Microsoft tries to polish a turd

[i***@example.com]

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit


Microsoft Tries to Polish Vista By Saul Hansell

Microsoft is really taking the gloves off this time.
ZDNet is reporting that it will spend $500 million to
make a powerful statement to its hundreds of millions
of customers. I imagine the statement would have to go
something like this:

"Windows Vista isn’t really as bad as they say.
Honest. Please don’t be mad at us. We promise our next
operating system will be better. Pinky swear."

Those aren’t exactly the words they use, but it is
certainly the tone of the ad that Microsoft has started
running on its site. I can’t find it, but Ed Bott at
ZDNet did and has a copy here. It shows a painting of a
tall ship with the headline “At one point everyone
thought the Earth was flat. Get the facts about Windows
Vista.”

That promotion leads to a page that acknowledges that
Vista had problems:

"But we know a few of you were disappointed by your
early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt
sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest
Windows wasn’t always living up to your high
expectations for a Microsoft product."

It takes a minute to figure out where to find
Microsoft’s response to this criticism: You need to
click some arrows on the page. (Why can’t Microsoft use
the plus Icon popularized by Google and lots of
others?)

The company asserts that it is now compatible with the
vast bulk of software and hardware. It also boasts that
Vista is more secure, faster, uses less energy and is
even “sexier.”

"Sure, Windows Vista gets a lot of compliments on its
aesthetics. But its style serves an important purpose:
to put everything within a click’s reach and make you
more productive."

Microsoft, is probably right that Vista gets a bit of a
bum rap. Lots of people find that Vista works fine and
is an improvement over Windows XP. I use Vista on a
home computer with little trouble. (And no, I don’t
hate Microsoft, despite what some commenters say. I am
a big fan of Word 2007, and I even pay for Microsoft’s
OneCare anti-virus and backup software.)

But this is still a dreadful place for Microsoft to be.
It is fighting Google on one side and Apple on the
other. And both of those companies have flaws, products
that don’t quite work right, have gaps and disappoint
users. But both Google and Apple have products that you
don’t need to be told to notice they are sexy. That
changes how people see the more prosaic parts of their
product lines and makes people far more open to
considering new products.

Even if you are a big fan of Microsoft, consider which
you would rather read about first: a something new from
Google, Apple or Microsoft?

After spending $500 million, Microsoft might be able to
convince people that Windows Vista is not awful. But
just because you can show the earth is not flat,
doesn’t mean you will rule the new world.


http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/microsoft-tries-to-polish-vista/?ref=technology

[Martin Griffith]

On Sat, 26 Jul 2008 22:49:10 +0000, in sci.electronics.design

Post by i***@example.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit

oops, fell asleep, sorry


martin

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

Post by i***@example.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit
Microsoft Tries to Polish Vista By Saul Hansell
Microsoft is really taking the gloves off this time.
ZDNet is reporting that it will spend $500 million to
make a powerful statement to its hundreds of millions
of customers. I imagine the statement would have to go
"Windows Vista isn’t really as bad as they say.
Honest. Please don’t be mad at us. We promise our next
operating system will be better. Pinky swear."
Those aren’t exactly the words they use, but it is
certainly the tone of the ad that Microsoft has started
running on its site. I can’t find it, but Ed Bott at
ZDNet did and has a copy here. It shows a painting of a
tall ship with the headline “At one point everyone
thought the Earth was flat. Get the facts about Windows
Vista.”
That promotion leads to a page that acknowledges that
"But we know a few of you were disappointed by your
early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt
sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest
Windows wasn’t always living up to your high
expectations for a Microsoft product."
It takes a minute to figure out where to find
Microsoft’s response to this criticism: You need to
click some arrows on the page. (Why can’t Microsoft use
the plus Icon popularized by Google and lots of
others?)
The company asserts that it is now compatible with the
vast bulk of software and hardware. It also boasts that
Vista is more secure, faster, uses less energy and is
even “sexier.”
"Sure, Windows Vista gets a lot of compliments on its
to put everything within a click’s reach and make you
more productive."
Microsoft, is probably right that Vista gets a bit of a
bum rap. Lots of people find that Vista works fine and
is an improvement over Windows XP. I use Vista on a
home computer with little trouble. (And no, I don’t
hate Microsoft, despite what some commenters say. I am
a big fan of Word 2007, and I even pay for Microsoft’s
OneCare anti-virus and backup software.)
But this is still a dreadful place for Microsoft to be.
It is fighting Google on one side and Apple on the
other. And both of those companies have flaws, products
that don’t quite work right, have gaps and disappoint
users. But both Google and Apple have products that you
don’t need to be told to notice they are sexy. That
changes how people see the more prosaic parts of their
product lines and makes people far more open to
considering new products.
Even if you are a big fan of Microsoft, consider which
you would rather read about first: a something new from
Google, Apple or Microsoft?
After spending $500 million, Microsoft might be able to
convince people that Windows Vista is not awful. But
just because you can show the earth is not flat,
doesn’t mean you will rule the new world.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/microsoft-tries-to-polish-vista/?ref=technology

Vista is an ME re-run.
From the users POV the best thing they could do is not release the next
OS until they get it right. REALLY get it right.

[Paul Hovnanian P.E.]

Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote:
[snip]

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
Vista is an ME re-run.
From the users POV the best thing they could do is not release the next
OS until they get it right. REALLY get it right.

How many chances do they get? Remember how long they worked on Longhorn
(Longwait)? And when marketing started to kick ass and demand a release,
they started stripping out promised features (Shorthorn)?

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

Post by Paul Hovnanian P.E.
[snip]

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
Vista is an ME re-run.
From the users POV the best thing they could do is not release the next
OS until they get it right. REALLY get it right.

How many chances do they get? Remember how long they worked on Longhorn
(Longwait)? And when marketing started to kick ass and demand a release,
they started stripping out promised features (Shorthorn)?

Then thats the lesson for them.

[i***@example.com]

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
Vista is an ME re-run.
From the users POV the best thing they could do is not release the next
OS until they get it right. REALLY get it right.

Screenshots of the 25 worst moments when windows fails:

http://www.wackyarchives.com/featured/25-worst-moments-when-windows-fail.html

[Joel Koltner]

Post by i***@example.com
http://www.wackyarchives.com/featured/25-worst-moments-when-windows-fail.html

Many of those are demonstrating failures of non-Microsoft-provided code,
actually (e.g., applications, device drivers, etc.).

Obviously one can see "Windows" failing far more often than any other OS when
they have something like 90% of the desktop market.

For embedded applications, Linux is far more popular... and you don't have to
Google much at all to find incidences of poorly implemented Linuxes dying in,
e.g., network routers ("router reboots" has ~290k hits!).

It's probably a fairly safe statement that OSes failing -- regardless of which
one you choose -- is in the single digit percentages; the rest of machine
failures being due to bad drivers, applications, configuration, etc.

Although it is absurd that, in some distributions of Linux, having a bad
Xorg.conf file will dump you back into text (console) mode rather than giving
you a (Windows-like) generic VGA desktop.

---Joel

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:40:54 +0100, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
From the users POV the best thing they could do is not release the next
OS until they get it right. REALLY get it right.

That won't happen. Users only buy upgrades in the vain hope that the
next release will fix the bugs of the current version. Of course that
never happens because features and functions are added faster than
bugs get fixed. There's always hope, but it never seems to happen.

If Microsoft actually did release something that was bug free, nobody
would upgrade to subsequent versions, resulting in a predictable
revenue loss. Therefore, it is beneficial to Microsoft (and other
software vendors) to intentionally leave a few major bugs in their
current products.

How it works:

1. It takes 18 months from initial release for a major software
product to be worth buying. Microsoft seems to take a bit longer at
about 24 months.

2. Subsequent upgrades add bloat, fix a few old bugs, add more bugs,
slow down the machine, and require additional RAM and diskspace.

3. After about 3-5 years, the products usually stabilize into a
consistent level of mediocrity. The product doesn't really get
better, but the customers learn to tolerate its idiocyncracies and
bugs. If left alone, the customers get very comfortable with the
product and refuse to tolerate any furthur changes. This is bad for
selling updates, so new bugs, instabilities, and preformance issues
need to be introduced in the latest updates, to inspire such
conservative customers to update.

[unknown]

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
From the users POV the best thing they could do is not release
the next OS until they get it right. REALLY get it right.

