL thanks. Still stuck with XP Power Toys which I can't remove.
Getting there. Still running a bit slow for my liking though - maybe I'll try de-activating Aero. The other thing is Azureus is killing the virtual memory - Vista is taking 750Mb of RAM consistently, and I've 'only' got 1Gb in here. Thrashing like mad.
Jim
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Jim,
fwiw, I got the same problem with firefox and application associaition under XP with the new PC. Which is weird because I didnt (dont) on the old PC...
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Strewth, Vista takes up a lot of memory.
Good to see that you are managing to squish the bugs one by one, there's no way I am as brave as you.. No way I'd use IE7 either, fuck that.
It would be easier to buy a mac.
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I shouldn't be, but I'm surprised by the amount of RAM it uses. Unreal.
Keep with the updates, Jim, it's nice to see some first-hand experiences of Vi$ta.
It would be easier to buy a mac.
Don't ever say that, man!
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Nothing wrong with macs :o
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Obviously doing this upgrade fragmented the disk to hell and back. Vista still has a defrag tool in there but it has basically no UI at all. Also defrag is scheduled to run once a week on all drives - if you did this on XP your machine would come to a grinding halt, so Vista has the defrag running at a really low priority in the background. Well, that's a good idea, except if you've got something like Azureus running then the defrag tool will never do anything (because the disk's always in use). I ran it for 2 days and it did nothing.
I downloaded Perfect Drive 8 Vista Beta and used that. It's defragged everything in a couple of hours so we'll see if that makes any difference to the performance.
I had to reboot to defrag the swap file (which it grew from 1Gb to 2Gb, again indicating I've not got anywhere near enough RAM in here). Another way to defrag the swap file is to turn it off in the control panel, reboot, delete pagefile.sys, re-enable the swap file. Basically that'll create a brand new clean swap.
Taskman is pegged around 600Mb memory usage. I'm running a web browser and a virus scanner.
I ran disk cleanup. It didn't want to compress my old files HOORAY! It also deleted "800Mb of files unused after Vista update". Which is nice.
Running pretty smoothly now, but I've still got the Remote Desktop problem which is a real pain because I use that all the time.
Jim
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You're a brave man with more time on his hands than I have by the sound of it.
If I was to use Vista I think I'd wait until I get my next computer which won't be for a few years as I just bought this lappy.
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I'm actually really busy, the run up to Christmas is always really busy while the salesforce realises it's spent the entire year sitting around and there're actually some sales figures to meet.
My main imperative for installing Vista is because it's my job. I've been a Windows programmer since 1995 when Windows 95 came out. There's no way I'm going to lose the opportunity of being 2 or 3 months ahead of everyone with this new OS. It's a competitive edge to know the pitfalls before anyone else :)
Only thing to report today is, as we spotted with your demo, there's a problem with our PTC library, which I have in the debugger right now!
Jim
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No OpenGL support at all at the moment. Nothing wrong with ptc, it's trying to use Microsoft's software driver instead...
Jim
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Anther scener just ocntacted me, said hes struggling with vista: his advice was dont ever install it.
Its looking bad for mere mortals if the experts are struggling. ??? ??? ???
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Actually, I'm really tempted to install another PC with Vista ;), this time without the upgrade - just a straight clean install. There are obviously teething troubles. It'd be foolish to dismiss it out of hand though. I remember when DOS and Win95 were competing in the same market, all the people who really knew nothing were complaining about the slowness of Win95 compared with DOS, how hard it was to code, etc.
I shut a few of them up by building the same demo with VESA2 and DirectDraw running at exactly the same speed, just with the Win95 version being about 1/10th the code size.
You're going to hear the same things with Vista. "Microsoft have broken DirectX compatibility", "Microsoft have broken OpenGL", "It's shit", etc. I agree it's frustrating, but these things are almost certainly not true. Everyone has to just get used to the new way of doing things. It's really early days yet - it's only been in final release for for a week!
Jim
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I remember when DOS and Win95 were competing in the same market, all the people who really knew nothing were complaining about the slowness of Win95 compared with DOS, how hard it was to code, etc.
My old argument of looking at old operating systems like kickstart and amigados doesn't even stack up any more which is a shame. It's still true that my old a500 with gvp a590 was much nicer to use than all the pc's in college at that time.
What pisses me off is that Microsoft have all the money in the world, you'd assume that they'd also have some of the best programmers and they are still capable of writing a so called final release that takes up 600mb of ram and doesn't work. This is typical microsoft, there's no way I'd install vista before my next computer.
It's a shame that my argument doesn't add up any more when pc's are getting more and more powerful to put up with microsoft's operating systems. Their code will get worse and worse as computers get more and more powerful.
