“When Microsoft brings out a new operating system, it’s always nice to know that you can actually take advantage of it. Sure, you’re used to whatever you currently have, which is most likely Windows XP, but you also know that sooner or later, something new will come along that requires the new operating system. So when Vista finally shipped, I decided that the time had come. I’d upgrade one of the machines in the back room.”
I must say, that Chinese bug is certainly odd. Not something I’ve ever encountered. *eyes symantec suspiciously*
Sounds more like a meta tag problem, making IE think the page is written in Chinese.
Although it wouldn’t surprise me if it was something caused unintentionally by himself, seeing as he suddenly realised having to order Vista to install it and finding out plugging in monitors is useful for getting a working pc. *lol*
But it does show again how Vista makes people buy new hardware, whether it’s actually needed or not. I wonder if he really needed that new videocard.
But it does show again how Vista makes people buy new hardware, whether it’s actually needed or not. I wonder if he really needed that new videocard.
He doesn’t mention what card he had originally, though it’s likely it was a D3D 8 class card. The possible cards that can be chosen for purchase with that workstation include:
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 280 (AGP)
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 400 (AGP)
NVIDIA Quadro4 380 XGL (AGP)
ATI FireGL T2-128
NVIDIA Quadro FX1100 (AGP)
NVIDIA Quadro FX3000 (AGP)
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/11506_na/11506_na.HTM…
Of those, only the two FX cards are D3D 9 compliant (and are 3 years old). The rest D3D 8. In any case, he’d only need to upgrade it if he wanted Glass. Otherwise, Vista will run on just a standard VGA card.
Edited 2007-02-10 02:35
The aticle author, like most people, didn’t seem to care about Aero glass, or which version of D3D he could support. Read the article, he used the Windows Upgrage Advisor, it told him to upgrade his Graphics card, so he did.
The aticle author, like most people, didn’t seem to care about Aero glass, or which version of D3D he could support. Read the article, he used the Windows Upgrage Advisor, it told him to upgrade his Graphics card, so he did.
If he didn’t care, (and based on all the complaints since beta 1 about requirements and the lower tiers, most people do seem to care about Glass), he wouldn’t be upgrading his video card. The Upgrade Advisor doesn’t just say “upgrade your video card”. It also tells you why the upgrade is suggested in the context of each edition of Windows Vista, such as upgrading the video card to run Aero Glass.
See this webpage for an example:
http://www.windows-consulting.net/windows-how_to-install_run_vista_…
and this image in particular:
http://windows-consulting.net/img/38/step6.jpg
You’re nearly as bad as NotParker was. READ THE ARTICLE.
I wasn’t talking about what was technically accurate, I was talking about the article, where a moderately technically minded user thought that “Like nearly everyone else on the planet, it appears, I would need a better video card.” After using the upgrade advisor.
I wasn’t talking about what was technically accurate, I was talking about the article, where a moderately technically minded user thought that “Like nearly everyone else on the planet, it appears, I would need a better video card.” After using the upgrade advisor.
Accuracy matters. He upgraded on his own accord. The advisor didn’t tell him he had to. The author and some posters in this thread are suggesting MS is pushing people to upgrade which is not the case. The advisor provided a suggestion and gave a reason for it. It didn’t tell the user he had to upgrade to run Vista. He could have done so with his current configuration.
We’re talking about regular people here who don’t have much experience on the subject.
What happens is that most people follow the suggestion from a supposedly reputable source. Regardless of the reason for the suggestion given, most people will follow it because they don’t know or aren’t told what it means if the suggestion is Not followed.
We’re talking about regular people here who don’t have much experience on the subject.
What happens is that most people follow the suggestion from a supposedly reputable source. Regardless of the reason for the suggestion given, most people will follow it because they don’t know or aren’t told what it means if the suggestion is Not followed.
Most regular people do not upgrade the OS. They buy a new computer with the OS preinstalled. Also, the advisor suggests performing the hardware upgrade after installing Vista. If you follow the instructions, you may find that you’re satisfied with the current hardware configuration. If the user ignores this, it’s not because of any requirement from MS.
Most regular people do not upgrade the OS. They buy a new computer with the OS preinstalled. Also, the advisor suggests performing the hardware upgrade after installing Vista. If you follow the instructions, you may find that you’re satisfied with the current hardware configuration. If the user ignores this, it’s not because of any requirement from MS.
But a lot of people do. Even inexperienced users. Otherwise Microsoft wouldn’t put so much effort in marketing the retail version. So when Microsoft tells users “You need to upgrade hardware X, otherwise feature Y doesn’t work” users will do it because they don’t know what feature Y is and think it might be important.
it’s always symantec never microsoft
Given their history with writing slow, inaffective AV software which exploits bugs in the kernel to work. I don’t trust any software which relies on bugs in code to make money.
