The Vista Brick... your old PC?
- Thread starter Cyberman
- Start date
smcd
Active member
Speaking of Vista, they were giving it away freely for a while in the USA and I didn't know about it until approximately 2 days after they'd run out of product 
(http://www.powertogether.com/) but I did make it to an MS launch event to still get Office 2007 Pro for free. They demoed Office and Vista (and Exchange) features that were new and several were exciting, though I am still unsure it's well worth the price of upgrading just yet.
(http://www.powertogether.com/) but I did make it to an MS launch event to still get Office 2007 Pro for free. They demoed Office and Vista (and Exchange) features that were new and several were exciting, though I am still unsure it's well worth the price of upgrading just yet.
t0rek
Wilson's Friend
I know I won't have any use for Vista until I get DX10 card. I'm saving my money
AFAIK the 9800 pro you have is Directx9 so is Aero compatible, so you can get Vista now and upgrade later
I know, and btw I forgot to change that stat.. I have an x850 pro now. What I'm saying is, I won't have a need for vista until I get a DX10 card BECAUSE to me Vista isn't worth upgrading to unless you got a DX10 card... I know my card will support it fine.
Doomulation
?????????????????????????
So what's new with Vista that actually benefits us? Most are under-the-hood changes, but many of them are good. I'll list a few that I recently found out:
- Better thread scheduling. Previously in Windows, thread execution could be cancelled to handle interrupts. The time these interrupts took (in cpu cycles) was counted as executing time for threads. Thus Thread A & Thread B, both which were assigned 10 ms each, could execute different amount of time. Thread A could execute 5 ms, while Thread B 10 ms. The rest of the time was executed as interrupts, though it was assigned for Thread A. No longer in Vista.
- Multimedia Priority. This helps Multimedia threads get more CPU time (they get prioritized before other threads) so they can perform their work without any interruptions from other threads that are fighting for cpu time. Hence you will get smooth audio and video playback even if you're running demanding processes in the background.
- File-Based Symbolic Links. I don't know what they do exactly because it's complicated, so you may have to read about it yourself. Look below.
- Better IO handling. First, when waiting for an asynchronous IO operation to complete, the thread that waited for this was the one that actually completed the IO request when finished. In Vista, this is handled by the system, which removes the need to interrupt everything and switch to the thread that did the IO.
- IO Cancellation. Vista can now cancel synchronous IO operations, which brings better stability. The UI will be responsive, and you can cancel the IO operations if they take too long. Furthermore, this will solve the infamous problem when a process won't terminate when you try to kill it in task manager. Because IO (and device drivers) can now be canceled, Windows can clean up after the process and terminate it (Windows has to wait for any and all IO operations and drivers to complete before terminating the process). Unfortunately, the applications (and device drivers) need to written to take advantage of this.
- Kernel rollback or something? A very neat API was added to Vista that helps developers. In installation programs, when copying lots of files, deleting, registers, adding new registry entries, etc, etc, what would happen if something were to fail? The installation program would have to clean up and make sure it doesn't screw up the system and leave a lot of crap lying around. Vista solves this by letting applications tell Windows that they're going to do these things (via an API). You may call it a sort of a virtual mode. The application will do everything as it would, install, copy, register, add registry entries, etc, etc, and should it fail? Then fail. In this mode, Windows does not do anything of that mentioned above. It simply returns success or failure. That means the application won't have to worry about cleaning up if it fails. If everything goes smooth, the application tells Windows to execute everything that it wants. Simple, and so effective!
- Last but not least... IO Priority! Applications can now specify priorities to their IO operations. This means that tedious tasks such as defragmenting can be set to low, which would mean that other IO operations with higher priority would be executed before, hence giving a big boost for system performance! This would work especially good on slower drives. In previous versions of Windows, IO priority didn't exist. That meant that all and every IO operation was executed at the same time, bringing down system performance. No longer will defragmentation bring down system performance for you!
