Re: OT: MS VISTA (more pain)
- From: "John K." <john3000@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2008 22:43:06 -0400
I have hopes for Vista, but I have no interest in putting it on any machine I use or manage, at least for the next several months.
Quite frankly, my experience with Vista is such that I don't see any overwhelming advantage to moving to Vista, despite the improved security (or at least the appearance of improved security).
While I saw a big difference between Windows 98SE and Windows XP Pro, I don't see anything approaching that between Windows XP Pro and Vista. And actually I still have two PCs running Windows 98SE that run 24-7. One now spends most of its time as a print server and the other is the family music server. One hasn't been rebooted since a power failure earlier this year, and the other was restarted a couple of days later (two fans in that box failed to spin up after power was restored, so I had to find replacement fans). Oh, and I don't buy that Windows Media hype about how you need Vista to really have a media PC. Both of the Windows 98SE boxes have ATI All-In-Wonder cards and both can record, edit, and playback video (the one with an ATI All-In-Wonder Rage 9000DV card does it better and can pause and resume viewing while recording continues). Maybe it is a little easier in that you don't have to install a lot of drivers, but I really haven't found much you can do (media-wise) on Vista that you can't do on 98SE.
In comparing Vista to XP Pro, the only factor which leans in Vista's favor is its ability to run applications with large memory requirements so much better than XP. I routinely get "out of memory" errors with XP, but in using Vista I haven't had that problem. What are these "large memory" applications? Adobe Photoshop CS2, Corel Paint Shop Pro X2, Canon Digital Photo Professional, things like that. While I have 2 GB of RAM in the XP boxes, they don't seem to be very adept in managing it, and there seems to be a hard limit to how large the virtual memory space can be. Once the Task Manager shows 3.22 GB, the applications start popping "out of memory" modals. Unfortunately, I see this way too often.
Stability is NOT a problem with XP. My main PC (which is where I do my image editing) is not a small system. Currently it has an AMD 3800+ dual-core with 2 GB RAM and 12 hard drives for a total of about 5.2 TB of disc space (hey, when your raw image files come from the camera as 11 MB to 16 MB files, you eat up disc space very quickly).
Most of those hard drives are external USB drives, so the amount of space on the PC varies from day to day. Along with all those external USB drives, there are many other USB devices - CF card readers, webcam, graphics tablet, printers, Spyder 2 Pro color calibration sensor, MP3 player, and of course keyboard and mouse. Yup, so many USB devices that there are three external USB 7 port USB hubs, and there is only 1 empty USB port. Oh, and it has dual monitors (very handy for image editing).
Did I mention that it also runs Apache and MySQL in the background, as well as some "services" I developed in PHP which hit certain web sites every 15 minutes, capture the pages, parse the pages, and save copies of the pages along with metrics from the pages?
So how long does this XP Pro system run between reboots? Not as long as an HP 3000, but not too bad for a PC. I usually reboot it once a month when the Windows Updates come out. Last month I didn't reboot it, so as of a few minutes ago it has now been up 59.66 days since the last reboot.
It is true that my Linux box has been up a few months since its last reboot, but then it is a pretty basic configuration. It doesn't receive the pounding the Windows XP box receives, so I'd expect it to run at least two years to see the level of activity the XP box sees in two weeks.
So which do I prefer, Windows XP or Linux? It depends on what I have to do. These days I do a lot of LAMP and WAMP, and with so much open source software from the Linux/Unix world now running on Windows XP, I'm actually finding that I do a lot of my LAMP development on Windows XP Pro and then moving it over to Linux and testing on both Windows and Linux, making sure that there is ONE version of the code and that it runs on both platforms.
Choose Linux or choose XP? Nope, can't make that decision, I want them both!
John
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- OT: MS VISTA (more pain)
- From: James B. Byrne
- OT: MS VISTA (more pain)
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