Why would you trust microsoft any more, then? Or any proprietary vendor, for that matter? Forcing their customers to upgrade by various tricks, including bugs in their software, is their business. They wouldn’t make 95ct profit out of every dollar you pay them, but a more decent 5-10 cents…
The difference is: Microsoft and other vendors would be able to innovate. What can AV software do? If bugs stop coming in then they run out of business.
Now I could say stuff about the lack of innovation coming from MS (esp considering their income) but it’s true one can expect more innovations from them compared to AV software vendors… That’s an reactive business by nature, after all.
Yea I meant “can” innovate not “will definitely”. I do think they innovated to an extent with Vista, not as much as they said they did.
In the end, OSes in general innovate and evolve more than AV does.
we agree
Microsoft doesn’t innovate that mutch they buy programs and companys from left to right to save time and money
talked to a guy that works at symantec sweden and he said that the new antivirusprogram is faster and better than before and people that complain about norton antivirus haven’t tested the new one
*translated from swedish
If I ever get a choice of two companies to blame and my choices are Microsoft and Symantec I’ll consistently choose Symantec…
Even if it couldn’t possibly have been Symantec.
This reminds me of trying OS/2 version 2 (’cause someone said it was cool): 1) Boot up and install. 2) half the stuff does not work 3) Uninstall and put the floppy into trash 4) WTF happened to my MBR? 5) Won’t try that again.
and a sense of humor
10:30 p.m.: Eventually I resort to the Symantec removal tool, which is like using a hand grenade to kill a mouse
3:15 p.m.: After going through the troubleshooting process, I find the problem. I plug in the monitors, and all is well.
Is this guy for real?
Agreed. This guy doesn’t sound like he’s that great with computers. I was expecting to read the performance of a running Vista installation on an older machine and instead got a 2-page article on somebody struggling to do a Vista install. His “old computer” has better specs than my main system. The article was a clumsy attempt to rehash what has already been said, that hardware and software compatibility in Vista is not perfect.
I tried Vista RC1 on my Athlon 2000, and I don’t think it is “old” for that.
The GUI was slow but I expected that, drawing windows on a 3D texture requires to send that texture back to the video card for rendering, and it takes a while. This is not a problem for games because their textures are static. If you’re going to use Aero, best to do that with a PCI Express video card, which has a much larger bandwidth than AGP.
If you’re going to use Aero, best to do that with a PCI Express video card, which has a much larger bandwidth than AGP.
Problem is not so much in bandwidth as in CPU needed for composing the bitmaps before transferring them to card. AGP does just fine job on every other composite system (look for XGL for Aqua).
Best example I can give is, try to benchmark compositing of normal window and compositing of firefox or IE browser panel, is most obvious on resize if you enable live contents resize.
Problem is not so much in bandwidth as in CPU needed for composing the bitmaps before transferring them to card. AGP does just fine job on every other composite system (look for XGL for Aqua).
I did some graphics programming and you just can’t say that a modern CPU is slow on compositing a bitmap
For the little I know about Direct3D, I can only think it is a bandwidth problem. Aero was very slow on my Athlon, and I have 4x AGP here.
Perhaps, but I doubt it. How much memory does your card have? I’m betting not enough and it’s storing some data in system memory, making the problem one of latency not bandwidth.
128 MB, I think that’s more than enough
But the mainboard has got only 4x AGP.
Thanks for the warning. I too would’ve preferred an article that talked about the performance of vista on yesterday’s pc’s rather than reading about the installation process.
I wonder. Who calls tech support to find out what graphics cards will run on his machine? i thought google had rendered support calls (for simple stuff like that) extinct..
People call tech support for all kinds of wacky reasons and often even call the wrong helpdesk…
OT but still a nice example: I do tech-support for a cable ISP and people call us because their sound card suddenly stopped working.
And yes, we also get call from customers that want to know what graphics card we would recommend for vista.
LOL
He’s got Linux installed. Knows what’s AGP, yet is baffled by some software called “NERO” and runs Norton.
Connect the dots…
I know what you mean. After reading this I am thinking this guy must be new to computers. His comments about not knowing what ‘nero’ is, along with the fact that he uses Norton AV (worst ever).
Also I looked up that Compuvest website to see the price of the nVidia FX 3000 and its $500! Why not just pop in and pickup a FX6200 AGP for $40, I don’t think he really is doing video gaming/cad on his spare computer. I also would have liked to known which Quadro card was already equipped with his system.
http://compuvest.com/Search.jsp <- Search nVidia FX 3000
It also states that he is a longtime technology writer and an author of four technology books… scary stuff.
How spoiled can you be to call a 2 years old computer “old”? I’d be interested to see some statistics on how often people replace their computer.
The fact is, for regular use a PIII with 512MB of memory will run XP just fine. I wonder how well Vista would run on such a system, with the basic UI of course.
Not funny. 512 mb ram?!?! Barely enough to boot and use 1 application at a time…
Not even close, Vista need 728mb here before it starts to use swap.
Use it on a 512mb machine and you will continually swap.
And that’s the final version? What the heck have these guys been doing?!?!? And to think KDE is trying to get KDE4 to run decent on 256 mb ram… with a hopefully matching featureset!
