Vista

[benny!]

...
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!

[Jim]

every 10th thing I click in control panel thingies either doesn't do anything at all

Fixed this one.Ã,  I had Firefox 2.0 active when I upgraded.Ã,  I think this was a bad idea.Ã,  What's happened is there was no default application set for http:// or https:// or ftp:// protocols, or .htm or .html files.Ã,  Looks like MS use a lot of html to do things.Ã,  So basically nothing happened.Ã,  I fixed that, and more things are working
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.Ã,  Looks like either a Vista/RD bug or an ATI driver bug.Ã,  I'm talking to an MVP on Usenet to address that one.

'COM Surrogate Error'

Been uninstalling a lot of crap things, especially codecs.Ã,  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.Ã,  Haven't seen this bug for a couple of days now.Ã,  Yay!Ã,  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.Ã,  Still running a bit slow for my liking though - maybe I'll try de-activating Aero.Ã,  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.Ã,  Thrashing like mad.

Jim

[taj]

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...

[Shockwave]

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.

[Yaloopy]

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!

[Shockwave]

Nothing wrong with macs 

[Jim]

Obviously doing this upgrade fragmented the disk to hell and back.Ã,  Vista still has a defrag tool in there but it has basically no UI at all.Ã,  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.Ã,  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).Ã,  I ran it for 2 days and it did nothing.
I downloaded Perfect Drive 8 Vista Beta and used that.Ã,  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).Ã,  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.Ã,  Basically that'll create a brand new clean swap.

Taskman is pegged around 600Mb memory usage.Ã,  I'm running a web browser and a virus scanner.
I ran disk cleanup.Ã,  It didn't want to compress my old files HOORAY!Ã,  It also deleted "800Mb of files unused after Vista update".Ã,  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

[Shockwave]

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.

[Jim]

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

[Jim]

No OpenGL support at all at the moment.  Nothing wrong with ptc, it's trying to use Microsoft's software driver instead...

Jim

[taj]

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. 

[Jim]

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

[Shockwave]

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.

[rdc]

The problem is that OS makers are trying to fix the symptoms without actually finding a cure the underlying problem. I remember in electronics school (way back when), the teachers would rig the tv sets with problems that we had to fix, and the problems took some digging to find and correct. Even though Vista, and the other newish OS'es, has some nice features, it doesnââ,¬â,,¢t solve the fundamental problem that has existed since the days of Eniac: computers are hard to use because they are hardware-centric devices. Computers are basically engineering devices and must still be used as engineering devices, rather than as an appliance. Computers should be as simple to use as a television or radio, and shouldnââ,¬â,,¢t require a CS degree to operate.

What is needed is a paradigm shift. Software in general, and OS software in particular, needs to be smart enough to operate correctly on a given hardware setup. And not only operate correctly, it needs to be smart enough to help us get our work done rather than getting in the way of that work. I should be able to ââ,¬Å"tellââ,¬Â? the computer I want to write a document, and it loads the appropriate software to do it. I shouldnââ,¬â,,¢t have to search through a 100 items on the task bar to write a letter. If the computer has a problem, it should be smart enough to be able to tell me what the problem is, and help me fix it. It should learn how I work, and assist me in that work.

It is amazing to me that we were able to land on the moon using something like 16k of ram. We now have multi-processor, multi-gigabyte systems, with advanced graphics--and we are still using computers like we did in the 1950ââ,¬â,,¢s. Personally, I think we need a revolution of the mind and finally bring computers into the 21st century.

[Jim]

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

[ninogenio]

programers ehh cant live with um cant live without em 

[Ghost^BHT]

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

[lilw4t3rdr0p]

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!  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.

[slinks]

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.

[Jim]

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