Microsoft Updates

[Lady Brin 0]

However, I never had a problem with boot time until Vista...XP was much, much faster.

Really? I've had to run to the beauty shop and get my roots touched up while waiting for XP to re-load.

[jasonlockwood 0]

I have been contemplating geting a new computer for some time now. I am still using XP and am very leary of upgrading to Vista. I am glad to hear that Mac OS X worked well for you and that you were able to fully migrate all of your Windows based files into your Mac system. I have been checking our Mac prices for sometime, and although they are more expensive than Vista version PCs, I am willing to pay the money in exchange for peace of mind and fewer re-boots.

I've had my Mac for about three months now and have had to reboot maybe twice. There are some programs that crash occasionally (most notably AOL Instant Messenger), but in most cases, everything works wonderfully. The printer software even works better than what I using on my PC, too. I constantly had communication errors with my Windows PC and my printer (and HP all-in-one OfficeJet), among other day-to-day problems.

This is not to detract from Phil's comments about Apple as a company, but personally, my computing life is far better now.

[bborg 0]

Really? I've had to run to the beauty shop and get my roots touched up while waiting for XP to re-load.

Hehe I think your machine might need a little house cleaning.

[Lady Brin 0]

I have been contemplating getting a new computer for some time now. I am still using XP and am very leery of upgrading to Vista. I am glad to hear that Mac OS X worked well for you and that you were able to fully migrate all of your Windows based files into your Mac system. I have been checking our Mac prices for sometime, and although they are more expensive than Vista version PCs, I am willing to pay the money in exchange for peace of mind and fewer re-boots.

I'm not that computer literate. I'd be scared to death I'd never be able to migrate - heck, I've got old Quicken files and some other *stuff* on a '98 that I've never moved. How software would have to be replaced in a switch to a Mac?

[PhilO 0]

This is not to detract from Phil's comments about Apple as a company, but personally, my computing life is far better now.

I think Apple as a company is doing well and doing some great things, I would just like to see them doing even better. Microsoft has become very calcified and needs serious competition. Apple could make a version of OS X that ran on general PC hardware without much difficulty now (in fact it takes extra work to stop it from running on stock PC hardware by checking for a security chip), and would still sell a ton of their own hardware. Actually probably a lot more of it.

[PhilO 0]

I'm not that computer literate. I'd be scared to death I'd never be able to migrate - heck, I've got old Quicken files and some other *stuff* on a '98 that I've never moved. How software would have to be replaced in a switch to a Mac?

Are you running on a PC that's 10 years old?

Quicken and Microsoft Office are available on Macs, by the way. Also, the PC can be made to run in a "virtual machine" on a Mac in many cases, thought I doubt that an OS as old as Win 98 is supported. In any case, a real computer wiz can do figure it out whatever the situation. A 10 year old machine is a disaster waiting to happen (hard drive crash.)

One cool thing is that if you had a couple of PCs, you can actually move both of them to run on the Mac under VMWare; they can even run simultaneously along with OS X if you wanted, though that would be slow on a lower end system.

[Arnold 0]

The back-up is a joke. One has little discretion on what to back, and unlike my External Western Digital backup, which is brilliant because it not only backs up the whole computer, but from then on, it only does incremental additions. When the disk fills up, it drops older files. Not Vista. Change one file in your pictures or music, and the whole thing is redone, filling up the disk in a few days, and then it comes to a halt because the disk is full.

I use the windows backup program that comes with XP in \WINDOWS\system32\ntbackup.exe It allows for full, incremental and differential backups for whatever parts of the file system you tell it, on a file by file basis if you want it to. It has a windows interface but is most easily used for a routine backup strategy from scripts invoking the command line interface. My scripts segment the backup into separate pieces so the backup sets are more easily managed and not too big to fit on DVD arvhives when eventually moved from safe storage on an external drive or another PC on the network. I click one 'shortcut' icon on the desktop and the script does the rest, including compression and naming the backup sets with date and time stamps.

Thanks ewv, but that looks too technical for me. Software should be user friendly, or they have failed the general market. My XP Western Digital "book" just plugged in as an external, and needs no attention. It goes to sleep when not needed, and turns on and off with the computer. It also gives the choice of back-up or copy. I will stop using the Vista backup, it is useless. I may get another Western Digital 'book' for the Vista instead.

[MichaelJ 0]

A friend of mine joked that Microsoft is so annoyed at the rebellion against Vista and the petitions to keep Windows XP available that they released SP3 to kill off Windows XP to force people to move to Vista.

It was, of course, just a joke ...

Seriously it was a joke?

Does anyone on the Forum use Vista? If so, what have been your experiences?