That won't happen. Users only buy upgrades in the vain hope that the
next release will fix the bugs of the current version. Of course that
never happens because features and functions are added faster than
bugs get fixed. There's always hope, but it never seems to happen.
If Microsoft actually did release something that was bug free, nobody
would upgrade to subsequent versions, resulting in a predictable
revenue loss. Therefore, it is beneficial to Microsoft (and other
software vendors) to intentionally leave a few major bugs in their
current products.
1. It takes 18 months from initial release for a major software
product to be worth buying. Microsoft seems to take a bit longer at
about 24 months.
2. Subsequent upgrades add bloat, fix a few old bugs, add more bugs,
slow down the machine, and require additional RAM and diskspace.
3. After about 3-5 years, the products usually stabilize into a
consistent level of mediocrity. The product doesn't really get
better, but the customers learn to tolerate its idiosyncrasies and
bugs. If left alone, the customers get very comfortable with the
product and refuse to tolerate any further changes. This is bad for
selling updates, so new bugs, instabilities, and performance issues
need to be introduced in the latest updates, to inspire such
conservative customers to update.

Brilliant analysis!

I would add that, in order to further discourage customers who
refuse to pour more money into "upgrades", Microsoft mixes
together must-have security fixes with updates that are designed
to drive the customer to a newer version, mixing them together
with almost identical descriptions. Later, they announce an
end of support so that, for example, a security flaw in code
that is shared by Windows 2000 and Windows XP only gets patched
for the Windows XP users. In the Linux world, a patch is made
available to all versions that share code, even if the code has
not changed since version 1.0.

Here is Bill Gates himself, confirming that what you describe as...

"Users only buy upgrades in the vain hope that the next
release will fix the bugs of the current version. Of
course that never happens because features and functions
are added faster than bugs get fixed. There's always hope,
but it never seems to happen."

...is a deliberate business decision.

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

FOCUS Magazine Interview with Bill Gates:

Microsoft Code Has No Bugs (that Microsoft cares about)

Source:
http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+has+no+bugs
http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html

-----

In this interview, Big Bill gets distracted and reveals his
contempt for you, his loyal customer.

In an interview for German weekly magazine FOCUS (nr. 43,
October 23, 1995, pages 206-212), Microsoft`s Mr. Bill
Gates has made some statements about software quality of
MS products. [See executive summary, below.] After lengthy
inquiries about how PCs should and could be used (including
some angry comments on some questions which Mr. Gates
evidently did not like), the interviewer comes to storage
requirements of MS products; it ends with the following
dispute:

-----

FOCUS:
Every new release of a software which has less bugs than the
older one is also more complex and has more features...

Gates:
No, only if that is what will sell!

FOCUS:
But...

Gates:
Only if that is what will sell! We've never done a piece
of software unless we thought it would sell. That's why
everything we do in software ... it's really amazing: We do
it because we think that's what customers want. That's why
we do what we do.

FOCUS:
But on the other hand - you would say: Okay, folks, if you
don't like these new features, stay with the old version,
and keep the bugs?

Gates:
No! We have lots and lots of competitors. The new version --
it's not there to fix bugs. That's not the reason we come up
with a new version.

FOCUS:
But there are bugs an any version which people would really
like to have fixed.

Gates:
No! There are no significant bugs in our released software
that any significant number of users want fixed.

FOCUS:
Oh, my God. I always get mad at my computer if MS Word
swallows the page numbers of a document which I printed a
couple of times with page numbers. If I complain to anybody
they say "Well, upgrade from version 5.11 to 6.0."

Gates:
No! If you really think there's a bug you should report a
bug. Maybe you're not using it properly. Have you ever
considered that?

FOCUS:
Yeah, I did...

Gates:
It turns out Luddites don't know how to use software
properly, so you should look into that. -- The reason we
come up with new versions is not to fix bugs. It's
absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason to buy a new
version I ever heard. When we do a new version we put in
lots of new things that people are asking for. And so, in no
sense, is stability a reason to move to a new version. It's
never a reason.

FOCUS:
How come I keep being told by computer vendors "Well, we
know about this bug, wait till the next version is there,
it'll be fixed?" I hear this all the time. How come? If
you're telling me there are no significant bugs in software
and there is no reason to do a new version?

Gates:
No. I'm saying: We don't do a new version to fix bugs. We
don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a
hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say
"Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get
a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of
bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis.

FOCUS:
Probably you have other contacts to your software
developers. But if Mister Anybody, like me, calls up a store
or a support line and says, "Hey listen, there's a bug" ...
90 percent of the time I get the answer "Oh, well, yeah,
that's not too bad, wait to the next version and it'll be
fixed." That's how the system works.

Gates:
Guess how much we spend on phone calls every year.

FOCUS:
Hm, a couple of million dollars?

Gates:
500 million dollars a year. We take every one of these phone
calls and classify them. That's the input we use to do the
next version. So it's like the worlds biggest feedback loop.
People call in -- we decide what to do on it. Do you want to
know what percentage of those phonecalls relates to bugs in
the software? Less than one percent.

FOCUS:
So people call in to say "Hey listen, I would love to have
this and that feature?"

Gates:
Actually, that's about five percent. Most of them call to
get advice on how to do a certain thing with the software.
That's the primary thing. We could have you sit and listen
to these phone calls. There are millions and millions of
them. It really isn't statistically significant. Sit in and
listen to Win 95 calls, sit in and listen to Word calls, and
wait, just wait for weeks and weeks for someone to call in
and say "Oh, I found a bug in this thing."...

FOCUS:
So where does this common feeling of frustration come from
that unites all the PC users? Everybody experiences it every
day that these things simply don't work like they should.

Gates:
Because it's cool. It's like, "Yeah, been there done that -
oh, yeah, I know that bug." - I can understand that
phenomenon sociologically, not technically.


-----

Executive Summary:

So...

* Bug reports are statistically, therefore actually,
unimportant;

* If you want a bug fixed, you are (by definition)
in the minority;

* Microsoft doesn't care about bugs because bug
fixes are not a significant source of revenue;

* If you think you found a bug, it really only
means you're incompetent;

* Anyway, people only complain about bugs to show how
cool they are, not because bugs cause any real problems.

Straight from the horse's mouth.

-----

Source:
http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+has+no+bugs

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

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:26:23 +0000, Guy Macon

Post by unknown
Brilliant analysis!

Thanks. Fame and fortune will surely follow. I'll have it framed.

Post by unknown
* Bug reports are statistically, therefore actually,
unimportant;

Yep. With statistics and sufficient creativity, I can make numbers
say almost anything. If I also write the interpretation of those
numbers, I can do even more.

Post by unknown
* If you want a bug fixed, you are (by definition)
in the minority;

Most companies maintain a bug list or database not so that they can
schedule fixes. They do so that they don't waste internal resources
on fixing known bugs.

Post by unknown
* Microsoft doesn't care about bugs because bug
fixes are not a significant source of revenue;

It's not just Microsoft. It's like that with most software companies.

Post by unknown
* If you think you found a bug, it really only
means you're incompetent;

I've had quite a few arguments with support and development people
trying to report what I consider to be a bug. In many cases, the
employees and zealots consider themselves the first line of defense
for "their" product. It has to be really bad and easily reproduce
able to get them to consider it a bug. In addition, there's
considerable truth to what Bill says about user incompetence. I've
had to slog my way through a huge mass of incoherent and
irreproducible bug lists. In my opinion, the overwhelming number of
reports are not bugs, but user problems. A substantial number are
also just opinions on how things should operate (unexpected behavior)
and are very subjective.

However, that may apply to the GUM (great unwashed masses), but should
not apply to Microsoft's own beta testers. I was involved in the
rather huge Windoze 95 beta test. Thousands of users submitted bug
reports and found problems during the tests. I spent considerable
effort documenting bugs. When the product arrived, most of the bugs
we found were still there. It took years for some of them to be
fixed.

Post by unknown
* Anyway, people only complain about bugs to show how
cool they are, not because bugs cause any real problems.

Software companies expect a predictable number of bug reports from
their customers, beta testers, and developers. If the bug reports
don't appear in the designated quantities, they are deemed to be
useless loafers.

Post by unknown
Straight from the horse's mouth.

Yeah, but that was 13 years ago, when things were somewhat different.
I don't have any direct contact with Microsoft and am not familiar
with how they operate. However, I was involved with SCO for many
years. If you want bugs fixed, SCO had to allocate the resources.
There was a small group that did maintenance on existing code, but the
really big fixes and added features required that big OEMs (IBM,
Compaq, HP, etc) to pay SCO to fix them.

