Vista, is just a phase

[DuX]

Say that again after a month or two of using it quantize, after using all your software without any problems.
No offence, please, but anyone can install Vista, go immediately online and say "hey it works, and it's nice". Just a reality check. I'm speaking from my personal experience - one stubborn and too young client blinded with Vista eye-candy... I had to remove default OEM install of Vista, then install nLite XP, then Vista again after a week, then nLite XP again after a week... well it's his choice and his money. I don't remember how many times I've told him "told you so"...

Anyway, thanks MS for making me more money .

Cheers!

[quantize]

ah well i actually READ and checked compatibility first. My mum isnt using cubase or a powercore for that matter. Im just commenting that the OS was very nice to use, in er, a very OSX way.....the compatibility is another matter. I did the homework first. Maybe you shoulda too

[Dominus]

helped me mum setup a toshiba lappie with vista installed...gotta say, as an OSX and XP user, I thought it was kinda nice!

just sayin'...wouldn't be surprised if despite all the patronising geekery here it eventually does eclipse XP

Only way that will happen is if new PC sales go up.

I'd like to see the numbers of sales of retail box and upgrades of 98 vs retail box and upgrades of ME. We'll probably see the same numbers of XP vs Vista sales. Take out the OEM equation and we'll see quite a huge difference.

I build systems for a living and have only had ONE person this year ask for Vista. I've been working with computers since MSDOS 4.01, and have been "in the industry" since Windows 95. I've been able to say which OS versions have been worthwhile purchases and which ones have been junk.

[DuX]

I did the homework first. Maybe you shoulda too

Yep. did that. I don't know what you mean . I'm not the one talking through my arse ... or wallet, for that matter . [last one concerns those MS paid droids for advertising the unadvertisable ]

[quantize]

im just saying it seems a very nice OS to use and certainly seems very fast on the core duos. Some may call that eye candy, personally if youre working in the studio all day (or night), i call making the GUI tolerable and the navigation convenient a definite improvement over XP. There sure seemed to be a lot of laptops being sold with it when i was there...but anyhow, as i say, I prefer Mac OSX, and XP kinda makes me ill...i just found Vista to be a nice improvement..not pretending to be an expert like some of you may be. Im sure all the same work can be done back in that nice accounting package look XP has before all the GUI addons etc

Custom systems are nice an all but i would hazard a guess its the out of the box systems and laptops that come with Vista that will eventually drag the rest of the market with it over the next few years, no?

[DuX]

Custom systems are nice an all but i would hazard a guess its the out of the box systems and laptops that come with Vista that will eventually drag the rest of the market with it over the next few years, no?

Yep, MS is pushing Vista through those systems, because Vista wouldn't sell as much otherwise. That's quite understandable and very clear. I had a few requests to install XP over Vista on pre-assembled systems and a laptop since Vista was introduced. Even though, there are 2 nice features which could help a DAW system work better, I think it's just too new and absolutely not ready to make a DAW on top of it, but as everything is relative, there sure have to be some configurations/computers that work [almost] nicely with it, but there's also the problem of compatibility with programs for now.

Cheers!

[Lunch Money]

I didn't say you "can't" have BSODs, DuX, I was just mentioning that I've never had one with XP. You were implying that they're common occurrences, though you amended this implication with a statement that indicates that you rarely get them.

That's part of the problem with Win-bashing and Linux-praising rhetoric. Nobody ever remembers to keep an objective sense of scale.

[DuX]

Oh, we misunderstood each other .

To sum it up what I was saying:

IME, generally blue screens happen a bit less on W2000, something like Win2000 - very rare, WXP - rare and that's it, but both are absolutely capable of working without any BS ever, it's just that it's sometimes a luck of the draw and nothing is an absolute rule, nothing.

Anyway, once you have what I call a stable comp, you never get to see those, ever. Although with MS system there's always a possibility, though , but seriously speaking, if you have a stable XP there's no chance you can get a blue screen unless: you install some new hardware - that's always risky or you install a badly programmed app which can bring XP down.

