MS admits Vista is bloatware

King Harold · Post by **King Harold** » Mon 29 Oct, 2007 11:51 am

@Benryves:
Well the RAM requirement comes from trying to install Vista on a virtualbox with only 256MB allocated for it, Vista just refuses to install (instead of turning off a couple of RAM eating features..)
Weird XP that it runs badly on 512MB though.. It should work fine on anything over 100MB (tested in VirtualBox) of course 100MB RAM will be slow if you'd run a couple of programs, but for just XP it's fine
Also, not only does Vista with 512MB RAM completely stuff the RAM full (ok, acceptable) but it also makes a huge pagefile (which is not acceptable because it is insanely slow)
Those bloggers probably don't know that you can tell XP to use as much RAM as it can before using the pagefile as well..

So, I'd say Vista is not worth anything to have it instead of XP, even with all these fancy looks turned off it's as slow on 512MB RAM as XP is on 64MB, and even XP does quite a bit of hogging. And then you could compare it's window-manager to Beryl, which has more effects than Vista (including, but not limited to, the same ones) and combined with, say, Ubuntu, it doesn't require anything near 512MB RAM just to run.
Storage being cheap also doesn't make it free, and 2GB RAM certainly isn't.

Truly free RAM is RAM for programs, unless you want to spend boot-time to pre-load them, and then if you need an other program that takes a lot of RAM, something will have to be kicked from the cache, right? so wasted boot time.. So unless you have a crazy amount of RAM, how will it do any good?
But of course (like I said before) those bloggers don't know that XP can try use all RAM before using the pagefile, RAM that is free while the pagefile is in use is not truly free.. it should have been used instead of the pagefile. Ok the setting has been hidden quite well, but it is there..

@CoBB: exactly, but .NET isn't slow on my old computer (512MB RAM)m and I do run VC# Express 2005 on it, which isn't slow except when it starts up

Timendus · Post by **Timendus** » Mon 29 Oct, 2007 12:03 pm

CoBB wrote:But is it really news? After all, MSO has been available under Linux too for ages thanks to Wine, not to mention virtualisation environments.

It's all about ease of installation and use, and integration with the host platform. You can't double click on a Word document in Linux and have it run MS Office in your (hidden) virtual machine. Also, Wine looks like someone vomited over the Win95 GUI. Installing software under it is a total pain. It doesn't do hardware acceleration (perhaps unless you spend a life time configuring it, which most people can't). It's horribly slow...

I personally use Ubuntu for all my daily needs, and if (heaven forbid) I need Windows (for debugging websites in Internet Explorer, for example) I run XP in a virtual machine. This works just fine, but it's not something your avera Joe user can set up, it requires quite a bit from your hardware, and there's zero integration between your host OS and the virtual machine OS (which I'm personally quite happy with, but most managers wouldn't be, for example).

Now I'm not bashing linux here, but I personally have never managed to get anything up running on linux with 3D of any kind. I'm sure it's possible, I've just never had the patience to do it. [...] Alas, I am stuck in Vista for the time being

You should give Ubuntu a try while you're waiting

Just download and burn the live CD, insert it in your drive and boot over it. If you have a fast CD-rom drive and a proper amount of RAM you'll be able to use the desktop without significant performance issues, and try out the 3D acceleration. Make sure you install the proprietary drivers if you have an Nvidia or ATI card (Ubuntu should detect them for you and propose to install them), restart X (don't reboot, as it'll reset everything; no harddrive

) and run "glxgears" from the console; there's your 3D running on Linux

And Ben, I don't really consider 512MB RAM "low end". I have a few PC's lying around with 384MB RAM, and they're running just fine with either Windows XP or one of the many flavours of Linux. I wouldn't dare install Vista on any of them though, and I don't want to either.

King Harold · Post by **King Harold** » Mon 29 Oct, 2007 12:30 pm

And Ben, I don't really consider 512MB RAM "low end". I have a few PC's lying around with 384MB RAM, and they're running just fine with either Windows XP or one of the many flavours of Linux. I wouldn't dare install Vista on any of them though, and I don't want to either.

