Reply With QuoteI'm sticking with Linux until Plan 9 is fully realized.
Best wishes,
Bob
I admit - I ordered a 'cheap' copy back in August for £45. And it turned up today. Apparently suppliers are shipping early to aviod the postal strike.
I won't install it yet though - I've used the beta on and off for a couple of months and I don't get any windows audio through my firewire audio interface, so no iTunes yet, although the ASIO driver works okay for Cubase.
There are still problems getting the file permissions correct on my network drive, which is a linkstation running linux with smb.
I'm sticking with Linux until Plan 9 is fully realized.
Best wishes,
Bob
I'm waiting for Midori.
Actually, no, I know I'll give in and go for 7. ;-)
As an aside, unlike many people, I had good experiences with Vista.
Somehow I expect that Windows 8 will be a clunker a lot like Vista for most people. I very much hope that 8 will be the last Windows and will then be replaced by what is currently known as Midori.
By the way, don't forget the Microsoft Empower Programme and the Action Pack, which are both very cost effective ways to obtain Microsoft software (as long as you qualify).
Vista drove me to Ubuntu which meant I'm grateful to Microsoft. Free OSs seem so good compared to £100 for an MS solution...
Hadn't heard of Midori though... Going to have a look at that. Personally I think Ubuntu and other linux should get a fair bit of credit for the improvements in Windows. Their viable competition made MS buck teir ideas up IMO.
All Day Long
RIAC
Amen 8)Originally Posted by 100thmonkey
All Day Long
When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks long into you.........
I was going to upgrade from Vista, but now they've pushed the price up I think I'll wait until it's first SP.
Not long to wait then........ :wink:I was going to upgrade from Vista, but now they've pushed the price up I think I'll wait until it's first SP.
When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks long into you.........
:lol: probably notNot long to wait then........ :wink:I was going to upgrade from Vista, but now they've pushed the price up I think I'll wait until it's first SP.
:shock: Thats the wrong kind of pussy to be chasing :?
All Day Long
:wink:
I spent a few weeks running the RC of Windows 7 but had too many issues with Audio as another poster mentioned. iTunes seemed flaky when running in it too.
I'll be sticking with Vista Business and SP1 until they release SP1 for Windows 7.
Never could get on with Vista ... Found it very slow ... But then I was trying to run it on an "aging" laptop ... Tried out Win 7 RC as soon as it was out and was happy with it; Ran at least as fast as XP. Tried it on a newer laptop and it just flew.
Not had any issues with iTunes... But then I have always found iTunes to be slow and clunky. Did hear that it runs a lot better on a Mac ... So maybe it runs like that as some kind of "incentivisor" from Lord Jobbie get me to move to a Mac ... [Paranoid much?!]
Mind you, still don't have a full set of Win 7 drivers yet ... But thats Sony for you ... Beginning to freaking hate them! :x
The problem with iTunes is that it is just so resource intensive. I have a 2GHZ Dual core laptop with 2Gb ram laptop and it runs like the aforementioned dog. On the home server (3.4GHz Dual core with 4Gb) it runs like lightning!
I agree on the second rate windows support being some form of marketing/sales strategy though!
Interesting thing this OS "flying" stuff. When I first started using personal computers I had cutting edge stuff, as that's all there was. But, since then I've almost always used out-of-date hardware. (E.g., this, my home computer, has a couple of Pentium Xeons from 2002.) It all pretty much "flys" these days. Perhaps, the exception being very heavy picture editing, where making a change to a 150MB picture can take a couple of seconds (e.g., rotating it a bit). The only thing that's still slowish are 100MB + disk writes, and those aren't too bad (10K, 160Ultra SCSI -- old technology).
My guess is that these days the appearance of a computer being slow is usually down to the software and feature bloat. Very high level languages, and interpreted languages require more heavy lifting, but programs are easier to write and easier to maintain. (And, actually, a high level language with a good compiler has very little unnecessary overhead, or at least that's what I seem to remember.)
Best wishes,
Bob
PS In the early days, all the programs I used were written in assembly. Those "flew". :)
RLF
True ... I too feel that it is the software that causes the "slow down" in machines. However, in the grand scheme of things I get the impression that its is generally cheaper (in the short term) to buy faster hardware than it is to write better code.
PS: coder in a high level language
I have a sony media centre for the TV...the white doughnut shaped thing. Vista running but dreadfully slow. Could I downgrade to XP or move up to 7 to speed things along. Not bothered with all the windows media programme as used for internet mostly...not much though as painfully slow to boot and enter files...
Are you having a party? :lol:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ
LOL. I've seen reference to that over at The Register. I see some shops are opening early too. :roll:Are you having a party? :lol:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ
I use Ubuntu NBR on my netbook and really like that - looking forward to 9.10 out in a few days time - it's meant to run a little bit quicker on the Atoms, and I'm already using EXT4 on 9.04 with an SSD.