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I agree it's disappointing in this day and age for a 'home' computer to come up with 'program has encountered an unexpected error. error code: 0x0' or 'COM surrogate error'. That is just lazy. Even I don't know what they mean, other than something somewhere buggered up.
Jim
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programers ehh cant live with um cant live without em ;D
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I agree with RDC - seems like the technology should be able to sort things out before the user even gets a hint that there is a problem. I believe that in time there will be an OS that finds the problem and repairs itself. It will probably take up 10GB of whatever storage system is being used (holographic disk perhaps :) ) and take 5 GB memory minimum to run, and Bill gates will be billions of dollars richer
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I love that you all have found a subject that insterest you so. I like reading the long messages as they tell so much about you. Very happy! :clap: As for me... I am happy with XP for now. It seems when new windows programs come out they have some bugs and after awhile they get worked out, so I am in no hurry.
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If there was a way I'd avoid vista forever. I loved 98 and nothing will ever change that. XP pisses me off, and vista sounds like an abomination. Be fine if we had a CHOICE (bill gates least favorite thing in the world) about which version of windows we can have, but no, you have to buy the latest one! Within a year, they'll stop selling XP, and we'll all be screwed.
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What makes you rebel against Bill Gates Slinks? I mean, his software has revolutionised the world whether you like it or not, and when you were born the Internet existed, Windows had a graphical user interface...Are you grumpy because Windows was crap for you, or are you grumpy because teen angst says you should be?
Jim
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i believe if anyone of us could be in his shoes with the amount bill gates has acheived we would jump at the chance i mean he seen an opening when pcs were just taking off and he jumped at it what one of us wouldnt?
the guy is smart and smart people although not always liked get places.
the only problem ive got with the guy is he has money and i dont ;D
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http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1959740,00.html
In the Guardian today...so it must be right ;-)
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"Basically, it means that when we boot the system, we load the DLLs at random addresses," Fathi says. Hackers will no longer be able to work out where any particular block of code sits in memory, and jump to it.
Nor will intro coders ...
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Well, after reading about some of your problems with Vista Jim, and from reading that article above I can only say that I'm quite looking forward to getting my hands on a copy and lashing it on a machine. I work for a living as a computer engineer and I've gotta say as sad as it may sound I really love my job. Been messing around with computers since the good old rubber door stop spectrum 48k's, and ever since then I've been hooked. Now I know that everybody hates Bill Gates, and I know that everybody hates his software, and I know that everything he does will piss off just about everyone that owns a pc that runs windows. I personally think that up to windows XP his team of programmers have had a lot to answer for with the amount of holes and flaws they have released in their software, and about 90% of the time its a security flaw, so straight away they look like plonkers for releasing something that could put the end users data or identity in jeopardy. But as often as I hear people say, or as often as I say that Microsoft or Bill Gates is a waste of space I do have to take a step back and consider the fact that for all their faults they are largely responsible for pushing the computer market to where it is today, Just like Clive Sinclair did when he first realeased the spectrum computer. OK I know he went a bit mad and came up with those little wheeled thingys to zip you about town, but even so he was instrumental in bringing computers to the home at an affordable price. The point I'm trying to make is that although we all feel disgruntled towards what we perceive as Microsofts often lapse approach to the security of their software, just rest assured in the fact that(and I'm going out on a limb here) none of us here has ever written anything on the scale as microsoft windows, but we have all found bugs in our code at some point or another so we are all capable of making mistakes. And of course you've always got windows update when things are found to be doing things they shouldn't. Imagine what we'd be like if Microsoft released something and did nothing to patch it afterwards. Hell on earth is all I can think of. Anyway I've rambled for to long, and I've actually said something positive about microsoft which is something that I didn't think I could do..... So after I've swallowed a gallon of fairy liquid and presumably vomited a few times I'll be back......
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My mate used to windows vista beta version I think and he said it was crap( well that his view) as it was unstable as so he perfer stick to window XP.
Now then....new graphics card that come out called Geforce 8800GTX(whoa!) which is direct 10 and it will work on window vista but for some old games(like direct x 9)....will it work on window vitsa?
My thinking is that I dont think old game will work on window vista unless they have specail software that enabled old games to work on window vitsa.
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I think the plan is that Vista will support all legacy DirectX apps, so it'll run DX10 all the way down to DX1 (which so far is my experience), but if you write your game for DX10 they haven't planned to release DX10 for XP.
Jim
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Ah bloody hell, that means I will have to upgrade to Vista at some time. Most of the winning 4ks in recent years have been very quick hacks on the latest dx drivers to use new features nobody seen before.