I agree. If 512MB RAM makes a computer low end, any normal computer that is over a year old would be low end. They are perfectly usable for anything except playing super-new games.

edit: on The Code Project's new poll (do you like Vista), at the time of writing, 34.6% says NO, 27.12% says YES, the rest has not used Vista enough or doesn't have an opinion.
Is Vista SP1 really that much better? I cannot try it right now.. who has?
And how about XP SP3? I did try that, and I didn't find anything different - where are the changes hidden?

edit2: the "YES" is rapidly losing now

CoBB · Post by **CoBB** » Mon 29 Oct, 2007 12:45 pm

Timendus wrote:It's all about ease of installation and use, and integration with the host platform. You can't double click on a Word document in Linux and have it run MS Office in your (hidden) virtual machine.

Sure, you need to click it inside the VM. Sure, it is a couple more clicks away, but seeing what kind of terribly convoluted procedures people are usually willing to put up with, this doesn’t seem like too much inconvenience in comparison.

Timendus wrote:Also, Wine looks like someone vomited over the Win95 GUI.

True.

What I seriously can’t understand about Wine is why I can’t increase the dpi setting as much as I want... I’m normally working in 2048x1536, and it’s nearly impossible to read 96 dpi fonts. Not that it would be without problem, since all pre-Vista Windows versions have terribly poor support for high-dpi displays.

Timendus wrote:Installing software under it is a total pain. It doesn't do hardware acceleration (perhaps unless you spend a life time configuring it, which most people can't).

I haven’t noticed the pain, but I haven’t tried installing many things either.

Timendus wrote:It's horribly slow...

Depends on what you need it for. Total Commander works fine for me.

Timendus wrote:This works just fine, but it's not something your avera Joe user can set up

Come on, how many ‘average Joe users’ can set up anything? Most people just turn to some tech-savvy friend to solve these problems.

Timendus wrote:it requires quite a bit from your hardware, and there's zero integration between your host OS and the virtual machine OS (which I'm personally quite happy with, but most managers wouldn't be, for example).

What do you mean by zero integration? I can even directly copypaste between a virtualised XP and the host.

Timendus · Post by **Timendus** » Mon 29 Oct, 2007 12:55 pm

CoBB wrote:What do you mean by zero integration? I can even directly copypaste between a virtualised XP and the host.

You can? Well, I can't

I can't drag and drop files between desktops either, or drag the XP windows out of the virtual machine, minimize them to my host tray bar, or use expose on them, like Parallels allows you to do.

But I'm going to ignore this discussion for a while as it's taking too much time to respond to everything

Post by **benryves** » Mon 29 Oct, 2007 4:15 pm

Timendus wrote:But I'm going to ignore this discussion for a while as it's taking too much time to respond to everything

Pretty much, and it's a repeat anyway (XP). All I can say is I'm very impressed with Vista thus far.

Anyhow, something relevant.

King Harold · Post by **King Harold** » Mon 29 Oct, 2007 4:50 pm

Lol he cheated Vista's RAM "requirement" enforcement by installing it on an other machine first..
Well I can't do that with my virtualbox, if I'd allocate 512MB for it my computer would die
And it probably wouldn't work as well as XP would..

Anyway, I thought you once also gave this link?
http://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini.htm

So with all crap disabled, Vista still eats more RAM than XP, quite odd. (some bloat in the kernel after all?)

Post by **benryves** » Mon 29 Oct, 2007 5:07 pm

King Harold wrote:So with all crap disabled, Vista still eats more RAM than XP, quite odd. (some bloat in the kernel after all?)

Not really. Vista and XP are different operating systems. Vista does more, and so it's only natural to assume that it consumes more system resources to do this with. (On the plus side, Vista appears to manage memory much better than XP, though it's better with larger amounts of RAM - the magical "2GB" at which point Vista zips along). If you want to compare system requirements, you'd want to take a typical machine from 2001 and compare it with a machine from 2007.