For a while, I lobbied to have only the minor and easy bugs fixed. The
product was looking rather shabby, with a large number of easily fixed
bugs becoming apparently permanent. As Bill Gates clumsily hinted,
nobody wants to pay to have those fixed. I suggested that instead of
concentrating on the really gross bugs, that require considerable
resources, testing, regression testing, documentation, errata notices,
install packaging, and time. Anything that could be fixed without
affecting other parts of the OS, should be fixed without the attendant
bureaucratic overhead for perhaps 3 or 4 months. In other words, a
general cleanup effort. It didn't sell to management because it was
decided that the allegedly necessary change documentation cost would
exceed the value of the bug fixes. It would also impact the schedule
for fixing the revenue generating big bugs. Grumble.

I have some rather specific issues with Vista. However, they're not
really bugs. They're design decisions that I consider to be a mix of
stupid, sloppy, inept, and not necessary. For example, look in the
root directory of a Vista computah. There's the usual "Program Files"
directory. There's also a new "ProgramData" directory. That's fine,
but what happened to the space between the words "Program" and "Data"?
Apparently, someone discovered that environment variables can't have
spaces in them, so they correctly solved the problem by removing the
space from the environment variable, but also incorrectly removed it
from the directory name. Not a big deal, and probably doesn't affect
anything other than my sense of aesthetics, but is indicative of some
rather shabby design. There's plenty more of the same in Vista, but I
don't wanna unload here.

It will be interesting to see if a few million dollars wasted on
public relations will improve the customers perception of Vista. I
predict it will backfire and be perceived as damage control and making
excuses.

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

Post by Jeff Liebermann
On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:40:54 +0100, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
From the users POV the best thing they could do is not release the next
OS until they get it right. REALLY get it right.

That won't happen. Users only buy upgrades in the vain hope that the
next release will fix the bugs of the current version. Of course that
never happens because features and functions are added faster than
bugs get fixed. There's always hope, but it never seems to happen.
If Microsoft actually did release something that was bug free, nobody
would upgrade to subsequent versions, resulting in a predictable
revenue loss. Therefore, it is beneficial to Microsoft (and other
software vendors) to intentionally leave a few major bugs in their
current products.
1. It takes 18 months from initial release for a major software
product to be worth buying. Microsoft seems to take a bit longer at
about 24 months.
2. Subsequent upgrades add bloat, fix a few old bugs, add more bugs,
slow down the machine, and require additional RAM and diskspace.
3. After about 3-5 years, the products usually stabilize into a
consistent level of mediocrity. The product doesn't really get
better, but the customers learn to tolerate its idiocyncracies and
bugs. If left alone, the customers get very comfortable with the
product and refuse to tolerate any furthur changes. This is bad for
selling updates, so new bugs, instabilities, and preformance issues
need to be introduced in the latest updates, to inspire such
conservative customers to update.

Well, in my case MS have just bought themselves another 3 years of
development time since I will be staying with XP on my next computer,
due this August. I only upgrade an OS on hardware changeover.

[Robert Baer]

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by i***@example.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit
Microsoft Tries to Polish Vista By Saul Hansell
Microsoft is really taking the gloves off this time.
ZDNet is reporting that it will spend $500 million to
make a powerful statement to its hundreds of millions
of customers. I imagine the statement would have to go
"Windows Vista isn’t really as bad as they say.
Honest. Please don’t be mad at us. We promise our next
operating system will be better. Pinky swear."
Those aren’t exactly the words they use, but it is
certainly the tone of the ad that Microsoft has started
running on its site. I can’t find it, but Ed Bott at
ZDNet did and has a copy here. It shows a painting of a
tall ship with the headline “At one point everyone
thought the Earth was flat. Get the facts about Windows
Vista.”
That promotion leads to a page that acknowledges that
"But we know a few of you were disappointed by your
early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt
sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest
Windows wasn’t always living up to your high
expectations for a Microsoft product."
It takes a minute to figure out where to find
Microsoft’s response to this criticism: You need to
click some arrows on the page. (Why can’t Microsoft use
the plus Icon popularized by Google and lots of
others?)
The company asserts that it is now compatible with the
vast bulk of software and hardware. It also boasts that
Vista is more secure, faster, uses less energy and is
even “sexier.”
"Sure, Windows Vista gets a lot of compliments on its
to put everything within a click’s reach and make you
more productive."
Microsoft, is probably right that Vista gets a bit of a
bum rap. Lots of people find that Vista works fine and
is an improvement over Windows XP. I use Vista on a
home computer with little trouble. (And no, I don’t
hate Microsoft, despite what some commenters say. I am
a big fan of Word 2007, and I even pay for Microsoft’s
OneCare anti-virus and backup software.)
But this is still a dreadful place for Microsoft to be.
It is fighting Google on one side and Apple on the
other. And both of those companies have flaws, products
that don’t quite work right, have gaps and disappoint
users. But both Google and Apple have products that you
don’t need to be told to notice they are sexy. That
changes how people see the more prosaic parts of their
product lines and makes people far more open to
considering new products.
Even if you are a big fan of Microsoft, consider which
you would rather read about first: a something new from
Google, Apple or Microsoft?
After spending $500 million, Microsoft might be able to
convince people that Windows Vista is not awful. But
just because you can show the earth is not flat,
doesn’t mean you will rule the new world.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/microsoft-tries-to-polish-vista/?ref=technology

Vista is an ME re-run.
From the users POV the best thing they could do is not release the next
OS until they get it right. REALLY get it right.

Never happen.

[John Larkin]

Post by i***@example.com
"But we know a few of you were disappointed by your
early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt
sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest
Windows wasn’t always living up to your high
expectations for a Microsoft product."

High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?

XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.

Word is an astounding POS.

IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.

Their self-flattering prose is, as usual, disgusting.

John

[Tim Williams]

Post by John Larkin
IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.

Now, I find them quite sufficient. I challenge you to scan my computer and
find a virus.

Tim

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Sat, 26 Jul 2008 23:52:10 -0500, "Tim Williams"

Post by Tim Williams
Now, I find them quite sufficient. I challenge you to scan my computer and
find a virus.
Tim

I recently setup a brand new Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop for a customer.
It came with Vista. I updated it to the latest and installed AOL
9.0VR (downloaded from the AOL web pile). When I ran a full scan
using Avast 4.2, it found 2 or 3 "virusus" in the AOL installation
files. They were probably false alarms, but who knows.

Anyway, you don't need a real virus to find a virus on your computer.

[Robert Baer]

Post by Tim Williams

Post by John Larkin
IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.

Now, I find them quite sufficient. I challenge you to scan my computer and
find a virus.
Tim

Their Os *IS* a virus!

[Baron]

Post by Tim Williams

Post by John Larkin
IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.

Now, I find them quite sufficient. I challenge you to scan my
computer and find a virus.
Tim

Everything on a windows machine is viral.
Do you like to be spied on all the time ? Most people don't !
Are you happy to have your computing behaviour monitored ?
The number of pages you sent to your printer !
How many Emails you replied to... etc etc !

[Tim Williams]

Post by Baron
Everything on a windows machine is viral.
Do you like to be spied on all the time ? Most people don't !

Wrong. Spying is hardly a virus. Windows in installed voluntarily
(assuming you're doing the installation), it does not spread via internet or
what have you. You're obviously ignorant of what a virus does.

Post by Baron
Are you happy to have your computing behaviour monitored ?
The number of pages you sent to your printer !
How many Emails you replied to... etc etc !

Where are these counters stored, how are they transmitted, and to where?

Tim

[Baron]

Post by Tim Williams

Post by Baron
Everything on a windows machine is viral.
Do you like to be spied on all the time ? Most people don't !

Wrong. Spying is hardly a virus. Windows in installed voluntarily
(assuming you're doing the installation), it does not spread via internet or
what have you. You're obviously ignorant of what a virus does.

Whatever.

Post by Tim Williams

Post by Baron
Are you happy to have your computing behaviour monitored ?
The number of pages you sent to your printer !
How many Emails you replied to... etc etc !

Where are these counters stored, how are they transmitted, and to where?
Tim

Try the registry or how about ADS ! Or try your printer driver ! Maybe
word docs ! Outlook Express 6. How about that nice little webcam you
just bought ?

The point is just about everything that you install phones home !
Virtually every program you use makes itself known in some way. Data
about you and your machine is recorded all over the place ! The
internet has opened a big gateway into your life via Windows.

[Tim Williams]

Post by Baron
Try the registry

There's a few million entries (well, almost). Care to be a bit more
specific?

Post by Baron
or how about ADS ! Or try your printer driver ! Maybe
word docs ! Outlook Express 6. How about that nice little webcam you
just bought ?

I don't have a webcam.

Post by Baron
The point is just about everything that you install phones home !

