Windows Vista vs Windows XP

**caravel** · 12-02-2007, 18:22

Originally Posted by sapi

Otherwise, vista is simply a better OS, imho. It's more stable, and I've yet to find a program that won't run (not even using compatibility mode).

I've always found XP and 2K to be very stable in general. In what way is Vista "more stable"?

**Husar** · 12-02-2007, 18:55

Originally Posted by Caravel

I've always found XP and 2K to be very stable in general. In what way is Vista "more stable"?

That's true, but more stable in my experience when a game crashes, I've had games and demos crash in XP and then the Task Manager wouldn't come up, the game window would be on top omitting the Task Manager and especially with background programs running it would be hard to close the game without restarting the whole Pc, at least for me. In Vista I do not recall that happening, when you press Ctrl+Alt+Del Vista opens a completely new screen that allows you to lock the PC, change the user etc and also to call up the Task Manager which, IIRC, has never been behind another program so far and the whole process seems "cleaner" to me than pressing the hardware reset button to restart the whole PC.

It's not just that, I think Vista overall and that includes visuals and other things like this, makes a more polished impression on me so far. You may be entirely right that it's not that polished underneath, but at least for me that doesn't shine through.

And in the end we all just want to be happy,don't we?

**caravel** · 12-02-2007, 22:11

Originally Posted by Husar

That's true, but more stable in my experience when a game crashes, I've had games and demos crash in XP and then the Task Manager wouldn't come up, the game window would be on top omitting the Task Manager and especially with background programs running it would be hard to close the game without restarting the whole Pc, at least for me.

In NT/2K/XP the Task Manager should always appear on top, the only reason why it wouldn't is if you've unchecked the "Always On Top" option which is if I may add very unwise as it causes exactly the problem you're referring to.

Originally Posted by Husar

In Vista I do not recall that happening, when you press Ctrl+Alt+Del Vista opens a completely new screen that allows you to lock the PC, change the user etc and also to call up the Task Manager which, IIRC, has never been behind another program so far and the whole process seems "cleaner" to me than pressing the hardware reset button to restart the whole PC.

The same is true for XP and 2K - just disable the welcome screen and by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL you will bring up the same screen that allows you to carry out exactly the actions you've mentioned above.

This is a screenshot of the dialogue box from the screen you mentioned. It hasn't actually changed at all since NT4 except cosmetically:
http://www.md.chalmers.se/Support/Ho...e-passwd-3.jpg

This is the same thing in 2K:
http://www.smc.edu/password/password...y-screen-3.gif

And in XP:
http://www.wfu.edu/is/thinkpad/guide...ltdelsmall.jpg

The Vista version is quite a departure from those visually, but if you disable the themes and revert to the classic appearance it may in some way resemble those above. Either way, underneath the gloss it's the same thing, with the same functionality.

Originally Posted by Husar

It's not just that, I think Vista overall and that includes visuals and other things like this, makes a more polished impression on me so far. You may be entirely right that it's not that polished underneath, but at least for me that doesn't shine through.

And in the end we all just want to be happy,don't we?

So overall you've admitted that you're mainly impressed by the visuals and Vista gives you the "impression" of being more stable, mainly because it appears more polished (the themes service) and because CTRL+ALT+DEL doesn't open only the task manager by default but instead goes to a "completely new screen" (which first appeared in Windows NT and has also been in 2000, XP and Server 2003)? Even if this were a new feature of some sort, I still wouldn't view it as any kind of indication of "improved stability" in the NT family.

**sapi** · 12-03-2007, 02:46

Originally Posted by Caravel

I've always found XP and 2K to be very stable in general. In what way is Vista "more stable"?

I just find it useful to have it cleanly recover from driver crashes within a session, for example. Instead of receiving a BSOD or other error screen, vista will simply do a clean restart of the driver, and a few seconds later you can keep using it as if there was no problem at all, thanks to the new (and admittedly irritating for developers) driver model.

You do know that us command line freaks () had something like that for, oh, I dunno, some 20 years now, in *nix shells - it's called auto-completion.
No malice intended, but I do find it ironic that you prefer Vista for offering exactly what a lot of the other supporters blame *nix for, and want to run away from: using the command line!

If *nix had decent support for games, I'd run it

In NT/2K/XP the Task Manager should always appear on top, the only reason why it wouldn't is if you've unchecked the "Always On Top" option which is if I may add very unwise as it causes exactly the problem you're referring to.

Both the XP and Vista task managers have a lot of problems with popping up on top of fullscreen games; indeed one of the main irritations that I have with Vista is that, while it will pull you out to a different desktop for the ctrl+alt+del menu screen, it'll dump you back to the active one when using the task manager. Things would be a lot easier for the user (if a lot harder to code) if it ran in a isolated desktop as well.

**Xiahou** · 12-09-2007, 11:44

Originally Posted by sapi

If *nix had decent support for games, I'd run it

Heard of Wine?

Anything rated "Platinum" or "Gold" should run well under Linux...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

**sapi** · 12-12-2007, 08:31

Last I heard Wine still had serious problems running modern directx applications (performance, not compatibility, wise)?

**Xiahou** · 12-12-2007, 08:43

Originally Posted by sapi

Last I heard Wine still had serious problems running modern directx applications (performance, not compatibility, wise)?

Oh it's definitely not perfect by a long shot. But apps that work under Wine generally work well. All you can do is search the appDB and see what experience others have had running a game. Obviously it's not likely to ever support games designed for Windows as well as Windows itself, but it's nice to know that if I ever make the switch, I won't have to give up all my Windows games.

**caravel** · 12-12-2007, 09:30

Cedega is better for running games than Wine. TW games don't run too well however. I think RTW and M2TW can be got to a barely working state in some cases but STW/MTW don't seem to work at all.

**sapi** · 12-12-2007, 10:36

I wonder how well virtualisation would work?

I know VMware server (free) can run using unix as a host OS, and the reports I've read on that sort of software indicates that the performance hit isn't really that bad (maybe ~10%).

Unfortunately, unless I'm mistaken (I'll check), they were only testing desktop performance, so didn't stress the graphics subsystem. Do any of you folks know what the overhead on 3d would be with virtualisation?

Else I might have to have a look into whether you can simultaneously have an image bootable and virtualise-able (to save space and simplify things, so that I could virtualise windows from *nix using the same install as was bootable on its own).

Any ideas, or is this off-topic rant getting a bit boring?