500 Hour Test of Tomorrow's Windows "Vista"

[pschmid]

Windows Vista offers more than just a pretty user interface with transparent window effects. You want to know all about Vista, and so did we. Here's what we found.

 

[chuckshissle]

It's looking pretty good. The interface and visual are very nice. Though I hope it wouldn't just give better ergonomics and productivity but performance as well.

 

[chuckshissle]

Hot!

 

[1Tanker]

you kiwi's must be desperate people, all them sheep must make any woman look good.

LMFAO! 😀

 

[NEO3]

PERFORMANCE!! Show some info on that! No processor speed/ram issue was involved in the review!!
:/

 

[FITCamaro]

Nice article but you make no mention of the fact of Windows Vista's major downfall. Its huge systems requirements. Show a screenshot of the task manager showing the commit charge and see how well people react. We just got Beta 2 installed yesterday at work. I like the new sidebar and how they ripped it off from these guys:

http://www.desktopsidebar.com/

 

[MU_Engineer]

The OS I am running cost several billion dollars and isn't commercially available either 😀 (But I know where you can download a copy of it off of BitTorrent...)

 

[prox2far]

Nice review but you failed to mention the hardware requirements.

I have not been able find any reason to upgrade my XP box with free firewall and antivirus to a VISTA system, This review changes nothing.

In my opinion Vista looks like XP with a lot of annoying eye candy, idiot proof desktop and a big load of system requirements.

Christ look at page 33 what person needs the help of an OS to know how to play FreeCell

 

[mixim]

The new look of the operating system is good, and lets it outshine its Linux and Mac OS competitors. One notices repeatedly while working with this software that Microsoft scoped out its competition very carefully.

Hmm, this is what they said in the article^^ In the conclusion.... But i really think that 95% of people ould disagree with the statement you made about Vista outshining Mac OS aesthetically speaking....

 

[Human1]

As for a media player, WMP11beta is up at M$ right now.

 

[kuff_kuff]

I would agree with you there, i have both the Vista Beta 2 and MacOSX x86 running on pc's at home, OSX is more pleasing to the eye, but honestly.....its not as comfortable after growing up on windows.

Even linux borrows more from the UI organisation of windows than it does from OSX,( although last Ubuntoo distro i sudes had option where u could configure it to look like either)

1 thing i can tell you is that every person (mostly girls/women) that i have shown vista to, have said it was very "pretty" and they love the bubbles sceensaver, as do i. i think the new UI will go a ways to encourage non-techies to migrate.

outside of these forums, there is no fight between OSX and Windows, office workers use XP at work and they'll use it at home. thats just the way it is.

my 2 cents of course

 

[FITCamaro]

The one good things about Vista is that it actually is a multi-user OS. As far as is it better than OS X, I don't really like OS to begin with. Graphically the two are about equal but I hate the interface of OS X. I have a G4 iBook that I use as a DVD player on planes (I paid $75, an 80 series Flowmaster muffler, and some old computer parts for it).

BTW, anyone know how to make your damn desktop icons in OS X stay in the same place and stay aligned? Really annoying that every time I boot it up the Hard drive icon and others are not where I put them last. I right click but theres no align to grid option or anything available. Yet another thing Mac hides away in the depths of menus.

 

[Frank_M]

As others have asked so far, it would be interesting to see how resource-hungry Vista is.

Also, how is this pagefile / RAM-unloading working IRL?

 

[kuff_kuff]

It usually takes a commit charge of 600MB when doing normal stuff like using office and IE7,

but i must say it it running rather smooth on my test pc

Celeron 3.03Ghz @ 3.7Ghz
512MB DDR333, single channel
80GB HDD
ATI 9600 256MB

Inspiron 9300
2.0Ghz Dothan
512MB DDR2 533, dual channel
60GB 5400rpm HDD
Nvidia 6800 Go 256MB

 

[theaxemaster]

Well at least it looks better than Fisher Price Windows (XP). I doubt I'll get it just because of the system requirements and all that crap that I don't need or want. And if games stop supporting DX9 or DX10 isn't available on XP then I'll just move to linux entirely and be done with it. But I guess it takes some advantage of all the processing power people with midrange dell PCs who use them to check their email.

 

[chuckshissle]

Oh it's more than hot.
The $4000 OS I'm using now isn't even commercially avaliable yet.

8O 8O 8O 8O $4000!?

 

[chuckshissle]

Oh it's more than hot.
The $4000 OS I'm using now isn't even commercially avaliable yet.