Even L-View Pro 1.D2/32? :^)

Tim

[JosephKK]

On Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:41:03 -0500, "Tim Williams"

Post by Tim Williams

Post by Baron
Try the registry

There's a few million entries (well, almost). Care to be a bit more
specific?

Post by Baron
or how about ADS ! Or try your printer driver ! Maybe
word docs ! Outlook Express 6. How about that nice little webcam you
just bought ?

I don't have a webcam.

Post by Baron
The point is just about everything that you install phones home !

Even L-View Pro 1.D2/32? :^)
Tim

Probably. Some programs are polite enough to tell you that they are
"phoning home" every time you start it (usually once at install time).
It is easy to see on "dial-up" connections, not so visible for "always
on" connections.

[unknown]

Baron wrote...

Post by Baron
Are you happy to have your computing behaviour monitored ?
The number of pages you sent to your printer !
How many Emails you replied to... etc etc !

Where are these counters stored, how are they transmitted, and to where?

The are stored (encrypted) in the data structures associated with
the Visa Kernel DRM subsystem. They are transmitted over the
internet, when and if a third party with a trusted signature
(a record company, recording studio, software vendor or government
agency, usually) pulls the trigger and tells Vista to gather that
data.

DRM is a kernel service in Vista that prevents users from accessing
media or using high-end monitors without authorization from the
"approriate" parties. Vista grants third-parties the right to
irrevocably alter policies and disable functionality on systems in
accordances with their own EULAs without warning. Basically, it
provides a kernel service that lets signed apps install rootkits
and spyware, prohibit you from using competitors products, or
monitor your use and charge you for EULA infractions.

[Tim Williams]

Post by unknown

Post by Tim Williams
Where are these counters stored, how are they transmitted, and to where?

The are stored (encrypted) in the data structures associated with
the Visa[sic] Kernel DRM subsystem.

Ah yes, the DRM fiasco.

I didn't mention in this thread, but I've mentioned elsewhere that I use XP,
not Vista. So where are they stored, transmitted etc.?

Tim

[unknown]

Guy Macon <http://www.GuyMacon.com/> wrote...

Post by unknown

Post by Tim Williams
Where are these counters stored, how are they transmitted, and to where?

The are stored (encrypted) in the data structures associated with
the Visa[sic] Kernel DRM subsystem.

Ah yes, the DRM fiasco.
I didn't mention in this thread, but I've mentioned elsewhere
that I use XP, not Vista. So where are they stored, transmitted etc.?

Assuming that you yourself don't download and run spyware
(I don't think you would, but someone reading this might
not know of the danger, so it is worth mentioning)...

Unlike Vista, which by design allows "trusted" (trusted by
Microsoft, not you) third-parties the right to access a
kernel service that lets signed apps install rootkits and
spyware, prohibit you from using competitors products, or
monitor your use and charge you for licencing infractions,
XP has a potential future vulnerability, not a gaping
security hole pre-installed in every copy by design like
Vista. Here is the sequence that would result in XP having
the same problem:

First Microsoft has to decide to spy on you (unlikely; the
enemies of Microsoft would put that on the front page of
your local paper as soon as someone detected the packets)
or decide to add Vista-style DRM to the XP Kernel (which I
consider far more likely).

We know that at least once, Microsoft installed a stealth
update to all copies of XP -- even those in which the PC's
owner had told the operating system not to download or
install updates without notification and permission.

Or Microsoft cound bundle DRM with SP3 and then do the
usual Microsoft trick of making futire security updates
require SP3.

If either of the above comes to pass, you will be in the
same situation that Vista users are in now; the gun is
pointed at you and loaded and you are trusting every
third party that Microsoft trusts with the DRM keys to
not pull the trigger.

In the meantime, XP is far, far safer than Vista.

Unless you are running XP Media Center Edition.
That version has already had several "critical updates"
that installed various DRM "features" like no longer
being able to watch HBO, Netflix online or the Cartoon
Network.

[unknown]

Post by unknown
We know that at least once, Microsoft installed a stealth
update to all copies of XP -- even those in which the PC's
owner had told the operating system not to download or
install updates without notification and permission.

"I know that this is a bitter pill for Microsoft to have to
swallow, but no matter what spin is being put on the PR,
updating files on systems where users have specifically
stated they want to have the final say on what's installed
is a serious betrayal of trust, and this isn't the first
time (we've already seen Microsoft push WGA through the
Windows Update mechanism as a high priority update). The
Windows Update mechanism cannot become a backdoor, access
all areas pass to systems where users believe that they have
indicated that they don't want updates, period. No excuses,
no waffle, no PR spin. With this incident Microsoft has
crossed the line and needs to make a clear public apology
and then lay out exactly what stealth updates have been made
prior to this one and what's being done to make sure that
this doesn't happen again. Also, I believe we need much more
transparency over the Windows Update mechanism and what
access it gives to systems. If there are exceptions to
'Download updates but let me choose whether to install them'
and 'Check for updates but let me choose whether to download
and install them' then how do we know that there aren't
overrides to the 'Never check for updates' option?"

Source:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=787&page=1
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=787&page=2
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=787&page=3

Also see:
Microsoft Stealth Updates Confirmed by Many
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/005417.html

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

Post by John Larkin

Post by i***@example.com
"But we know a few of you were disappointed by your
early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt
sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest
Windows wasn’t always living up to your high
expectations for a Microsoft product."

High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?
XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.
Word is an astounding POS.
IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.

Why anyone would use either when Open Office and Firefox are available
free is beyond me.

[mpm]

On Jul 26, 11:52 pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin

 "But we know a few of you were disappointed by your
 early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt
 sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest
 Windows wasn’t always living up to your high
 expectations for a Microsoft product."

High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?
XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.
Word is an astounding POS.
IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.
Their self-flattering prose is, as usual, disgusting.
John

By itself, Word also gets a bad rap.
It's actually very, very powerful software - and that is its downfall.
Most people (even programmers) don't need that kind of power in a word
processor.

I eventually took the plunge and got familiar with the Word object
model.
After that, the whole package started to look a lot more "friendly",
even inviting.
Word actually has the largest object model of any of the business
apps, even Excel.
Which is counterintuitive, at first glance.

But I agree. For the guy who justs wants to shoot off a quick
business letter, the first time Word gets a few settings out of whack,
it can be quite tempting to throw the whole thing out the window. No
pun intended.

-mpm

[John Larkin]

Post by mpm
On Jul 26, 11:52 pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin

 "But we know a few of you were disappointed by your
 early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt
 sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest
 Windows wasn’t always living up to your high
 expectations for a Microsoft product."

High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?
XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.
Word is an astounding POS.
IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.
Their self-flattering prose is, as usual, disgusting.
John

By itself, Word also gets a bad rap.
It's actually very, very powerful software - and that is its downfall.
Most people (even programmers) don't need that kind of power in a word
processor.

So why does it do the simple stuff wrong?

If I insert a jpeg into a document, it may appear pages away from
where I drop it, or it may disappear entirely. And if I try to grab it
and move it, about a third of the time I can't pick it at all.

And Word seems to pick fonts randomly.

Why can't I draw a box around text and move it? This is, I think, the
21st century.

Engineers sometimes start lines with numbers. Word takes over.

And heaven help you if you inherit a document that uses the "powerful"
features, with styles set up by a Word expert. That's like walking
into an entirely new and bizarre program you've never seen before.

Post by mpm
I eventually took the plunge and got familiar with the Word object
model.
After that, the whole package started to look a lot more "friendly",
even inviting.
Word actually has the largest object model of any of the business
apps, even Excel.
Which is counterintuitive, at first glance.
But I agree. For the guy who justs wants to shoot off a quick
business letter, the first time Word gets a few settings out of whack,
it can be quite tempting to throw the whole thing out the window. No
pun intended.

Yup. We have the same challenge in designing electronic gadgets that
have a lot of features, namely that we have to make it easy to
understand and use the basic stuff ("How to make a sine wave") while
still providing the advanced stuff ("Global Event group addressing")

Microsoft did it very badly.

John

[Tim Williams]

Post by John Larkin
So why does it do the simple stuff wrong?
If I insert a jpeg into a document, it may appear pages away from
where I drop it, or it may disappear entirely. And if I try to grab it
and move it, about a third of the time I can't pick it at all.

LaTeX does the same thing, more often than not. Apparently it has a very
conservative heuristic for placing images, so it often places images on the
next page, or worse, *all* of them end up at the end of the chapter just
because one pushed them all out of sync with the text.

The one thing about LaTeX is, it's structured. Word isn't, at least in any
way you can see (I forget, maybe you can view markup on a Word file?).

