Stuff that fries your potatoes with olive oil of HAPPY.

[Bobbias]

We have all our exams on one day. They're also on like, the last day of school.

[TimJing]

Yeah, I took my AP American History exam last friday, now I have nothing to worry about in that class- all we're doing is watching movies for the next 3 weeks.

Wednesday is my AP English exam which shouldn't be too bad, then after that I have nothing left to do in that class as well.

[MortifiedocAlot]

We have all our exams on one day. They're also on like, the last day of school.

I thought you graduated high school?

[Zakamiro]

He did, but that doesn't mean the school system changed the timing of their exams.

[Bobbias]

He did, but that doesn't mean the school system changed the timing of their exams.

Exactly.

[Spectere]

Vista.

Performance-wise, it completely blows XP out of the water on my machine (and it looks pretty).

Also, being able to finally use symbolic links for files in a Windows environment is wonderful.

[Bobbias]

I just don't like the way Microsoft is going with their Trusted Computing crap.

Maybe if I stop hearing quite so much negativity towards vista, I might look at getting it, but for now, XP works perfectly fine for me. The only thing I would really like that I've seen in vista is the ability to search your start menu. I've got a GIGANTIC start menu, and that would really help me :/

[TimJing]

Work today was essentially eating barbeque and chillin', and getting paid three hours for it. Sweet deal.

[Spectere]

Maybe if I stop hearing quite so much negativity towards vista, I might look at getting it, but for now, XP works perfectly fine for me.

And I'm sure Windows 98 worked perfectly well when XP came onto the scene.  If you recall, XP had a lot of negativity thrown onto it from people who refused to change.  Now just about everyone running Windows uses XP.

It'll be the same thing for Vista.  In a year or two people will forget what they were whining about in the first place.

Also, for Trusted Computing to work, your system needs a TPM.  Non-OEM boards generally don't have one of those.  It is a non-issue unless you buy a Dell or similarly branded computer and (in the case of Dell, anyway; haven't worked with other OEM systems with a TPM) go out of your way to enable it.  A lot of people whine about the DRM imposed with HD DVD and Blu-Ray, but that's all the work of the movie studios.  I somewhat doubt Microsoft really wants to burn those kinds of bridges and I can't find it in my heart to blame them.

I still stand by my belief that most of the people that bitch about Vista did nothing more than look at the system requirements and dismiss it on the spot, despite the fact that competing operating systems have the same requirements.

People talk about how much more efficient OS X is.  Well, no.  It doesn't use system memory as effectively and it requires as much as Vista does.

People go on about how tiny Linux can be.  Well, yeah.  It's a shame that once you add modules for every type of modern hardware imaginable, Xorg, GNOME/KDE/Xfce/whatever, hundreds upon hundreds of support libraries to support any kind of application imaginable (since there are dozens of different ways of doing the same damn thing) you wind up with an OS that takes far more disk space than it needs and can quickly consume memory above and beyond the needs of the standard operating environment.  The only way you're going to get a Linux desktop that's appreciably faster and more efficient than Mac OS and Windows is by rolling your own or choosing a source-based distro, and even then things can balloon out of control.  Say I'm a KDE user who wants to use the Gimp.  All of a sudden I have to have a full GTK+ setup, not to mention whatever dependencies it uses, all of which consume additional memory when I decide to load it.  With Windows and OS X, most programs utilize the system default libraries, meaning that the only thing taking up space is the program itself and whatever resources it needs to do its job.  Much more efficient.

It bugs me when people whine about how much memory Vista "consumes."  Right now, Vista is using 3GB of my memory.  If you think it absolutely requires all of that memory, please let me know so I can unceremoniously ban you.  My mom's laptop, which has 2GB of RAM, has about 1-1.5GB used.  The system with 512MB of RAM that I accidentally installed Vista on only had about 400MB in use at any given time.  This is the reason why I can do just about anything in the OS without having to wait for it.  Let's say I want to start up a game that requires a lot of RAM.  Since it's just cache data, Vista can drop it immediately and give my game however much RAM it wants.  Additionally, it disables Aero to prevent it from interfering with or lagging the game (which is another major point that some people seem to refuse to acknowledge or flat-out lie about).

The system requirements are another thing.  I've had numerous people whine about how "they heard" that Vista stalls on lower-end systems.  Well, guess what, I used it on a lower-end system and it ran about as well as XP.  I've had people call me a liar because I said that Vista ran well with 512MB of RAM.  Never mind the fact that I've used a machine with Vista Business that had 512MB of RAM quite a bit (it was a test machine at my old workplace and I intentionally pushed it hard).

People just assume too many things without asking themselves WHY it is the way it is.  People see that Vista is taking 3GB+ of their 4GB of available RAM.  Rather than clicking around and saying, "oh hey, it's still quick and responsive!" they start screaming "LOL FUCKING MEMORY HOG."  The official name for this feature is "SuperFetch."

