Until after the holiday season. Computer manufacturers can't be happy about this. Incidentally, when will the consumer Vista certified boxes become available? I won't upgrade until Dell certifies one for Vista, and had hoped to take advantage of the usual holiday incentives.

 

Corporate licenses will release in October/November. Why they're delaying the consumer market releases, I have no idea. Security is the main reason for the delay, so I would think that a corporate user would be in need of a more secure product than regular consumer. But then again, MS hasn't really ever been good when it comes to that angle concerning releases and security.

 

Security? HAH! They're actually doing it to give (potential) users more time to go buy the fastest, most powerful video card they can find (not _afford_, _find_).

If you thought today's PC games are tough on video cards - just you wait. Turning on all of Vista's UI bells and whistles will drag down many a card.

It's really... "pretty", and "slick", and "ugh".

The good thing - you can turn it all off and find that there's a "classic" mode still under it all.

 

What's the point in upgrading then? are there real advancements beside look and interface? I am running win2k and it like it. It does everything I need it to do. It takes a bit longer to boot, but once running it's pretty quick

Last night I set up a PIII-866 with 256mb for a greenhouse. This thing will only be running some software to monitor the climate, and control the irrigation.
I bought an off lease machine and it had a Winnt 4 license stuck to it.
I decided to dig up the old NT disc, and installed it with SP 6a.
All works great, firefox and openoffice install fine. Quite ironic that a mid nineties operating system really runs a lot of todays software just fine, especially if you're just using it for basic stuff like emailing and webbrowsing.
The only disadvantage with NT 4 is that it doesn't natively support USB, there are some options though.

I won't be jumping on the bandwagon anytime soon to buy Vista. I'll see in a couple of years when the machines with Vista installed start coming of leases etc.

 

We did some work on some vista installed machines at school the other day. It is definitely flashy. pretty cool at first, but after a while it wears off and you just want to open or close a program you don't really car how flashy it can do it, also the search feature is vastly improved. I didn't get to dig to deep so i don't know to much, would like to know some more advanced (useful) capabilities other than looks good eats resources and can find misplaced files quick.

i don't really mind the delay, if you are going to pay that much for a product i would expect it to work as much as possable out of the box. (hopefully better than the xbox 360's)

 

Yeup.

And frankly, I'm happy with a laptop I have that has 98SE on it, and my XP machines are all stripped down to the "Classic" interface. I will say that XP is "nice" when it comes to device integration, but the whole MSFT company line about "install a device without booting!" that they've been touting since forever is BS.

Most devices will install without a boot - but definitely not all. It boils down to how tightly you play by XP's rules to make that work.


As for Vista... Gawd, I dunno. There're plenty of new things in the core, and the file system is {again} optimized. A lot of stuff has been re-written from the ground up, the audio pathways are {again} new which will {again} make developers go "HUH?", there was a lot of work done during the development cycle through new procedures to make things clean and stable (there's some stories...); blah blah blah. Oh, and the lack of 64-bit native support - WTF?

Basically... The only reason you will want to "upgrade" is 'cause MSFT will drop support for anything old a year after release. That means that developers will _HAVE_ to start writing code to the new APIs which will kill any new code (big stuff) showing up for anything previous.

I have ALWAYS resisted upgrading until the last minute. And I HATE getting sucked into MSFT's crap.


I resurrected a machine for a friend's son along the same lines. PIII-500, 288meg. Dropped an 80gig drive in it and XP (yeup, XP). I was actually amazed at how well XP ran on the machine - even with a few of the UI things happening. The machine won't be a gamer by any means, but it'll play back music that the son is archiving in iTunes, and with OpenOffice on it, it can be a homework machine. Total cost was about $100 which included the drive and adding it onto a wireless network.


Yeah... It's not at the top of my list.


What's the price point? I haven't heard anything down those lines.

 

60% of Vista code to be re-written.

:pat:

They're pulling Xbox programmers to do the work!!! Jeez!!

Well, on the bright side, at least they're addressing the issues. But how many times are they gonna delay this?

 

According to an insider, the 60% re-write claim is BS.

 

I have more info, though I can't share specifics.

Basically the press is having their way with something that was announced the other day. There is some _core_ truth, but the numbers and conditions are blown out of proportion.

 

and i care..... why?

 

Ehh, you really don't. Vista doesn't bring anything new to anyone that needs it.

 

rumors has it, bill gates will instead delay the year 2007 itself...

that way, vista will be delivered on time...

 

He does have that power...

 

Wasn't windows95 originally supposed to be windows93? I swear it was a couple years late by the time they finally released it. I see this as one of the methods MS uses to keep there customer base locked in. Announce really early, then string everyone along till it's done.

Of course the company I work for has pc's that barely run 2000, so I don't think we'll be getting vista anytime soon.

 

if you look back, it was windows 3.1 that was the previous version. you'd think it's be windows 4.0.

but delays after delay. soon it was 1994 and they were gonna release soon, so they release it as windows 95, in 1995...

internally, if you did a VER command, i think it was version 3.5 or even 4.

currently, on my XP SP2, the VER command comes back as version 5.1.2600

 

I'm pretty sure it was 3.x... I think it was NT 4.0 that responded with "4.0".

Were you around for the Win 3.1/WFW 3.1/WFW 3.11/Win 95 confusion? I was in the midst of it, coding away... Windows For Workgroups 3.1 added networking to Win31, WFW 3.11 fixed networking in WFW 3.1 and then Win95 brought us the first look at this new UI, broke networking, made hints at 32bit, and was still running a 16bit GUI. weeeeeeeeeee!

The public was also quite confused because the words "NT 4.0" were whispered soon after 95 shipped (though it shipped a year later), and folks started thinking that Win95 had part of the NT kernel in it. hah... we could have only hoped.

Some fun stuff:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q32905/
http://www.computerhope.com/history/windows.htm

 

oh... i was around... i was around when windows 1.0 shipped... or was that 2.0?

totally dos based TSR app...

 

Cool! I have a buddy who has a sealed copy of IBM DOS 1.1.

I was "one of those people" disassembling and documenting CP/M BIOS & BDOS...

 

I don't think I will ever buy Vista unless there is a game that requires it that I really want to play. I like how they have what....6 or 7 versions of Vista, yet they aren't even available to the public yet......hmmmmm

I have to say it. Mac will always be better then Windows, no questions asked. The fact that they have very few versions of the Mac OS proves the fact that they can easily beat Windows. I hate all the different versions of XP. Whats the point? There is no need to have a crap load of different versions for different styles of computer use. I have Professional, Home, and Media Center. Professional is best for games, home is good with the office programs, and media center gives you a lot of options for your PC (as far as music and movies go), but why not combine them all into one version? Such as "Professional Media Center at your Home" or "Media Center at Home Professionaly".

Until Windows makes a version that can do everything, then I am going to stick with what I have, and cry and moan from the fact that there will be things I can't play because I don't have Vista "Professional" or things I can't do because I don't have "Vista Home" or can't watch my DVD's with the best quality without "Vista Media Center."

There is a difference between all of those versions. Reinstalling them every time sucks nuts. I've been BSoDed quite a bit with Professional and Home, and Media Center will not let me play some of my games because it doesn't run in a certain format for them (and because I don't want to play games on the Laptop.)

Buy a Mac.