Bearing in mind Leopard was patched a day after it was released. ;)Not long to wait then........ :wink:I was going to upgrade from Vista, but now they've pushed the price up I think I'll wait until it's first SP.
XP Pro for me, might consider changing in about a year when they have at least some of the bugs worked out.
I've decided to stick with XP on the laptop, just downgraded after Vista starting up and powering down in 15mins each time. XP is now down to 30secs or so.
But...also just got the first Mac in the family to run through the new 40 HD TV. Just taking a while to work out how it all works as have been a Windows Boy for years!
Always found Vista to run okay, never had a problem with it but i may just be lucky, i do reformat approx every 6 months though.
nuff said :wink:
When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks long into you.........
Ha. I only bought Vista because I got 64 Ultimate cheap on SC last Jan. It's still running well. There has never been an actual need to reformat often unless you trawl and install a lot from the dark side of the web - and that sort of behaviour would block any machine, except the really good stuff doesn't run on Macs. :twisted:
Vista is running perfectly well on both of my low-ish spec laptops, and has done so from new, without any 'maintenance'.
I can't imagine why anyone would want or need to reformat every 6 months.
A fifteen minute power up / power down sounds very much like a hardware conflict. You can use just about any hardware from any manufacturer you like with Windows, so it's not surprising that it occaisionally doesn't 'just work'.
Unlikely to ever happen, but I'd love to see a comparison of MAC users vs. PC users, showing the percentage that can program their video.
I never had problems with Vista myself, on a desktop PC, once i'd cleaned up the PC (prevented all the redundant processes running that get launched as default by windows - pen tablet drivers, smart card reader drivers, all manner of shit that maybe 2% of users would actually want running) and turned of the UAC nonsense.
This is, incidentally, on the same PC that repeatedly hung, BSOD'd and spontaneously rebooted itself under XP.... :?
On my laptop, Vista was a bit of a dog for performance (although I'm running a 64bit dual core processor and 4Gb RAM).
I've been running win7 on my laptop since the first beta and it is much much quicker to do most things and has been very stable. Not a single crash in over a year of using it now. Many aspects of the user interface have been improved, some of the "help" actually does help you, and it looks really pretty :)
I have win7 RC running on my Quad Core i7 desktop and it is blindingly quick and has been so far faultless (in terms of stability and consistency) and pretty much a joy to use. The only prob i had initially was with the latest NVIDIA driver upgrade, which hung my graphics card - if I just use the older driver, no problem. I put that down to NVIDIA (it usually is them...)
Have an order in with Amazon at the cheap rate, which hopefully will get fulfilled soon, and have a couple of licences at 30 quid each on the academic licensing scheme coming up ;) so all my pooters will be 7'd up soon. Except for the Ubuntu one. And the lappie that's running Mint. :)
The wife has a Dell laptop with Vista Home Basic on it, which it came with. We had thoughts of downgrading, but after some use of giving Vista a go found it okay and no slow by any means. I didn't take to the eye candy (and the basic version doesn't even have the glitzy aero), but I did find it amusing that there was no XP theme, but there was a Windows Classic theme (ie Win95). What I did find with the Classic theme though, with the eye candy removed the new layout and tools made a lot more sense.
However, in the last month image thumbnails have started being a problem with very slow refresh rates. The thumbnail cache is now stored centrally, as opposed to XP where they are installed in each folder (thumbs.db). Hopefully a £45 copy of Win7 will sort it.
Who the hell still has a video? :lol: :lol:
Sticking with xp :?
Linux
Tried Linux a couple of times - Suse and that drink they only drink in the congo :wink:
1st time round squeezed 6 months out of Suse before I went back to Windows. A few years later tried the the other and that lasted about 6 days.
The UI just felt "heavy" compared to XP or Aero. Also (and to my surprise) found that I had more headaches with finding drivers than I did with Windows and the final straw was that I could not find anything as "simple" as Quicken (or Money) for Linux.
(Yes, I know that I could have run it under WINE or something like that, but what's the point? - A bit like strapping a desk calendar to your wrist watch just because it does not tell you the date .... can you see what I did there?? :twisted: )
Not (yet) convinced that Linux is mature enough for the "common consumer". Feel that its still an enthusiasts OS, for now.
Oh yes thats the one for me as well and er just £25 :D
All Day Long
Fair enough. Good thing that there are alternatives. I may be an enthusiast, I suppose. But, I've been using linux for everything since it came out (except for some excursions into *BSD).
Indeed, I just had a problem on my system, and some of the features I like about linux helped me fix it. (Lots of detailed information, text based configuration files, documentation for everyting, even if sparse in places, and wonderful logs). I've been spending some of the morning restructuring my website from using a pretty heavy duty CMS (Python/Zope/Plone, which I used as a demonstration for others, but decided to continue using for a while after the demonstration) to a static website (Ruby/webgen) automatically regenerated at intervals. For my purposes, the overhead and complexity of the CMS is a bit of overkill. The webserver I use wasn't interacting nicely with the generated web pages. But, since there was a lot of documentation, lots of text configuration files, and lots of log files, I was able to sort it out in a relatively short period. And, thank God, I didn't have to use a mouse once. For this sort of thing, a mouse just gets in the way.