You lost your mind! How the hell does a CD cost $4000, you must be joking. I got my XP Home Edition for about $180. What the hell is in that OS that would cost so much? Damn you Bill Gates! You're ripping people as having a $1Million per hour business for you in not enough!!!! Yes, Bill Gates is earning about $1M per hour ever since he founded the Microsoft company. Im only getting $12.50 in my part time job. Jezz I wonder how much would the Windows Vista Home Edition costs. Anyone has a guess?

 

[Aragorn]

I agree that the look and feel of OS X is awfull. Usability is so far below windows that it should be an embarassment to anyone that owns one. And before anyone decides to tell me to try it before I talk about it ... I have used every type of Mac from the Apple IIe on. They were all awfull and I did use most of them on a daily basis until fairly recently. I still help family members with them and work with them from time to time. The less the better. I also used Macs before I used windows.

 

[mesarectifier]

OSX = great, IMO.

For 'power users' it's probably a bit too helpful - I know lots of people prefer to just have a couple of ugly menus but more options in total rather than some nice pretty buttons.

I prefer OSX, after years of being forced into power-usery by Windows it's a breath of fresh, easy to breathe air.

I just hope that Vista isn't too much like OSX in that respect, as I still like getting my 'power-user' fix on my PC from time to time, and it'd be a shame to get rid of that.

 

[prox2far]

It usually takes a commit charge of 600MB when doing normal stuff like using office and IE7,

but i must say it it running rather smooth on my test pc

Celeron 3.03Ghz @ 3.7Ghz
512MB DDR333, single channel
80GB HDD
ATI 9600 256MB

Inspiron 9300
2.0Ghz Dothan
512MB DDR2 533, dual channel
60GB 5400rpm HDD
Nvidia 6800 Go 256MB

8O 600 MB pagefile on a 512 meg system 8O sounds very wastefull, I thought M$ had figured out using a pagefile by now.

 

[samir_nayanajaad]

...an interesting extension in IE 7. It's possible to specify a local domain suffix, such as .net or .de. This means that users need only enter "tomshardware" then press Alt+Shift+Enter to open www.tomshardware.de.

quick question about that, why dont they keep it the same as IE6. all I ever type in is, tomshardware, then hold Ctrl and hit enter and IE6 puts in http://www.tomshardware.com. Ctrl and enter are so easy to hit compaired to Alt+Shift+Enter. I hope thet I can still use Ctrl+Enter to add on the http://www. ... .com stuff

 

[Arexcedian]

I'm sure it will run on a dual or even quad proc system, but will it efficiently make use of those multi processors even when your apps are not written to utilize multi processors - like today’s games? This seems like the most important aspect of any new operating system but none of the reviews have mentioned this. Am I missing something here?

 

[kuff_kuff]

OSX has a bigger memory footprint than Vista, and much more than XP, if i remember correctly OSX was using about 1.5GB in swap, i'm not certain so dont hold me to it, but it was large enough to raise both eyebrows, yet OSx was running relatively smooth.

And Vista, larga swap file and all, does run smooth on 512 so i would say - Yes Microsoft does know how to use a swap file, i for one use vista everyday since may 22nd, and it hasnt crashed at all, and i havent turned it off except to restart when i was installing a driver.....and its a beta!

when i get home i'll restart and see what Vista uses in memory on boot up

 

[FITCamaro]

The lowest I've seen on two machines is 650MB commit charge. Up to 800MB. Thats not doing anything. Just the OS running. Around 650-700MB without Aeroglass and around 750-800MB with. Each instance of IE adds about 35-45MB.

Machines have been:

1.66GHz Merom dual core
2GB DDR2-533 (we only had 256MB and needed to upgrade but DDR2-667 wasn't available)
160GB hard drive
ATI x600 (also ran this with the onboard)

3.0GHz P4 w/ HT
512MB and 2GB (ran at first with 512MB and then upgraded)
80GB hard drive
Integrated Intel 945 graphics

Took forever to boot up with only 512MB of RAM but once running was fine doing nothing. Aeroglass worked though even on the integrated graphics.

With 512MB of RAM Task Manager stated only 80MB was free with nothing running and the commit charge was as I said 650-800MB (depends if running 32-bit or 64-bit). With 2GB of RAM 1.4GB was free with same commit charge.

I don't even want to imagine trying to run real apps like Office though. Can easily see over 1GB commit charge with something like Power Point open.

 

[kuff_kuff]

i dont know what differences exist between our systems, but i have used office 2003 pro and IE7 while browsing windows explorer, and it ran smoothly on 512. i particularly found browing network files to be smoother than i expected, but its all subjective i suppose.

i takes longer to boot than XP but still not windows 98 style go fix a meal and come back boot times.