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Gotta pull the punters in somehow ;). I'm quite used to Vista now but Aero isn't enough to make me want to upgrade at work. If DX10 becomes a standard, for games or productivity, then I (and everyone else) will have to upgrade. If games all end up as DX10 everyone will need to upgrade- that's how '95 took off.
I know it p's you off, but loading dlls at random addresses is the best thing Microsoft have ever done for security. Nonetheless, I think the simple hack is that even though the address is random, every process shares dlls at the same address once they are loaded - ie. it's fixed at the first time the dll is loaded. So it's just a case of LoadLibrary-ing the dll, getting its base address and patching your sploit before applying it ;D
Jim
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I know it p's you off, but loading dlls at random addresses is the best thing Microsoft have ever done for security.
Actually it doesnt p me off cos Im not that good. It evens the field a bit for me :-)
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I HATE win 98, it crashed all the time. :whack:
Got 2k and XP, prefer 2k even if it takes longer to start it seems to be more stable.
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New video driver from AMD end of last week...still no OpenGL...They've got six weeks to fix this until everyone starts screaming at them (that's when Vista is publically released).
I'm pretty sure I'm going to spend a day this festive holiday doing a clean install of Vista. My machine's still a bit of a mess though the original problems have all calmed down. Still have terrible problems with Remote Desktop, but even though I've read the web and usenet, it seems I'm the only one. Maybe I too should wait until after the official release and other folks start clamouring for patches?
Jim
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Was it the same situation with beta XP or is the release quality of beta lower in your opinion Jim?
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XP was a nightmare too. And 2000 was even worse. You couldn't really use NT or 98 drivers on 2000, but you could sometimes get a 2000 driver to play on XP. With both it was 6-12 months before everything had drivers. Windows 95 was the funniest, there was just NOTHING. They were all pretty stable though.
I'm sure there's just something screwed up on my system...It's 3 years old, has had various bits of spyware (yeah, I know, how did that happen), hundreds if not thousands of programs added and removed...I'm not really surprised that I've probably got something legacy installed that Vista doesn't like. That's what caused all my initial problems.
Jim
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In search of a stable OS, I've reinstalled Vista and deleted my old XP install. Took under 45 mins to do a clean install, compared with 9 hours for the upgrade! I am definitely recommending that people don't even bother thinking about upgrading a previous install.
Jim
PS. ATI - you have less than 5 weeks to get your OpenGL drivers out...
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It took quite a while to reload my software, but probably less than the 9 hours it took to do an upgrade. And now I have a WORKING PC! All the things that were really broken are now OK. As long as I install things in steps and spot if something goes wrong everything's running perfectly at the moment.
I'm not putting on any more ATI beta drivers, I'm using the built-in one that comes from Microsoft. Means my gfx are a bit choppier right now, but at least it's had some testing!
Jim
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Everything's been solid since I reinstalled. The only recurring issue I've had is I managed to get a bad url in the IE7 history file, and every time it came up in the autocomplete bar IE7 crashed. Clearing the history fixed that.
Also, ATI released a full-featured Vista driver on 29th January (yay!), so I'll be installing that tonight :)
Anyone queue up outside PC World at midnight to get a copy?
Jim
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Is OpenGL stuff running ok?
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People who queued to buy this amaze me. !! :clap: All I can say really.
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->Dr_D, all that stuff about Microsoft removing OpenGL or only allowing OpenGL to be layered on top of Direct3D are FUD. OpenGL is a first class API under Vista. The default Microsoft OpenGL is actually not bad and *is* layered on D3D, but this ATI driver includes a full ATI OpenGL driver. So far everything works.
Jim
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Sweet! :updance:
I give you karma stuffs for make man happy! :2funny:
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Bah!
I gave up on my ATI X1600 on Vista and bought a new PC, since I'm sick of reporting the bug to ATI that the OpenGL accumulation buffer doesn't work (it uses the front buffer as source instead of the buffer set by glReadBuffer).
Now I've got an nVidia 8600GT. Yay!, you might think. Unfortunately, multithreaded OpenGL doesn't work there. There's some race condition in the driver that means 8/10 times it doesn't display anything.
Both cards with the same EXEs work perfectly under XP.
Anyone know any engineers at either company I can have a chat with? I promise to provide source/examples.
Jim
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A lot of them hang out over at opengl.org. Have you tried posting a topic there?
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I think Vista is pretty cool, I had to install it after my PC got hacked by a back door trojan.
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When did you get hacked matey?
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Last week, just as I was getting back at the PC. Sods law.
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Good idea Dr_D. I'll get my samples together and post them there.
Jim
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I've jsut got vista, and except the lag i like it :)
luckely the pc i got with it is pretty powerful :P
I've got a 8800gts and i havent had a single problem with the graphics!