These are only a few of the improvements to Vista, I'm sure (there's lots of security enhancements as well), but for now, this is all... for your reference, this article provided me with information: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2007/02/VistaKernel/default.aspx
- Better thread scheduling. Previously in Windows, thread execution could be cancelled to handle interrupts. The time these interrupts took (in cpu cycles) was counted as executing time for threads. Thus Thread A & Thread B, both which were assigned 10 ms each, could execute different amount of time. Thread A could execute 5 ms, while Thread B 10 ms. The rest of the time was executed as interrupts, though it was assigned for Thread A. No longer in Vista.
- Multimedia Priority. This helps Multimedia threads get more CPU time (they get prioritized before other threads) so they can perform their work without any interruptions from other threads that are fighting for cpu time. Hence you will get smooth audio and video playback even if you're running demanding processes in the background.
- File-Based Symbolic Links. I don't know what they do exactly because it's complicated, so you may have to read about it yourself. Look below.
- Better IO handling. First, when waiting for an asynchronous IO operation to complete, the thread that waited for this was the one that actually completed the IO request when finished. In Vista, this is handled by the system, which removes the need to interrupt everything and switch to the thread that did the IO.
- IO Cancellation. Vista can now cancel synchronous IO operations, which brings better stability. The UI will be responsive, and you can cancel the IO operations if they take too long. Furthermore, this will solve the infamous problem when a process won't terminate when you try to kill it in task manager. Because IO (and device drivers) can now be canceled, Windows can clean up after the process and terminate it (Windows has to wait for any and all IO operations and drivers to complete before terminating the process). Unfortunately, the applications (and device drivers) need to written to take advantage of this.
- Kernel rollback or something? A very neat API was added to Vista that helps developers. In installation programs, when copying lots of files, deleting, registers, adding new registry entries, etc, etc, what would happen if something were to fail? The installation program would have to clean up and make sure it doesn't screw up the system and leave a lot of crap lying around. Vista solves this by letting applications tell Windows that they're going to do these things (via an API). You may call it a sort of a virtual mode. The application will do everything as it would, install, copy, register, add registry entries, etc, etc, and should it fail? Then fail. In this mode, Windows does not do anything of that mentioned above. It simply returns success or failure. That means the application won't have to worry about cleaning up if it fails. If everything goes smooth, the application tells Windows to execute everything that it wants. Simple, and so effective!
- Last but not least... IO Priority! Applications can now specify priorities to their IO operations. This means that tedious tasks such as defragmenting can be set to low, which would mean that other IO operations with higher priority would be executed before, hence giving a big boost for system performance! This would work especially good on slower drives. In previous versions of Windows, IO priority didn't exist. That meant that all and every IO operation was executed at the same time, bringing down system performance. No longer will defragmentation bring down system performance for you!
These are only a few of the improvements to Vista, I'm sure (there's lots of security enhancements as well), but for now, this is all... for your reference, this article provided me with information: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2007/02/VistaKernel/default.aspx
Flash
Technomage
Microsoft again found future in the past. This thing was in *nix systems for at least 20 years. And it's not complicated. for example i have full install of Quake4 on windows partition and i want to play it in linux. I made symlinks to all *.pk4 files in /mnt/dos_d/games/quake4/q4base to /usr/local/games/q4base so quake4 executable "thinks" that all packages are in q4 directory (/usr/local/games/quake4/q4base)
Symlinks are very useful for many things - for example i have 20 directories with video files and it's easier to work with them when they all linked to /home/flash/Movies
As for thread scheduling, again it's new old feature - in linux and BSD systems it works much better already.
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Doomulation
?????????????????????????
Indeed, but we're comparing Windows to Windows here. Linux is pretty technologically advanced already, but you'd have to switch.
Anyway, linking to directories and files, I believe they already exist in XP and previous, but Vista added something more or changed something, I'm not sure, to this. That's why I wrote complicated and that I don't know that much.
Anyway, linking to directories and files, I believe they already exist in XP and previous, but Vista added something more or changed something, I'm not sure, to this. That's why I wrote complicated and that I don't know that much.
Toasty
Sony battery
NTFS 3.0 and onward supported symbolic links (more commonly referred to as junctions in NTFS) and hard links all along - it just wasn't as easy to take advantage of them without third party tools. Anyway, so yeah, it was possible to use them in Windows XP, 2000 and some of the NT variants as well.
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