Woo, that turned into a long-winded rant.  Holy crap, I'm turning into Bobbias. -_- (jk u no i luv u <3)  I'll just stop here for everyone's sake (including my own).

[Zakamiro]

Actually, my sister has vista installed on her laptop...It's compaq with a dual core amd 64 (i think) and has 512 mb of ram.. Totally a "bang for the buck" type of thing, cost less than $500. Anyway, so once you get rid of all of the extra proprietary BS compaq preloads with the computer, it's remarkably fast.. Faster than my mom's HP @ 2.8 Ghz/ 1GB laptop running XP.

I doubt I'll be making the switch to Vista, though. As soon as my replacement 500 GB drive comes back from seagate, I'm installing freeBSD and gnome. :> I would do it now, but all of my disks are in NTFS and I don't have any breathing room.. Both my drives are almost completely full. I guess it's what happens when you collect COMPLETELY LEGAL files and music on your computer.

[Spectere]

COMPLETELY LEGAL

That's PERFECTLY LEGITIMATE, bub.

Vista uses a better task scheduler than the NT5 line does, so that probably helps a lot.  I'm sure they also improved the performance of multicore systems as well -- I know their threading model improved.

A lot of people really underestimate Vista.  I've heard people go so far as to call it "XP with a new skin" (then again, those very people usually consider XP to be a dramatically updated version of Windows 2000, which is most certainly false) despite the fact that it is probably a more dramatic change to the NT architecture than the move from NT4 to NT5 was.  People are stupid.

Best of luck on your FreeBSD ventures!  May the ports guide you...

And it's kind of funny you should mention FreeBSD -- that's the next OS that I plan to put on hazard (my old compy).  My menu.lst on that system is going to be ridiculous, haha.

[Bobbias]

I wonder how much of the Native API changed in Vista...

I've begun reading about the new changes in vista, and I really like what I'm seeing. I'm going to really do a lot of reading on it, but my stance IS changing.

Oh, and I'll mention that I'm never going to buy some pre-built machine with vista on it... One of my friends is locked out of XP completely because the driver that enables his laptop's fan only works in Vista, so switching to XP causes it to overheat.

[Spectere]

Most manufacturers aren't dumb enough to completely lock their system fans to a particular OS (that design decision doesn't even make any bloody sense).  Dell doesn't have any issues; haven't really used any of the others.

I wonder how much of the Native API changed in Vista...

It really can't change all that much.  It still would have to retain some semblance of compatibility.  I doubt Microsoft would want to rewrite things like CSRSS, for instance, with every Windows release.

Not that using it for normal programs is a good idea, of course...

[Bobbias]

True, but it can be an interesting way to look at the internal structure of windows more in depth than normal. Plus, you could probably achieve some performance increases if you used some of the Native API functions (albeit not likely much of one, but sometimes every little bit counts). I don't know too much about it, but I'd think there are probably some things that are easier to implement using the Native API as well.

You also have to think of how many things changed in Vista though, there were a lot of changes in how some things worked.

[Spectere]

Plus, you could probably achieve some performance increases if you used some of the Native API functions (albeit not likely much of one, but sometimes every little bit counts).

When given the choice between performance and compatibility ten years down the road, I'm going to take the latter.  No sense taking risks.

You also have to think of how many things changed in Vista though, there were a lot of changes in how some things worked.

Uh...I've been ranting about how different Vista is from XP since long before it came out (I've used it since Beta 1).  I'm well aware that it's a very different OS.

The point is, it's not cost effective to completely change APIs between versions in the middle of an OS line.  If they completely revamped the Native API, they'd have to revamp all of the documents, all of the programs that require it, and wipe out any semblance of compatibility.  Seeing as Vista is an NT, they're not likely to do something that extreme.

The Native API isn't likely to do much more than grow until Microsoft phases out the NT product line in favor of something entirely different.  For that reason, it's not a good idea to rely on it.  You can count on the Win32 APIs staying the same.  This is why an OS as new as Vista can run my beloved Stars.  Windows is so bloody compatible with itself that, with a minor change to the file header, Vista can run applications designed for Windows 1.0 -- that's 20 years of binary compatibility.  If you want to take it down another notch, you can run DOS applications on Vista as well.  There's a neat little game called Executive Suite that I play from time to time.  This game works perfectly under Vista.  It was written in 1982.  The game is older than me and it runs perfectly fine under a modern OS.

The obvious exception to this is that the x64 editions of Windows only support the Win32 and Win64 APIs.  Even so, that's still 15 years of binary compatibility, given NT 3.1's release date.  Very impressive as far as operating systems go.

But anyway, the point that I'm trying to make is that using things like the Native API can very easily break you.  It's like how some programmers came to rely on VXDs in the Win9X era.  Guess what; those cannot function at all in NT.  The Native API was introduced in NT, intended for internal use and for when the standard Windows API isn't available.  Whenever Microsoft moves onto their Next Big Thing(TM) the Native API is going to either disappear from the equation or be radically changed, since right now it's specific to the NT kernel.