I use Vista, and I am quite happy with it. Having a good experience comes down to 2 things, having enough memory(2GB minimum, but I recommend more) and having the right drivers(they are little programs that Vista uses to talk to the hardware).

Because Vista is still fairly new and requires a new type of driver compared to older Windows versions, most drivers that I have seen are immature and are unfortunately letting the platform down.

With the right ones, the system is brilliant and responsive. But in my opinion, the end user shouldn't have to worry about what driver they are running, so the OS has still got some work left to make it ready for the market.

[ewv 0]

I use the windows backup program that comes with XP in \WINDOWS\system32\ntbackup.exe It allows for full, incremental and differential backups for whatever parts of the file system you tell it, on a file by file basis if you want it to. It has a windows interface but is most easily used for a routine backup strategy from scripts invoking the command line interface...

Thanks ewv, but that looks too technical for me. Software should be user friendly, or they have failed the general market.

I agree, but for those who have "grown up with computers almost since the beginning", when you could program them to do almost anything you want, it is good that some of these features are still there for the flexibility they make possible in the face of the increasing trend towards making the PC into a self-contained "appliance" that usoft controls.

My XP Western Digital "book" just plugged in as an external, and needs no attention. It goes to sleep when not needed, and turns on and off with the computer. It also gives the choice of back-up or copy. I will stop using the Vista backup, it is useless. I may get another Western Digital 'book' for the Vista instead.

Hopefully the Western Digital product is flexible enough to do all you want. Remember, though, that disks can fail so make sure you also archive critical data you may need in the future onto some other medium like DVDs.

[PhilO 0]

I use Vista, and I am quite happy with it. Having a good experience comes down to 2 things, having enough memory(2GB minimum, but I recommend more) and having the right drivers(they are little programs that Vista uses to talk to the hardware).

On my previous system I ran Vista x64 with 6GB of RAM on a *quad* core processor and it was still ridiculously slow for a number of things such as using Windows explorer at times (which also does not properly apply default view settings, unlike XP.) "System Restore" in Ultimate doesn't distinguish between restoring just critical system files and any file changing on the disk, which is just stupid, so I leave it off. They leave out the classic windows help system files, so tens or hundreds of thousands of older Windows programs don't have help available, though you can go to MS and get the installer for it (and which users are savvy enough to do that?) UAC is stupidly implemented. Windows networking is *still* problematic and *still* can't properly remember something as simple as a specific username/password for a network resource and is *still* ridiculously slow in many cases. And one of the biggest fundamental problems now: 64 bit implementation is inelegant and it is just confusing and very problematic for driver software developers to have 32 and 64 bit versions of the same OS; by contrast, Mac OS X 10.5 is now totally 64 bit so developers can rely on that fact going forward.

I could go on, and on, but not much need to repeat what many have already written about around the net.

[PhilO 0]

Hopefully the Western Digital product is flexible enough to do all you want. Remember, though, that disks can fail so make sure you also archive critical data you may need in the future onto some other medium like DVDs.

In that context it's worth noting that conventional CD-R/DVD-R media doesn't necessarily have an indefinite lifetime either. If it's really important stuff to be kept long term on that media, I suggest the Mitsui MAM-A gold archive discs, which are more expensive but will outlive you.

A flash USB drive will probably also last indefinitely, the only question being whether the technology to read them will exist in the future (my guess, as with CD/DVD discs: yes, it will be, precisely because there will still be billions of them in existence that people will want to read even as the technology far surpasses it.)

[darren 0]

I use Vista, and I am quite happy with it. Having a good experience comes down to 2 things, having enough memory(2GB minimum, but I recommend more) and having the right drivers(they are little programs that Vista uses to talk to the hardware).

I agree. I picked up a new laptop with Vista late last year, and I really like it. Initially I was a little worried about purchasing it, just because of all the bad things I heard about Vista, but it's worked out well for me. It's just like every other Microsoft OS upgrade I've done (except Windows ME): If I wasn't told by so many people that it was a horrible OS, I'd swear it was their best OS yet.

That said, I don't know why anybody sells Vista machines with 1 gigs of RAM, which probably isn't enough to run the OS, a usual internet browsing session, and an IM client at the same time. Two gigs should be the minimum.

The only problem I have with the machine is that my wife has really grown to like Vista. I thought I'd be the only user for this new laptop, and now I have to share. She won't touch her XP computer now.

[MichaelJ 0]

I use Vista, and I am quite happy with it. Having a good experience comes down to 2 things, having enough memory(2GB minimum, but I recommend more) and having the right drivers(they are little programs that Vista uses to talk to the hardware).