So whereas merely mystifying to the ordinary user, Word is literally
impossible to understand, on a fundamental level, by the power user.

Incidentally, my word processing experience basically includes Notepad (no
word processing per se), Wordpad (limited, but good for simple stuff, and
fast), HTML (hand typed), some OpenOffice (haven't done anything as in-depth
as in LaTeX, but it seems to work well) and, as you might've guessed, LaTeX.

Post by John Larkin
Engineers sometimes start lines with numbers. Word takes over.

Now, there are packages to do this in LaTeX. I even wrote a paper including
line-numbered code, and it was even automatically highlighted (keywords,
strings, etc.) just as in the IDE. Can't beat that!

Post by John Larkin
And heaven help you if you inherit a document that uses the "powerful"
features, with styles set up by a Word expert. That's like walking
into an entirely new and bizarre program you've never seen before.

I couldn't imagine...

Tim

[Robert Latest]

Post by Tim Williams

Post by John Larkin
If I insert a jpeg into a document, it may appear pages away from
where I drop it, or it may disappear entirely. And if I try to grab it
and move it, about a third of the time I can't pick it at all.

LaTeX does the same thing, more often than not. Apparently it has a very
conservative heuristic for placing images, so it often places images on the
next page, or worse, *all* of them end up at the end of the chapter just
because one pushed them all out of sync with the text.

No, LaTeX puts images right where you insert them. What it /does/ push
around are so-called floats. This can lead to annoying effects if you
produce very picture-heavy documents, but upon closer inspection I
sometimes find that indeed I've asked Latex to do the impossible. Like
put floats "where I want them" AND keep them in sync with the text flow
AND fill all pages.

Post by Tim Williams
Incidentally, my word processing experience basically includes Notepad (no
word processing per se), Wordpad (limited, but good for simple stuff, and
fast), HTML (hand typed), some OpenOffice (haven't done anything as in-depth

OpenOffice's biggest problem is its determination to faithfully
reproduce each and every shortcoming of M$ Office.

robert

[Phil Hobbs]

Post by Tim Williams

Post by John Larkin
So why does it do the simple stuff wrong?
If I insert a jpeg into a document, it may appear pages away from
where I drop it, or it may disappear entirely. And if I try to grab it
and move it, about a third of the time I can't pick it at all.

LaTeX does the same thing, more often than not. Apparently it has a very
conservative heuristic for placing images, so it often places images on the
next page, or worse, *all* of them end up at the end of the chapter just
because one pushed them all out of sync with the text.e

You can control this in LaTeX:

\begin{figure}[!h] will put the figure right there, come hell or high
water. I usually use

\begin{figure}[!hbt]
which means "try really hard to put the figure here (h) but if it cannot
possibly work, put it at the bottom of the page or the top of the next
page."

Post by Tim Williams
The one thing about LaTeX is, it's structured. Word isn't, at least in any
way you can see (I forget, maybe you can view markup on a Word file?).
So whereas merely mystifying to the ordinary user, Word is literally
impossible to understand, on a fundamental level, by the power user.
Incidentally, my word processing experience basically includes Notepad (no
word processing per se), Wordpad (limited, but good for simple stuff, and
fast), HTML (hand typed), some OpenOffice (haven't done anything as in-depth
as in LaTeX, but it seems to work well) and, as you might've guessed, LaTeX.

Post by John Larkin
Engineers sometimes start lines with numbers. Word takes over.

Now, there are packages to do this in LaTeX. I even wrote a paper including
line-numbered code, and it was even automatically highlighted (keywords,
strings, etc.) just as in the IDE. Can't beat that!

For simple stuff like this, you can turn off the page formatting in LaTex:

\begin{verbatim}

Anything in

here

will be formatted just as it's typed.
\end{verbatim}

Personally, I'd have been happy with WordPerfect 5.1+ for DOS forever,
but publishers and journals generally don't accept WP any more.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

[Joel Koltner]

Phil,

Same suggestion to you that I mentioned on ABSE... you might try out
Scientific Workplace some time, if you like LaTeX. I was actually first
pointed to it by a chemistry professor at the University of Canturbury -- he's
done journal papers with it without any hassle from the publishers, AFAIK.

---Joel

[Phil Hobbs]

Post by Joel Koltner
Phil,
Same suggestion to you that I mentioned on ABSE... you might try out
Scientific Workplace some time, if you like LaTeX. I was actually first
pointed to it by a chemistry professor at the University of Canturbury -- he's
done journal papers with it without any hassle from the publishers, AFAIK.

My first real word processing experience was with MS Word 1.5 for
Macintosh, circa 1987--I taught myself to touch-type writing my thesis.
When I came to IBM, I used SCRIPT/VS and Bookmaster, which is a
LaTeX-like typesetting language for mainframes. Publishing was all done
via hardcopy then, so it wasn't an issue. Then I used WordPerfect 5.1+
for DOS for about 15 years. I'd still be using it if publishers still
accepted it, but most of them don't. It was real geek city--I used
machine-compiled macros and a big makefile to package up my book MS, so
that I could have a completely portable method and back up the tools as
well as the text and pictures.

I had a look at SWP once...the problem I saw with it is that if you used
it in GUI mode, it made messy LaTeX that required its own macro set, and
it couldn't display LaTeX that wasn't written with SWP's macros.

My whole 800-page book takes only a minute or two to typeset, mostly in
the DVI->PDF stage. A journal article takes a few seconds, so I usually
just use a text editor (X2) to write LaTeX source and gsview (part of
Ghostscript) for debugging. Works great. I'd love to have something as
quick as WP5.1+ (which *flies* on modern hardware), but oh, well. WP
had some issues with placing figures as well--sometimes they'd overlap
each other, which was a real mess. The big benefits of WP were (a) I
knew all the keyboard shortcuts cold; (b) it didn't need a mouse; and
(c) it has a 'reveal codes' mode that lets you debug corrupted files.
Good luck if your Word file gets hosed.

LaTeX is pretty good medicine, though not as good at hiding the works as
WP--all those \begin{} things and (especially) tables are pretty
cryptic. When I get desperate, I do them in WP and run WP2LaTeX on the
results--that's how I was able to switch from WP to LaTeX in the first
place. Re-keying all those equations would have been really nasty.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

[Joel Koltner]

Hi Phil,

Good information, thanks.

I had a look at SWP once...the problem I saw with it is that if you used it
in GUI mode, it made messy LaTeX that required its own macro set, and it
couldn't display LaTeX that wasn't written with SWP's macros.

It does require its own macro set, although it's freely redistributable. The
LaTeX it makes isn't particulalry messy at all -- at least in recent editions.
And it can import regular LaTeX, although it imports some blocks of LaTeX
commands (e.g., for graphics, tables, etc.) with "Code Block" icons since they
don't contain the "secret sauce" needed to tell SWP how to display them
properly.

I think SWP's biggest drawbacks are that (1) ongoing development seems to have
ceased and (2) if you *do* end up getting an error while running LaTeX, it can
be that much harder to debug due to having to figure out what SWP's own macros
are doing.

WinEdt (not to be confused with WinEdit) is a good "middle ground" in that --
at its core -- it's just a regular old text editor... but contains lots of
handy mini-wizards/tools/etc. to help generate LaTeX code for you.

Of course, the most important thing is that you have a flow that works for
you, and it sounds as though you do.

---Joel

[Joel Koltner]

Post by Tim Williams
LaTeX does the same thing, more often than not.

Well, perhaps by default... by how you change the behavior is well-documented
and -- more importantly -- I think even beginning LaTeX users all get the
lecture about, "Your job is to write, LaTeX's job is to typeset. At times
this will be incredibly frustrating and you'll be fighting with LaTeX, but
when that happens, take a moment and think about whether or not this is a
fight you *should* be having -- in many cases, it won't be." In other others,
people tend to appreciate from the start the whole idea of separating the
"writing" vs. "typesetting" processes, whereas for all the good that WYSIWYG
products such as Word have done, they intentionally blur that line to the
beginner... because that's what beginners usually want.

I suppose that's not particularly bad or anything, just different. Word,
OpenOffice, etc. all have the tools to separate out typesetting from content
editing, although I doubt they're commonly used.

Post by Tim Williams
The one thing about LaTeX is, it's structured. Word isn't, at least in any
way you can see (I forget, maybe you can view markup on a Word file?).

No, you're perhaps thinking of WordPerfect, which still lets you do that.

Post by Tim Williams
So whereas merely mystifying to the ordinary user, Word is literally
impossible to understand, on a fundamental level, by the power user.