Good thing about having a stable comp is that when you have it, everything is working perfectly and nobody's been installing anything, if you get a blue screen there's most certainly some problem with the hardware so it's easier to diagnose the problem.

If you've never had a blue screen with your XP than you have a very nicely assembled configuration and that's it. Good for you and I'm happy for you [with absolutely 0 sarcasm] .

Cheers!

[Lunch Money]

Whoops, yeah, we agree then. Though, for the record, I didn't tweak my XP install at all. With current-gen processors, I find it to be a bit of a waste of time.

[DuX]

Well, you're absolutely right - much less tweaks are needed these days, and there are so few of them that have some real impact on performance. Turning off eye-candy, disabling some really unnecessary services and features [indexing, auto update to name some], setting the processor scheduling to background, and a couple of registry tweaks is all it takes, beside choosing the best drivers.

That's the advantage of using an older OS . Buy a new comp, install the same OS and you *really* got yourself a faster machine to work with . Now *that* makes me a happy user, not the fact "I can install a new MS OS now" and have the same performance as before+new bugs and probable instability and various new issues.

Greg , are you behind those wonderful audio algorithms for BetaBugs? If you are, i'd just like to tell you you're really doing a good good job and your code is top-notch.

Big Thanks for the plugins! I really like them. I'm not a big fan of your GUI's [I love your style, though, it's beautiful], but they sound very good and that's what's important!

[beside stability ]

once more - Thanks!!

p.s. I guess you've already probably reckoned, but I'm really obsessed with three things on PC's: stability, efficiency and functionality in that order. I may be even too obsessed, I know...

[bullshark]

I've just spent an evening with Vista, which came preinstalled on my lappy, and I've got to say it's the most annoying OS I've ever used. EVERYTHING you click on the freakish thing ask you "are you sure you want to do that?" click yes "but have you really thought about it?" click yes "no, but I'm serious now, do you really really want to do that" click yes "You really have thought about all the consequences were you to do this, yes?" click yes "Ok, I'm about to open that email now, just click yes if your sure" Hm, not sure anymore, jumping off a bridge looked mighty appealing right about now...

took me five minutes to figure out how to turn this off. this is no more annoying than any third party security software, and much easier to manage/configure/disable.

Good for you, took me hours to figure out how to turn all that annoying shit off and I still got a few left coming up from time to time. Maybe you could tell me how to turn hibernation off completely so I can recuperate the 2GBs it needlessly take on my HD?

Then it broke my Vegas install, something about Mysql not supported anymore (talk about backward compatibility).

Then it couldn't find my external HD, something about dynamic disc not supported anymore, took me hours to convert the damn thing.

Ho, and all the old XP vulnerabilities and dependency mismanagement are still there, just worst because they hid the tools you used to run to check and fix things out from the end users.

And why do the "Show system file" setting now show a bunch of system ini files on the desktop? Never did that with any prior Window version, who exactly want that shit?

What about that annoying frame they put around all the app Windows? Do we have too much screen estate now so we need to waste it?

And don't get me started on the scrolling program menu, guess having an instant overview was too nice, they had to make us scroll and mouse about some more; I ought to sue them for RSI...

Yet with all that they still haven't fixed the self hiding task bar that shows up behind program windows from time to time.

That freakish OS is a disaster, a complete step backward in all area.

The only good thing is that my DAW software, Reaper, installed and run flawlessly as do all the plugs I depend on even using the integrated audio and Asio4all; and my old projects that ran at 100% on my dinosaur now only take about 20% on this core2duo thingamminy, not bad for a laptop. [edit] Whoopsy, talked too fast, Wusikstation doesn't work, doesn't even load and crash the host...

Ho, while I'm in a positive mood, Vista install is really completely unattended now and that's a good thing; it only ask you for the key right at the beginning and then you can go watch a movie and come back to an installed OS. 'bout time.