In 2001 I was using a 166MHz Pentium 1 with 114MB RAM. Windows 2000 runs OK on that; good luck getting XP to do the same.

King Harold · Post by **King Harold** » Mon 29 Oct, 2007 5:36 pm

If you want to compare system requirements, you'd want to take a typical machine from 2001 and compare it with a machine from 2007.

There's no reason to fair though, if XP works better now than Vista does now than why should we care that XP used to crap when it was released as well? (MS should have learned not to make the same mistake twice)

Vista does more

Like what? Something actually useful?
The only good and useful feature of Vista that I have noticed was that you could control sound per-program instead of system-wide.

Did you know that Halo 2 has a better framerate on XP than it does on Vista (even though it takes a special loader to run)?

Why did Vista take twice as long to boot as XP on the same machine when MS is promoting Vista because of its "short boot time"?

How come you can like Vista when you know it's hiding its slowness by requiring a lot of RAM and doing a lot of prefetching to make it appear faster?

coelurus · Post by **coelurus** » Mon 29 Oct, 2007 11:10 pm

XP is generally (note: very ambiguous term) faster than Vista, if "direct" performance is what you want. If you wanna play games, use XP. If you want to work safely, use Vista. Pick the one for your needs. Personally, I think Vista is like ME, something a bit newer that you really don't need.

I use XP since all I use it for is games. Got Vista for a month and it felt slick until recent games needed swapping. Chuggachugg.
If I wanna be safe, I use OpenSolaris or some Linux distro.

I don't have to touch doc-files, ever. The only decent way to write reports is with tex-files anyway and my university has understood that. Preferrably you give people the ps-file. pdf:s aren't safe, I got half a point off of a problems sheet because some lame crap version of acrobat in Windows couldn't read a pdf that a version of acrobat in Linux could. Note that that was Adobe's fault.

Bah, why do I bother with threads with no answers?

Halifax · Post by **Halifax** » Tue 30 Oct, 2007 12:25 am

I tried switching over to Ubuntu, but it was a bad experience on this computer, so right now I am running XP because it runs great on my low end PC!

Anyways, I just have quick question. What exactly is hardware-accelerated? Recently I have been noticing that people are calling applications, that use GPU assembly, hardware-accelerated.

Really this isn't the case though. Because in my own understanding hardware-accelerated would be like this:

z80 has software-accelerated multiplication
68k has hardware-accelerated multiplication

because 68k has an assembly instruction for multiplication, while on the z80 you have to make your own multiplication routine out of multiple assembly instructions.

So overall, based on my opinion, no WM is hardware-accelerated, unless the GPU contains specific assembly instructions for the WM. I pretty much know that this isn't the case since there are no Shader languages around with special instructions.

Overall I guess my question is, why are people throwing around all this jargon about Windows WM being hardware-accelerated? Unless the definition has changed from what I remember?

thegamefreak0134 · Post by **thegamefreak0134** » Tue 30 Oct, 2007 5:58 am

When people refer to "Hardware Accelerated" in computer jargon, they typically mean that the GUI you are looking at for X application (including windows) has it's graphics drawn by the video card directly, rather than using a frame buffer mode or similar and drawing the graphics themselves. Non-hardware accelerated would be like trying to run F.E.A.R. using a software 3D engine, it's just not going to happen.

Even the most basic of low-end PCs have some kind of hardware 3D acceleration these days. Granted, it's typically not too great, but it still fills the bill for most applications to not slow you down terribly with their interfaces.

-gamefreak

CoBB · Post by **CoBB** » Tue 30 Oct, 2007 8:17 am

coelurus wrote:I don't have to touch doc-files, ever. The only decent way to write reports is with tex-files anyway and my university has understood that.

You’re lucky.