Agreed. Happily, few people actually use advanced Word features, so it's
usually not a problem. :-)

---Joel

[JosephKK]

On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 14:09:02 -0500, "Tim Williams"

Post by Tim Williams

Post by John Larkin
So why does it do the simple stuff wrong?
If I insert a jpeg into a document, it may appear pages away from
where I drop it, or it may disappear entirely. And if I try to grab it
and move it, about a third of the time I can't pick it at all.

LaTeX does the same thing, more often than not. Apparently it has a very
conservative heuristic for placing images, so it often places images on the
next page, or worse, *all* of them end up at the end of the chapter just
because one pushed them all out of sync with the text.
The one thing about LaTeX is, it's structured. Word isn't, at least in any
way you can see (I forget, maybe you can view markup on a Word file?).
So whereas merely mystifying to the ordinary user, Word is literally
impossible to understand, on a fundamental level, by the power user.

Oh i am not sure that i would say that. VBA macros are pretty handy.

Post by Tim Williams
Incidentally, my word processing experience basically includes Notepad (no
word processing per se), Wordpad (limited, but good for simple stuff, and
fast), HTML (hand typed), some OpenOffice (haven't done anything as in-depth
as in LaTeX, but it seems to work well) and, as you might've guessed, LaTeX.

All of those but LaTeX.

Post by Tim Williams

Post by John Larkin
Engineers sometimes start lines with numbers. Word takes over.

There is a setting for that. Try looking around in
menu->tools->options.

Post by Tim Williams
Now, there are packages to do this in LaTeX. I even wrote a paper including
line-numbered code, and it was even automatically highlighted (keywords,
strings, etc.) just as in the IDE. Can't beat that!

I probably teach word to do that. I would not want to, the IDE editor
is better for composing software.

Post by Tim Williams

Post by John Larkin
And heaven help you if you inherit a document that uses the "powerful"
features, with styles set up by a Word expert. That's like walking
into an entirely new and bizarre program you've never seen before.

I would not even blink. I have had to spend many weeks delousing
files written by others. (2.1 MB just for Section 10-3)

Post by Tim Williams
I couldn't imagine...
Tim

[John Larkin]

Post by JosephKK

Post by John Larkin
Engineers sometimes start lines with numbers. Word takes over.

There is a setting for that. Try looking around in
menu->tools->options.

There are hundreds of settings. There should be one global setting,
"just do what I type and don't give me any crap."

So if I type ...

I get ...

and all the rest.

John

[Rich Grise]

Post by John Larkin
Engineers sometimes start lines with numbers. Word takes over.

There is a setting for that. Try looking around in menu->tools->options.

There are hundreds of settings. There should be one global setting, "just
do what I type and don't give me any crap."
So if I type ...
I get ...
and all the rest.

Well, Notepad will do that. ;-)

Cheers!
Rich

[mpm]

On Jul 27, 12:51�pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin
So why does it do the simple stuff wrong?
If I insert a jpeg into a document, it may appear pages away from
where I drop it, or it may disappear entirely. And if I try to grab it
and move it, about a third of the time I can't pick it at all.
And Word seems to pick fonts randomly.

Sorry John.
I forgot I was involved in this thread.

I do have a couple tricks for you that will help your aggrevation with
Word.

When you want to place an image (JPG, etc..) in your Word Document.
Insert a Text Box first. Then place your image in the text box.

If you want, you can later select the text box and get rid of the
border (a little tricky to do with the mouse, because the text box
and image handles almost overlap, but you'll get the hang of it.).
Unless you like the border, of course.

By using a text box to hold the image, you can place it anywhere you
want, whereas an image will move around a lot depending on where your
other text is on the page. You can also set the wrap style for a
text box directly, drag the image to the desired size, along with lots
of other familiar properties, etc...

Try it out. I guarantee you you will never go back to the old way of
doing it!

The command are: (In page view, preferably)
Insert - Text Box, then drag out a text box where you want it.
Immediately after that (the cursor will be inside the text box,
click:
Insert - Picture - From File (or Clipart, or ??)
Boom. Problem solved.

As for changing fonts, I'm guessing it's the style that changing, not
the font attribute directly. You do have to pay attention to the use
of Style, or it can get pretty confusing. Especially when cutting &
pasting. Sometimes the results can be unexpected.

If this happens, don't start changing the font directly. Just make
the selection and change the style (dropdown). The selection will
inherit all the properties of the selected style. Done!!!

Anyway, hope this helps.

-mpm

[mpm]

Post by mpm
When you want to place an image (JPG, etc..) in your Word Document.
Insert a Text Box first. �Then place your image in the text box.

Oops - I left something (minor) out.
Pay some attention to where you drop the text box.
If you put it too close to the edge of a page, your printer driver may
not print it.

By edge, I mean too close to the physical page edge, not Word's
margins.
A text box (or images in a text box) outside Word's margins will still
print, as long as the printer driver is OK with it. (It has to do
with the way the paper transport mechanism grabs the page.)

Generally you don't want stuff that close to the edge anyway, so this
trick is hardly ever a problem. -mpm

[John Larkin]

Post by mpm

Post by mpm
When you want to place an image (JPG, etc..) in your Word Document.
Insert a Text Box first. ?Then place your image in the text box.

Oops - I left something (minor) out.
Pay some attention to where you drop the text box.
If you put it too close to the edge of a page, your printer driver may
not print it.
By edge, I mean too close to the physical page edge, not Word's
margins.
A text box (or images in a text box) outside Word's margins will still
print, as long as the printer driver is OK with it. (It has to do
with the way the paper transport mechanism grabs the page.)
Generally you don't want stuff that close to the edge anyway, so this
trick is hardly ever a problem. -mpm

Why doesn't it just put a picture where I drag and drop it?

Interestingly, the Mac version of Word does this a lot better.

Macs do everything better. When I got my wife a Mac, the only thing
that didn't work right was Word. So we gave up and shut it down. Next
day, it worked great. I'm convinced that the Mac OS includes a
background Word repair demon.

It's like DOS. It wasn't a total piece of Microcrap because IBM QC'd
the hell out of it at source-code level.

John

[mpm]

On Jul 31, 1:16�pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin
Why doesn't it just put a picture where I drag and drop it?

Both the page, and the text box, are "containers" for the image.
The difference is a text box does not move on its container (page),
but an image does.

It's really that simple.

-mpm

[John Larkin]

On Jul 31, 1:16?pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin
Why doesn't it just put a picture where I drag and drop it?

Both the page, and the text box, are "containers" for the image.
The difference is a text box does not move on its container (page),
but an image does.
It's really that simple.

It's really that stupid.

John

[mpm]

On Jul 31, 6:27�pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin

On Jul 31, 1:16?pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin
Why doesn't it just put a picture where I drag and drop it?

Both the page, and the text box, are "containers" for the image.
The difference is a text box does not move on its container (page),
but an image does.
It's really that simple.

It's really that stupid.

You know what they say....
"It is a poor workman who blames his tools."

But I do hear you loud and clear.
Microsoft Word is not exactly user-friendly, and is crammed packed
with a lot of features the average Joe neither wants nor uses. It's
not that difficult to learn, though I agree word processing should be
appliance level by now. Like a toaster oven. :)

-mpm

[krw]

In article <43a4fcff-1647-4569-b07b-6f4f6e3727d5
@c58g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>, ***@aol.com says...

On Jul 31, 6:27?pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin

On Jul 31, 1:16?pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin
Why doesn't it just put a picture where I drag and drop it?

Both the page, and the text box, are "containers" for the image.
The difference is a text box does not move on its container (page),
but an image does.
It's really that simple.

It's really that stupid.

You know what they say....
"It is a poor workman who blames his tools."

It's a poor craftsman who has to blame his tools.

But I do hear you loud and clear.
Microsoft Word is not exactly user-friendly, and is crammed packed
with a lot of features the average Joe neither wants nor uses. It's
not that difficult to learn, though I agree word processing should be
appliance level by now. Like a toaster oven. :)

It is. Just use a text editor and forget all the fancy stuff. If
you want a general purpose, powerful tool you're not going to get a
toaster.

I prefer Frame but it's not exactly easy to learn either.

[John Larkin]

Post by krw
In article <43a4fcff-1647-4569-b07b-6f4f6e3727d5
@c58g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>, ***@aol.com says...

On Jul 31, 6:27?pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin

On Jul 31, 1:16?pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin
Why doesn't it just put a picture where I drag and drop it?

Both the page, and the text box, are "containers" for the image.
The difference is a text box does not move on its container (page),
but an image does.
It's really that simple.

It's really that stupid.