On my previous system I ran Vista x64 with 6GB of RAM on a *quad* core processor and it was still ridiculously slow for a number of things such as using Windows explorer at times (which also does not properly apply default view settings, unlike XP.) "System Restore" in Ultimate doesn't distinguish between restoring just critical system files and any file changing on the disk, which is just stupid, so I leave it off. They leave out the classic windows help system files, so tens or hundreds of thousands of older Windows programs don't have help available, though you can go to MS and get the installer for it (and which users are savvy enough to do that?) UAC is stupidly implemented. Windows networking is *still* problematic and *still* can't properly remember something as simple as a specific username/password for a network resource and is *still* ridiculously slow in many cases. And one of the biggest fundamental problems now: 64 bit implementation is inelegant and it is just confusing and very problematic for driver software developers to have 32 and 64 bit versions of the same OS; by contrast, Mac OS X 10.5 is now totally 64 bit so developers can rely on that fact going forward.

I could go on, and on, but not much need to repeat what many have already written about around the net.

In Vista Service Pack 1, UAC has been toned down to not be anywhere near as annoying(I don't notice it popup much anymore, never in daily operation, only when installing some programs). I have never witnessed the networking not remembering passwords. I connect to multiple companies networks each day(Some through VPN, some direct) as part of my contract work and it remembers all my passwords fine. Besides an annoying glitch with fast user switching messing up offline file synchronisations ability to connect to networks, I haven't seen any issues.

I have used x64 too but how is it not elegant? Mind you, I haven't tried to write a driver, but from the users perspective, how will they notice it?

[Cometmaker 0]

One cool thing is that if you had a couple of PCs, you can actually move both of them to run on the Mac under VMWare; they can even run simultaneously along with OS X if you wanted, though that would be slow on a lower end system.

Do the two PCs have to be on the same server?

[PhilO 0]

In Vista Service Pack 1, UAC has been toned down to not be anywhere near as annoying(I don't notice it popup much anymore, never in daily operation, only when installing some programs).

I hadn't noticed, I turned it off.

I have never witnessed the networking not remembering passwords. I connect to multiple companies networks each day(Some through VPN, some direct) as part of my contract work and it remembers all my passwords fine.

Distinct usernames and passwords, both? I have yet to see Windows *reliably* remember them. I would bet that either your username is the same as your Windows username on all of those systems, or the password is the same, or both. See e.g. http://www.vistax64.com/vista-networking-s...-passwords.html, one of many such references.

Besides an annoying glitch with fast user switching messing up offline file synchronisations ability to connect to networks, I haven't seen any issues.

The Mac side more reliably identifies available network devices than Windows ever has in my experience, including the Vista installation.

I have used x64 too but how is it not elegant? Mind you, I haven't tried to write a driver, but from the users perspective, how will they notice it?

From both the driver-writer and user's perspective you can't just use a 32 bit driver in 64 bit Windows (Apple OS X 10.5 evidently does permit it.) There are other reasons but that's one reason I call it inelegant, because it fractures the OS even further. If you think finding Vista x32 drivers is hard, try finding Vista x64 drivers (and then try finding ones that work right.)

[PhilO 0]

One cool thing is that if you had a couple of PCs, you can actually move both of them to run on the Mac under VMWare; they can even run simultaneously along with OS X if you wanted, though that would be slow on a lower end system.

Do the two PCs have to be on the same server?

I'm not sure I know what you mean. Once each PC is in a VMWare image, that image can run on a VMWare program pretty much anywhere. You could even copy the file multiple times to clone that PC multiple times on different VMWare instances (which in fact is done by IT people to make exact copies of machines that have been carefully configured rather than spending the time on each machine.)

If a computer is powerful enough (CPU power, RAM, disk space), you can run more than one virtual computer at a time on one physical computer. So if you currently had 2 PCs that were several years old, and had a new PC that was really fast with lots of RAM and hard disk, you could most likely convert the older PCs to VMWare images and have those PCs virtually available on your new PC simultaneously (or any permutation you wanted; you can have them not running at all, or just machine A, or just B, or A and B at the same time.)

Since the VMWare images are simply big files, you can move them anywhere you want, so old machines A and B could reside on different new computers, or the same computer, depending on your goals.

Does that answer you?

[Cometmaker 0]

Does that answer you?

No, sorry, that was too shorthand of me. Suppose you're running a program on PC A to compute aspect1 to a1+n, and the same program is being run on PC B to compute aspect2 to a2+n, and the computation of each aspect depends on the ability of a network to perform each aspect in the context of aspect1+2 from one computational time frame to the next. So if you pull both PC images on to one snazzy spiffy new computer, will VMWare still allow you to merge the data in real time? Or do you have to cease, merge, then restart? Or is that a configurable thing so that no shutdown is necessary?

[MichaelJ 0]

Does that answer you?

