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Our Blogs Open Sauce Vista: even six years isn't enough
Our Blogs Open Sauce Vista: even six years isn't enough | Vista: even six years isn't enough |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 01 January 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 2 This addition of RAM has made some difference in that the PC has, so far, never seized up as though it was choking - which it did many times during my first run, even though there was 2 GB of memory available. With a fair measure of confidence, I can now recommend that all prospective Vista users buy enough RAM so that they can provide this beast with 4 GB. Featured Whitepaper
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But 32-bit Vista cannot use all this RAM. As usual, Microsoft has a workaround - deceive the user. If you use the Control Panel and go to System, it will show you a beautiful round figure - 4.00 GB of RAM - which is impossible because of the binary system being in use. (It's interesting to note that this reporting of a nice round figure is one of the many fixes introduced with service pack 1!) But this route to view system resources is one that most punters know - instead try hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del and going to the Task Manager. There you can see the actual amount of RAM - 3518 MB. Why try to deceive users? (As a side note, a 32-bit Linux system can access up to 64 GB of RAM provided the kernel is compiled with the correct options and the mainboard being used can hold that amount of memory.) Nothing has changed with regard to administration of Vista - you have to give permission for each and every operation that is carried out. I had problems with installing the motherboard manufacturer's drivers for the inbuilt sound card but after a couple of reboots (ah, those still remain the bread and butter sysadmin tools for Windows) the card was usable. It is amusing to note that Vista offers up the local hard drive "for safe removal" as it does any USB drive which is plugged in. Sure, it's a SATA drive and therefore recognised as a SCSI device but how in heaven's name would you be able to safely remove it while using the PC??? And who uses anything but SATA drives these days? Is this also a "feature"? Having become a bit more familiar with Mac OS X over the last six months, I noticed that Vista has some similar features - it has a desktop search function located at the bottom left-hand corner as opposed to the Mac's Spotlight which is located at the top right-hand corner! Definitely not a copied feature. And then there are the little utilities like the clock - Microsoft calls them gadgets, the Mac has had them for a long time and calls them widgets. Once again, no copying here, folks. One could go on about the photo organising program (Windows Photo Gallery as opposed to iPhoto) and numerous other "features" but... As of this writing, I have a total of 53 updates installed on the Vista system, including service pack 1 which, for me, weighed in at something in the region of half a gig. I noticed that whenever I tried to install some hardware, Vista would re-install drivers from Microsoft after a reboot. The manufacturer, it would appear, knows less about his or her hardware than Microsoft - or else it could well be that a signed driver, available after the manufacturer paid the Microsoft tax, is installed. I had most of the same problems I mentioned in my first review so the service pack has been of little use in that respect. There is still no way that Windows Media player will play an .avi file - VLC media player has to be used. And there is no application to burn an .iso image to disk - I had to download something myself. Isn't this something that ordinary users need? I didn't bother with the 64-bit version this time as all the emphasis was on seeing what effect the service pack had had on the overall performance of Vista. DVDs still seize up occasionally, no matter the source. I noticed that Vista allows a user to only change the region code on a DVD player four times after which it gets locked. Of course, there are ways around this. But Microsoft, as always, caters to the establishment. Can't let those poor Hollywood studios suffer, can we? I've reached more or less the same conclusion after these two weeks as I did with my first experiment with Vista - this is an overly complicated operating system which is far too complex to be maintained. It is said to have 50 million lines of code. The principles which governed the first Unices, those of one application doing a task, doing it well and then handing it over to another app have long been cast by the wayside. Multitasking, an unnatural concept, has come to dominate thinking in Redmond. |
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