You know what they say....
"It is a poor workman who blames his tools."

It's a poor craftsman who has to blame his tools.

But I do hear you loud and clear.
Microsoft Word is not exactly user-friendly, and is crammed packed
with a lot of features the average Joe neither wants nor uses. It's
not that difficult to learn, though I agree word processing should be
appliance level by now. Like a toaster oven. :)

It is. Just use a text editor and forget all the fancy stuff. If
you want a general purpose, powerful tool you're not going to get a
toaster.

I use Crimson Editor for the plain text stuff. It does everything fast
and right, doesn't crash, and has sensible options.

But modern documents need graphs and pictures. I'd love something like
Crimson that allowed pics and a few font effects.

I don't use Word enough to be an expert, and it's not friendly to the
occasional user who just wants to type text. It's another Microsoft
hack that was designed badly, in a rush to kill competition, and then
featurized to death by thousands of programmers.

Of course Crimson is good: it was written by one person.

John

[krw]

Post by John Larkin

Post by krw
In article <43a4fcff-1647-4569-b07b-6f4f6e3727d5
@c58g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>, ***@aol.com says...

On Jul 31, 6:27?pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin

On Jul 31, 1:16?pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin
Why doesn't it just put a picture where I drag and drop it?

Both the page, and the text box, are "containers" for the image.
The difference is a text box does not move on its container (page),
but an image does.
It's really that simple.

It's really that stupid.

You know what they say....
"It is a poor workman who blames his tools."

It's a poor craftsman who has to blame his tools.

But I do hear you loud and clear.
Microsoft Word is not exactly user-friendly, and is crammed packed
with a lot of features the average Joe neither wants nor uses. It's
not that difficult to learn, though I agree word processing should be
appliance level by now. Like a toaster oven. :)

It is. Just use a text editor and forget all the fancy stuff. If
you want a general purpose, powerful tool you're not going to get a
toaster.

I use Crimson Editor for the plain text stuff. It does everything fast
and right, doesn't crash, and has sensible options.

I've used Crimson for several years as my programming editor. It's
quite nice and has decent language support (VHDL included ;). There
are a few things I'd like to have though. There always are, so we
get bloat.

Post by John Larkin
But modern documents need graphs and pictures. I'd love something like
Crimson that allowed pics and a few font effects.

That's no longer a simple editor. Images and graphics complicate
things immensely. Hell, I'd like an editor with a decent graphics.
Visio is ok, but has some silly defaults (like humpy wire crossings)
I can't seem to get rid of. It seems to always be missing something
I need too.

Post by John Larkin
I don't use Word enough to be an expert, and it's not friendly to the
occasional user who just wants to type text. It's another Microsoft
hack that was designed badly, in a rush to kill competition, and then
featurized to death by thousands of programmers.

Sure, but like all the rest of the M$ crap, it works, sorta.

Post by John Larkin
Of course Crimson is good: it was written by one person.

Well...

[Jim Thompson]

On Jul 31, 6:27?pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin

On Jul 31, 1:16?pm, John Larkin

Post by John Larkin
Why doesn't it just put a picture where I drag and drop it?

Both the page, and the text box, are "containers" for the image.
The difference is a text box does not move on its container (page),
but an image does.
It's really that simple.

It's really that stupid.

You know what they say....
"It is a poor workman who blames his tools."
But I do hear you loud and clear.
Microsoft Word is not exactly user-friendly, and is crammed packed
with a lot of features the average Joe neither wants nor uses. It's
not that difficult to learn, though I agree word processing should be
appliance level by now. Like a toaster oven. :)
-mpm

One of my clients recently introduced me to a new phrase, using it to
describe a Cadence schematic-entry product, "User carnivorous" ;-)

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:[phone] Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

Al Gore is the Pied Piper of "Climate Change"
Alarming you with Bull Shit
While quietly sucking the IQ out of your head

[Vladimir Vassilevsky]

Post by John Larkin
High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?

I remember people standing in the lines in the front of the stores at
the release day of Windows 95. MS XBOX and optical mouse caused some
hullabaloo, too.

Post by John Larkin
XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.

Vista is an attempt to do the things finally in the right way, when
everything had gone too far for making changes.

Post by John Larkin
Word is an astounding POS.
IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.

I am perfectly all right with the functionality of MS Office 97. The
further releases only introduced the incompatibilities.

Post by John Larkin
Their self-flattering prose is, as usual, disgusting.

What I dislike is that MS is selling not the utility software but the BS
concepts of "cyberspace" and "the digital style of life".


Vladimir Vassilevsky
DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant
http://www.abvolt.com

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

Post by Vladimir Vassilevsky

Post by John Larkin
High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?

I remember people standing in the lines in the front of the stores at
the release day of Windows 95. MS XBOX and optical mouse caused some
hullabaloo, too.

Post by John Larkin
XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.

Vista is an attempt to do the things finally in the right way, when
everything had gone too far for making changes.

Was an attempt.
The attempt was aborted because it was taking too long and a defective
product was released with most of the major innovations omitted.

[unknown]

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit


V.I.S.T.A. = Virus Infection and Spyware Transmission Architecture

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Vladimir Vassilevsky

Post by John Larkin
High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?

I remember people standing in the lines in the front of the stores at
the release day of Windows 95. MS XBOX and optical mouse caused some
hullabaloo, too.

Post by John Larkin
XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.

Vista is an attempt to do the things finally in the right way, when
everything had gone too far for making changes.

Was an attempt.
The attempt was aborted because it was taking too long and a defective
product was released with most of the major innovations omitted.

They did, however, have *plenty* of time to implement DRM. The recording
and movie industries, it seems, are more important customers that we are.

DRM is a kernel service in Vista that prevents users from accessing
media or using high-end monitors without authorization from the
"approriate" parties. Vista grants third-parties the right to
irrevocably alter policies and disbale functionality on systems in
accordances with their own EULAs without warning. Basically, it
provides a kernel service that lets signed apps install rootkits
and spyware, prohibit you from using competitors products, or
monitor your use and charge you for EULA infractions

A few interesting quotes:


"The contentious stealth update that Microsoft delivered
to customers this summer blocks 80 patches and fixes from
installing after Windows XP is restored using its "repair"
feature... The background updates were delivered and
installed without prior notification, even when the PC's
owner had told the operating system not to download or
install updates without notification and permission."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9039258&pageNumber=1


"many of Vista's DRM technologies exist not because Microsoft
wanted them there; rather, they were developed at the behest
of movie studios, record labels and other high-powered
intellectual property owners."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9005047


"NBC-Vista copy-protection snafu reminds us why DRM stinks
Handfuls of Windows Vista Media Center users found themselves
blocked from making recordings of their favorite TV shows
this week when a broadcast flag triggered the software's
built-in copy protection measures. The flag affected users
trying to record prime-time NBC shows on Monday evening,
using both over-the-air broadcasts and cable. Although
the problem is being "looked into" by both NBC and Microsoft,
the incident serves as another reminder that DRM gives
content providers full control, even if by accident."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080514-nbc-vista-copy-protection-snafu-reminds-us-why-drm-stinks.html


Schneier: Do not upgrade to Vista: Security guru Bruce Schneier
has given a big thumbs-down to Windows Vista, arguing that the
DRM (digital rights management) features built into the new
operating system "will make your computer less reliable and
less secure."

The celebrated cryptographer, who is credited with designing
or co-designing several widely used encryption algorithms,
is calling on consumers to send a message to Microsoft by
avoiding Vista entirely.

"[The] only advice I can offer you is to not upgrade to Vista.
It will be hard. Microsoft’s bundling deals with computer
manufacturers mean that it will be increasingly hard not to
get the new operating system with new computers. And Microsoft
has some pretty deep pockets and can wait us all out if it
wants to. Yes, some people will shift to Macintosh and some
fewer number to Linux, but most of us are stuck on Windows.
Still, if enough customers say no to Vista, the company might
actually listen," Schneier wrote in an essay posted at his
personal blog.

His argument is that Microsoft has succumbed to the
entertainment industry and built copy-protection (DRM)
schemes into the OS that will make computers less stable
and force customers to spend to upgrade peripheral hardware
and existing software.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=28
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/lockin.html


MSN Music to shut down, leaving DRM customers in the
lurch: Microsoft is ceasing support for its MSN Music
service. After August 31, 2008, people who have bought
music from the service will no longer be able to move
that music to different computers, or even change
the operating system on their current computers.
With restricted music, every time you move it to a
new system, you have to get new approval. Microsoft
is shutting down the servers that currently grant
that approval, which leaves everyone who bought
music from them holding locks with no keys, and
no recourse.
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/1131


Also see:
http://cbbrowne.com/info/mslinks.html


V.I.S.T.A. = Virus Infection and Spyware Transmission Architecture

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

Post by i***@example.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit
V.I.S.T.A. = Virus Infection and Spyware Transmission Architecture

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Vladimir Vassilevsky

Post by John Larkin
High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?