Best wishes,
Bob
Thats cool
There is GnuCash which runs on both Linux and Windows. However, it's not as well-rounded as the commercial products.
For me, what locks me into Windows is a number of pieces of software that I have grown to rely on which only exist in Windows versions:
1) Nelson E-mail Organiser (NEO) - which I have been using for more than 9 years now, probably saved me hundreds of thousands of pounds.
2) Taglocity - again, something I have used since day one and which helps keep umpteen projects at a time from imploding into a mess
Both of the above are Microsoft Outlook plug ins which then impose the use of Outlook as an e-mail client and PIM - which is okay with the plug ins, but I do not understand how anyone can live with the standard Outlook functionality for categorisation, search and e-mail organisation.
3) Microsoft OneNote - which over the last year and a half has become indispensable to me as my main repository for notes on everything.
4) fanix As-U-Type - which is a system-wide spell check and autocorrect/text substitution gizmo that I have been using, again, for around ten years. It is the absolute killer application for me - I effectively type in shorthand - it saves me hundreds and hundreds of hours and I literally can't cope without it if I have to type more than a few dozen words on a computer.
There is nothing on Linux (nor Mac) that substitutes adequately for the above set of tools, so I am committed to the windows platform for the foreseeable future.
Also I agree that Linux for the common man is a long way still - it's just not heading in the same direction as Windows/MacOS (or not quickly enough, anyway).
PS my Amazon order was fulfilled today so I now have a production copy of win7 to play with over the weekend. Will report back anything of interest... :)
Cheers,
Steve
+1 - don't get all these flying windows etc. design crap
Wasn't that fussed about it, but having read this, I'm tempted:
The pros and cons of switching to Windows 7
Reckon I'll give it 9 months to bed in, and then spring for a new machine... and see if it's up to Ubuntu standards!
Mine came today so I'll spend tomorrow backing up before a reformat for the 64-bit version.
Here you go:
sounds a bit ghastly to me though :lol:
:shock:
Here you go:
sounds a bit ghastly to me though :lol:
I reckon that Microsoft's Midori will get a new name before it is launched. ;-)
For those of you going for Win 7, if you can at all help it go for a clean install not the upgrade, it is a right pain in the @***!!!! :evil:
Especially from XP! ;)
Seriously, what problems did you find? Did you make sure you had downloaded the latest drivers before starting or just let the 7 installer take care of things?
I find it amazing that Micro$oft haven't put in place an upgrade from XP - particularly with the slow uptake of Vista and their wanting to get users off of XP. They claim it's not possible - yet upgrade from XP to Vista is and 7 is meant to be a re3latively minor update to Vista. I think it more their typical belligerent attitude shining through!
Vista from XP is not an upgrade as such; Vista code base is entirely different from XP and Vista installs into a completely different set of folder structures (and registry is different internally, too). When you do an upgrade from XP to Vista you find (or I did, anyway) that there are a load of spurious folders and shortcuts left over from XP which do not resolve properly in Vista and give you errors like "you are not allowed to access this folder" if you click on e.g. the spurious My Documents shortcut left in your User folder.Especially from XP! ;)
Seriously, what problems did you find? Did you make sure you had downloaded the latest drivers before starting or just let the 7 installer take care of things?
I find it amazing that Micro$oft haven't put in place an upgrade from XP - particularly with the slow uptake of Vista and their wanting to get users off of XP. They claim it's not possible - yet upgrade from XP to Vista is and 7 is meant to be a re3latively minor update to Vista. I think it more their typical belligerent attitude shining through!
Win7 is built on the Vista code base (hence the sniping about it being a service pack for Vista), so is a real upgrade from there.
Interesting to here they never got the XP>Vista upgrade properly sorted either then!
FWIW I just upgraded Ubuntu 9.04>9.10RC on my netbook and that took over 3 hours and I'm left with some spurious files now that I can't delete now. A clean install would have taken about 15 minutes (plus re-configurating personal settings etc).
It takes longer when it does dependency checks.
I think that Ubuntu uses apt, so "apt-get check && apt-get autoremove" might tidy things up a bit.
I'm going from Debian stable to Debian testing on my server later this week. It should be interesting.
Best wishes,
Bob
PS As root, you can remove anything. Not that it is always a good idea.
RLF
As part of the upgrade process the installer tells you which applications you need to uninstall. I have a Thinkpad and all the of specialist IBM tools needed to be uninstalled (including the wifi software). I've also had issues with Outlook not being able to start up due to permission issues (i've sorted it, but a newbie would have problems). And then, depsite have all the latest versions of the software & drivers I'm still having some minor (though annoying) issues.
All in all it is a bit more performant, and I think I will eventually upgrade, but in the immediate future I'll be going back to Vista :?
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