No, sorry, that was too shorthand of me. Suppose you're running a program on PC A to compute aspect1 to a1+n, and the same program is being run on PC B to compute aspect2 to a2+n, and the computation of each aspect depends on the ability of a network to perform each aspect in the context of aspect1+2 from one computational time frame to the next. So if you pull both PC images on to one snazzy spiffy new computer, will VMWare still allow you to merge the data in real time? Or do you have to cease, merge, then restart? Or is that a configurable thing so that no shutdown is necessary?

It has been a while since I have last used VMWare but based on my knowledge from when I last used it, what you are describing should be possible. VMWare does have a driver to create 'network bridges' so you would have to bridge each virtual PC's network into a real network to allow them to communicate with each other in real time.

[PhilO 0]

Does that answer you?

No, sorry, that was too shorthand of me. Suppose you're running a program on PC A to compute aspect1 to a1+n, and the same program is being run on PC B to compute aspect2 to a2+n, and the computation of each aspect depends on the ability of a network to perform each aspect in the context of aspect1+2 from one computational time frame to the next. So if you pull both PC images on to one snazzy spiffy new computer, will VMWare still allow you to merge the data in real time? Or do you have to cease, merge, then restart? Or is that a configurable thing so that no shutdown is necessary?

Michael's answer re: network bridging is relevant here but your question may imply further considerations too. There *are* subtle differences between a computer running in an emulator such as VMWare and a real physical system. The emulator is itself running on some physical hardware and there's a certain degree of slowdown in that environment vs non-emulated. But, it would be very bad programming to rely on each computer's precise timing to complete a certain N'th iteration of a computation anyway. A message driven architecture is very robust and able to operate in a very heterogeneous computing environment.

From the "view" of each virtual machine, VMWare running instances A and B communicating over the network bridge will act as though they are independent computers talking to each other in realtime, assuming VMWare was configured to run multiple VM's simultaneously and assuming a multicore/multiprocessor computer, which is the norm now. The differences will be in the timing (computation time, and latencies), and division of actual physical resources available on a shared basis.

[Lady Brin 0]

I'm not that computer literate. I'd be scared to death I'd never be able to migrate - heck, I've got old Quicken files and some other *stuff* on a '98 that I've never moved. How software would have to be replaced in a switch to a Mac?

Are you running on a PC that's 10 years old?

No, I have a 3-4 year old Pentium 4 Dell 3.0 GHz, 2.99 GHz, 3 GB of Ram with XP. The newer versions of Quicken won't run on 98, but I have archived data on the '98 that needs to be converted; I'm just too lazy to do it. I get scared my 4 year old hard-drive is a disaster waiting to happen although I do keep everything backed-up.

One cool thing is that if you had a couple of PCs, you can actually move both of them to run on the Mac under VMWare; they can even run simultaneously along with OS X if you wanted, though that would be slow on a lower end system.

It would be even cooler if I had a clue what you are talking about. I would like to get a dual core and a second screen to keep open for my stock trades. What do you recommend...that's cheap. I have a small fortune in PC software.

[Lady Brin 0]

Really? I've had to run to the beauty shop and get my roots touched up while waiting for XP to re-load.

Hehe I think your machine might need a little house cleaning.

I know. I just hate reformatting and reloading all the software - it's such a tedious, boring job.

[bborg 0]

I know. I just hate reformatting and reloading all the software - it's such a tedious, boring job.

Nono, you just need to clean out your startup list. It sounds like you have too many things loading at startup, and it's probably slowing things down while the machine is running too.

[Lady Brin 0]

I know. I just hate reformatting and reloading all the software - it's such a tedious, boring job.

Nono, you just need to clean out your startup list. It sounds like you have too many things loading at startup, and it's probably slowing things down while the machine is running too.

Nope, this I know how to do. There are conflicts and the only way I know how to resolve them is to reformat.

[PhilO 0]

I would like to get a dual core and a second screen to keep open for my stock trades. What do you recommend...that's cheap. I have a small fortune in PC software.

Well, cheap is often a lot more expensive before too long.

One possibility would be this system:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?sk...5#productdetail

Quad (not dual) core, 4 GB of RAM, 1TB hard drive, NVidia video card, can receive TV signals (e.g. like CNBC in a window on the screen if you're a crazy day trader), $1,159 without a monitor which doesn't strike me as a ton of money for those specs. You shouldn't skimp on the monitor. The Dell 30" has a ton of screen real estate; Samsung makes decent monitors. I would avoid Viewsonic based on personal experience.

[Paul's Here 0]

------------

I would avoid Viewsonic based on personal experience.

Curious as to why. I've had Viewsonic (CRT) monitors for years and never had a problem.