When you have to work together with people from outside academia, especially on non-technical matters, MSO formats are inevitable. Even if it’s much easier to prepare an application with TeX and CVS, most people will resort to passing around doc files and merging them in Word (I had the pleasure to do it both ways, and the difference is incredible).

coelurus wrote:Bah, why do I bother with threads with no answers?

Because it’s fun to wallow in pity?

coelurus · Post by **coelurus** » Tue 30 Oct, 2007 8:32 am

Hardware accelerated means one uses hardwired routines to replace software routines. That's it. The routines can be small, but still essential.

A lot of programs these days are _graphics hardware_ accelerated, but lazy people (the majority, including me when I made a "hardware accelerated geocoder"

) tend to leave out that important first word. The routines are very essential in this case, all the drawing and compositing takes place on the graphics card. So, you move work from the CPU to the GPU. Two hardware components sharing work for one goal, adding two forces together, now I call that acceleration

Post by **benryves** » Tue 30 Oct, 2007 12:51 pm

King Harold wrote:
If you want to compare system requirements, you'd want to take a typical machine from 2001 and compare it with a machine from 2007.
There's no reason to fair though, if XP works better now than Vista does now than why should we care that XP used to crap when it was released as well?

The same reason that XP used to run slower than 98, that 98 used to run slower than 95, that 95 used to run slower than 3.1, ...

Vista does more
Like what? Something actually useful?

Yes. Per-application volume control is nice, as you mentioned. The pervasive search is great; I can, for example, bring up all of the source files I've been working on in the last day by typing "text modified today" into the start menu. Search results in Explorer are pretty much instant and can be saved (so that they appear as folders), something I've found to be immensly useful.

Speaking of the start menu, I've hardly ever used it in previous versions of Windows, preferring to run things from the Run dialog. Vista's search on the start menu lets me run any program or document this way. It also helps run programs with admin rights, as I can just hit Ctr+Shift+Enter when the program I want to run is highlighted and it will run elevated.

UAC is a good idea, IMO; in an ideal world all apps would run without needing elevated rights, but application developers are opposed to isolated storage and so those apps simply break in XP. In Vista you can easily elevate processes through the UAC prompt, or can simply let the data redirection thing do its magic and let Windows transparently redirect the writes to the VirtualStore directory user profile. (Yes, in this regard, Vista is more compatible with apps than XP).

Restore Previous Versions lets you view snapshots of directories in time, letting you roll back to old versions of files if they were overwritten or deleted. This saved me a lot of work when I accidentally deleted a directory of source files, I could just bring them back from the grave with a right click.

The power management is much more flexible, including Hybrid Sleep (a combined hibernate and standby) and finer control over what can and cannot wake the machine from its various levels of sleep. There is no more of the awkward problem where an app can prevent the OS from shutting down, either (Office XP occasionally has this problem).

Little things, like Explorer's breadcrumbs, better thumbnailing (eg images on the desktop are thumbnailed, live preview thumbnails on toolbar hover and Alt-Tab), improved property reporting and editing (edit tags directly through Explorer) make using the OS faster and more efficient. XP just feels clunky in comparison.

There are some other very nice features as a developer, ranging from a revised shell thumbnail system that makes writing thumbnail extensions a doddle, Direct3D 10 that makes resource management significantly easier and transactional NTFS. Unfortunately, if you want to support older versions of Windows you can't really use these new technologies, but as with all previous versions of Windows this problem will resolve itself.

There are some things that are available through shell extensions that are now built-in to Vista (eg copy file path and "command prompt here" in Explorer), which aren't so important but at least mean that when using someone else's computer you still have access to these tools.

Aero looks good and makes the interface much smoother (no more ugly window repaints, yay) but I wouldn't really consider it a deal-breaker. Flip3D is utterly useless.

Anyway, I might as well give up as I know you won't give in.

How come you can like Vista when you know it's hiding its slowness by requiring a lot of RAM and doing a lot of prefetching to make it appear faster?

Because it is significantly faster on a PC that cost me Ã‚Â£500 than XP ever was on a PC that cost me Ã‚Â£900 five years ago; not to mention the reasons above.