[james0tucson]

Just to give a devil's advocate position:

The OS is not so bad. Certain opinions of the user interface being horrible, I can agree with. But when I run Windows I either run it like an application machine (I don't really do anything to start my DAW in the basic recording/composing configuration other than turning on the switch). The Operating System itself is good enough. It works. The filesystem works and is reasonably efficient. The scheduler, while I wish it could be tuned more like a RTOS and give my application 100% of all resources on my request, that sort of thing, it doesn't do a bad job. The devices all work, and the OS kernel does not seem to get in the way of the device drivers. That's all I want the OS to do.

To be fair, when I do use Windows for anything else, I'm generally running a bash shell on RXVT. From that point of view, it's just another unix environment...

Also to be fair; except for my DAW, I haven't run Windows for any serious purpose in more than 12 years. I cut my computing teeth on 8-bit micros and VAX, worked for years as a systems programmer on Digital, HP and Sun Unix systems, switched from Linux to Mac OSX for all personal computing purposes, and my work environment is pretty much Linux, TeraGrid Linux, Solaris, and some specialized things for the science research that dominates my world. A few of the business office folks run Windows, and some people with laptops keep Windows on them.

Anyway, I have had the opportunity of observing many people start using Linux and also Mac OSX. Those who simply start using either of these systems, and continue using them daily for say, a year, *never* regard the notion of using a Windows box with anything but horror or contempt.

But in order to "switch", the work you need to do, the general application space that you're using a computer for to begin with, has to be suitable.

The thing is, on this forum, the application is pretty much, "low to medium budget skunkworks audio processing and music synthesis with commodity hardware and software."

The fact that there's such a wild west boom town environment with all this free and cheap hardware and software suitable to the task, sort of makes Windows the best choice for many; even those like myself who would never even consider setting up a windows box for any other purpose.

Not that you'd sit down at my Windows box, see it's X desktop, and guess it was Windows, of course... Much as I want to grit my teeth when I say it, later versions of Windows, even Vista, are not actually bad OS's once you get their default UI's out of your way.

[spacefox]

@Dux:

I'm having a smooth sail with Vista and Cubase 4, and I'm running two vista based boxes for a couple of months now (one is HTPC the other the band's main DAW).On the other hand, I've seen nLite f**k up a couple of Windows XP installations. Things are just not as simple as you try to paint them.
Can you accept the possibility that someone isn't ignorant or stupid and still does not agree with you? You say: "maybe you've got some reason for using that". I do, actually. After throughly testing all available alternatives (including Reaper), I realized that Cubase 4 was the best route for me to go, considering my current needs. Believe me, I wanted to keep using Tracktion, my former host, or switch to something cool like EnergyXT or Reaper. But none could provide me with a solution I was happy to work with. Cubase 4 could, so I bought 2 licenses.
As for Vista - never had a problem with it. rock solid since day one.And I got to say I enjoy using it a lot. Sure, it's nothing revolutionary, but I'm quite pleased with what was done here, especially interface-wise. My third computer is XP based, because M-Audio won't release drivers for my soundcard, and working on it is much less fun since I installed Vista.

[DuX]

Excellent points James. I enjoyed reading very much.

Talking about GUI, as I'm using LiteStep as a shell and Xplorer2 instead of Explorer, everybody who's seen my desktop said "what is this? It's nice." It's very minimalist [see pic, other parts of the desktop are completely black and "VST" logo is in the centre of the desktop], but it's absolutely functional, fast, efficient and very non-distracting so you can concentrate on doing music and nothing else.



Left click - you get this start menu anywhere on the screen, right click - you get the tasks list, very similar to FluxBox but the date/clock doubles as command line and a calculator which is very useful, otherwise I'd ditch it as well . I keep most used apps under "QuickStart" and "Other" is usual Windows "Programs"...

Cheers!

[bullshark]

Getting better and better, the phone authorization guy refused to authorize XP on the machine, said I'd have to get another license (that the paid in full Vista license would rot in a drawer didn't seem to move him at all). How many of those licenses do I need to run a freaking computer?

Be a cold day in hell before I do that, good thing I've got 14 days to bring the laptop back.