> for regular use a PIII with 512MB of memory will run XP just fine. I wonder how well Vista would run on such a system
I couldn’t get Vista to even run install on a Dual 1.13GHz PIII system with 1GB of RAM. This system has run Windows 2000, XP, Linux and FreeBSD just fine in the past.
1. When installing a new version of Windows, never EVER upgrade over an existing version .. always start with a clean install. This is commandment #1 for keeping a stable Windows system. If you want to work 10 years off the same install, use Linux
Windows does have its strengths, but this ain’t one of them.
2. If you decide to disregard rule #1, for f–k’s sake .. at LEAST uninstall the old version of Norton AV first before you upgrade. Or better yet, don’t run Norton anything. Your system would probably run smoother if you installed malware on it than if you installed Norton.
You’re comment made me chuckle because you’re right, I’ve seen many a computer that have been running ridiculously slow only to find out nothing is “wrong.” It’s just norton running. Norton Internet Security makes your computer so slow you don’t want to use it, so you’ll never have a problem. Pretty effective.
At least it didn’t burst into flames…
.. yes, I know better than to say that. But I did.
That’s not an impossibility, with the extra strain put on the CPU, GPU and Memory, there’s quite a lot of extra heat floating about.
I tried Vista RTM on my computer for about a Week, and switched back to XP after suddenly enountering frequent random reboots. The random reboots continued until my PSU died, taking with it about 3 fuses, I’m assuming this was because of the extra Power-draw by Vista(+glass).
I’ve tried the Pre release candidate on a three year-old machine. 1.7 Ghz P4, 384 Meg of RAM. Geforce 2MX (64MB) video. And everything seems fine, but Vista is just a memory hog. 450+MB used at startup. That’s not buffercache, that’s working set for all of the system services. I turned off Indexing (now called Windows Search), Themes, and all of the autodiscovery services and it trimmed up to 200 Megs or so. Explorer seems to be much slower than on XP. Other apps seem to run about the same speed (subjectively).
I think for many people, the above system with XP is sufficient. Most of the time for me as well. But other times, for some tasks I need more than 4GB address space, more than 8 processors, etc. etc.
I wish Microsoft gambled and released only a 64-bit version of their OS. I have the first 64-bit commercial workstation. It is 16 years old. It is time for 64 bits on the desktop, and I’m tired of waiting.
memory consumption went way down between Beta2 to RC1 and even further down for RC2. I haven’t gotten around to installing RTM yet.
The figures that I got for the RTM version were: 700MB, down to 400MB without Aero Glass and Indexing.
“I wish Microsoft gambled and released only a 64-bit version of their OS. I have the first 64-bit commercial workstation. It is 16 years old. It is time for 64 bits on the desktop, and I’m tired of waiting.”
It’s been rumored that their server software is going that way sooner than later (for example, Exchange 2007 is only supported under 64bit, though they do have 32bit versions available for testing only). That being said, MS would be severing a lifeline if it went 64bit only on the desktop. Maybe in 5 years or so. If folks thought having to buy a new video card was a hassle, imagine telling them they had to buy a new processor as well (and trying to explain what 64bits meant).
This article makes the upgrade process seem extremely painful. Because it was, really; mostly due to the writer foolishly wasting time with the recommendations, marketing and “support” of Microsoft, Symantec, and HP.
Sure, the guy should have known upgrading a Windows install instead of starting fresh was a big no-no, but still… I somehow expected a lot more Mac and Linux zealots in this thread, mentioning how the problems in the article wouldn’t be cropping up on an alternative platform…
Perhaps the zealots are losing their zeal?
Edited 2007-02-10 05:08
Perhaps they’re smarter than you think they are and know a fool when they see one?
I definitely wouldn’t want to discredit myself by using an idiot like this article’s author to support my viewpoint.
My guess he was running the Nvidia NVS280 graphics card. It is a dual monitor business video card. From what I’ve read it is very low end hardware max 1600×1200 resolution. Probably Geforce 2 type performance. A guy here in Australia was selling heaps of them (new old stock) on ebay a few weeks back.
He’s following a process that the majority of non-nerds will follow so its quite a good real-world example.
It’s a shame the Microsoft are pushing Upgrades as a viable install path. Another case of marketing and PR winning over common-sense.
Of course, as with many things, the people most likely to believe the ‘Vista-upgrade-is-easy/reliable’ FUD are the people least likely to know how to recover from a failed upgrade, and are also the people who are most likely to have degraded Windows XP setups with crapware like Norton AV and Spyware to mess everything up.
This sounds a lot like what went through installing and updating Linux about five or six years ago!!!
I now do installs and updates of Linux (mostly Suse) by the hundreds many from an install server – with out a hitch.
Perhaps you’ve never heard of unattended Windows installation?
And yeah, this is Windows if you are a clueless technical writer who’s obviously trying to drum up traffic for his column…for the rest of the clued in world it’s nowhere near as difficult as what he outlines.