I remember people standing in the lines in the front of the stores at
the release day of Windows 95. MS XBOX and optical mouse caused some
hullabaloo, too.

Post by John Larkin
XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.

Vista is an attempt to do the things finally in the right way, when
everything had gone too far for making changes.

Was an attempt.
The attempt was aborted because it was taking too long and a defective
product was released with most of the major innovations omitted.

They did, however, have *plenty* of time to implement DRM. The recording
and movie industries, it seems, are more important customers that we are.

The irony is that as Hollywood moved to protect its HiDef fare with all
kinds of crap, one of the biggest trends has been downscaling DVDs to
play on PDAs, phones etc.

[Frithiof Jensen]

Post by unknown
They did, however, have *plenty* of time to implement DRM. The recording
and movie industries, it seems, are more important customers that we are.

But, predictably, they screwed that up too: CloneDVD f.ex. installs and runs
just fine on Vista and one can rip as much as one likes.

I am still considering if I should try Ubuntu+WINE instead because file
copying and moving really, really sucks and Vista simply does not deliver
anything new at all. Disks still fragment, Network drives are
single-user-logon only, power-manglement does not work unless a luser has
logged in which occasionally causes the lapdog to self-discharge.


Vista is merely XP Me!!

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:20:05 -0500, Vladimir Vassilevsky

Post by Vladimir Vassilevsky

Post by John Larkin
High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?

I remember people standing in the lines in the front of the stores at
the release day of Windows 95. MS XBOX and optical mouse caused some
hullabaloo, too.

Post by John Larkin
XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.

Vista is an attempt to do the things finally in the right way, when
everything had gone too far for making changes.

Post by John Larkin
Word is an astounding POS.
IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.

I am perfectly all right with the functionality of MS Office 97. The
further releases only introduced the incompatibilities.

Post by John Larkin
Their self-flattering prose is, as usual, disgusting.

What I dislike is that MS is selling not the utility software but the BS
concepts of "cyberspace" and "the digital style of life".
Vladimir Vassilevsky
DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant
http://www.abvolt.com

Steve Jobs defines Microsoft products, and they struggle to implement
his vision.

John

[Martin Brown]

Post by John Larkin

Post by i***@example.com
"But we know a few of you were disappointed by your
early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt
sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest
Windows wasn’t always living up to your high
expectations for a Microsoft product."

High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?

Apparently with enough advertising spend you can get the punters to
believe in just about anything. The sad thing is that there are good
engineers in MS who know how to do things right, but somehow their
corporate culture prevents good quality software engineering.

Post by John Larkin
XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.

My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on
a Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

Post by John Larkin
Word is an astounding POS.

Although this is true for all versions in the case of Word, my favourite
bug is the exponentially growing filesize when documents are swapped in
a corporate environment with more than one version of Word in use and
contain drag and dropped pictures.

Excel 2003 was quite good for an MS product.

But Excel 2007 is particularly lamentable. The as shipped version yields
log graphs of scientific data with high dynamic range show two ticks for
10^8 and no 10^7. The statistics functions are broken as usual and they
wrecked the previously working polynomial fit and degraded it to give
the same answer as the hopelessly broken LINEST worksheet function.
Various other internals are either withdrawn, unsupported or broken.

Post by John Larkin
IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.
Their self-flattering prose is, as usual, disgusting.

We are in complete agreement here.

Regards,
Martin Brown
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **

[Joel Koltner]

The sad thing is that there are good engineers in MS who know how to do
things right, but somehow their corporate culture prevents good quality
software engineering.

I think it has a lot to do with their size as well... they've got over 30,000
folks up there in Redmond, and around 35,000 others spread around the globe.
I fully realize that Microsoft is a lot more than Windows, but still -- if I
had 65,000 employees, I'd be expecting something closer to a cure for cancer
than a few dancing animations and flashly 3D effects.

Tektronix had huge layoffs and never returned to their original level of
brilliance after management got too big for their britches. I wouldn't be
surprised if the same thing happened to Microsoft in the next few years --
they're betting a significant fraction of the farm on Windows 7, at this
point.

But Excel 2007 is particularly lamentable...

I'd suggest that OpenOffice Calc is your friend, but I personally I was
surprised they didn't even include engineering notation in the standard cell
formatting options.

---Joel

[mpm]

Post by Joel Koltner
I fully realize that Microsoft is a lot more than Windows, but still -- if I
had 65,000 employees, I'd be expecting something closer to a cure for cancer
than a few dancing animations and flashly 3D effects.

Dude. Don't forget "Clipie"
Clipie rocks!!

Post by Joel Koltner

But Excel 2007 is particularly lamentable...

Agreed. But Excel 2003 rocks. '97 was even better. (at least from a
VBA coding perspective.)
That dot-net stuff really didn't help Excel in my humble opinion.

-mpm

[Frithiof Jensen]

My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8 GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

On "Windows Features" I killed the following:

Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

Anyways:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/

*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via Explorer!!!

Next job is to get dual-boot going!

[krw]

Post by Frithiof Jensen

My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8 GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

[Frithiof Jensen]

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8 GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

Post by krw
--
Keith

[krw]

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8 GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping. It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable. ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

[JosephKK]

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8 GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping. It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable. ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

[krw]

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8 GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping. It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable. ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.

I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

[JosephKK]

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8 GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping. It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable. ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME. Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO. Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8 GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping. It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable. ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME. Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO. Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

I tried Suse for a couple of months.
It was hellish.
If I ever give Linux another go it will probably be with Ubuntu.

[krw]

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8
GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping. It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives
for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable. ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME. Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO. Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

I tried Suse for a couple of months.
It was hellish.
If I ever give Linux another go it will probably be with Ubuntu.

As I indicated a while back, I found Ubuntu to be totally unusable
(i/e uninstallable). The display was unreadable (~.001pt fonts).

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

Post by krw

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8
GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping. It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives
for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable. ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME. Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO. Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

I tried Suse for a couple of months.
It was hellish.
If I ever give Linux another go it will probably be with Ubuntu.

As I indicated a while back, I found Ubuntu to be totally unusable
(i/e uninstallable). The display was unreadable (~.001pt fonts).

Which release?

[krw]

<snip>

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by krw

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by JosephKK
How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME. Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO. Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

I tried Suse for a couple of months.
It was hellish.
If I ever give Linux another go it will probably be with Ubuntu.

As I indicated a while back, I found Ubuntu to be totally unusable
(i/e uninstallable). The display was unreadable (~.001pt fonts).

Which release?

Dunno, everything is packed (moving this weekend, all the stuff in a
couple of weeks). It's fairly recent because I've only been here
nine months. Before that I was attempting to get SuSE working
satisfactorily.

[JosephKK]

On Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:17:19 +0100, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by krw

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by Martin Brown
My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on
a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed
as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8
GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping. It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives
for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows
DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable. ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via
Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME. Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO. Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

I tried Suse for a couple of months.
It was hellish.
If I ever give Linux another go it will probably be with Ubuntu.

As I indicated a while back, I found Ubuntu to be totally unusable
(i/e uninstallable). The display was unreadable (~.001pt fonts).

Which release?

Since you mention it, which Suse release gave trouble and on what
hardware?

[krw]

Post by JosephKK
On Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:17:19 +0100, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by krw

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by Martin Brown
My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on
a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed
as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8
GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping. It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives
for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows
DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable. ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via
Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME. Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO. Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

I tried Suse for a couple of months.
It was hellish.
If I ever give Linux another go it will probably be with Ubuntu.

As I indicated a while back, I found Ubuntu to be totally unusable
(i/e uninstallable). The display was unreadable (~.001pt fonts).

Which release?

Since you mention it, which Suse release gave trouble and on what
hardware?

Same hardware[*]; SuSE 10.0. SuSE 9.0 worked, sorta. At least I
could trick it into recognizing both displays (it really didn't want
to). It wasn't perfect and it seemed that the SuSE and Matrox folks
had a long running pissing contest going.

[*] I chose SuSE for its early 64bit support and "full package".

[JosephKK]

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK
On Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:17:19 +0100, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by krw

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by Martin Brown
My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on
a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed
as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8
GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping. It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives
for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows
DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable. ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via
Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME. Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO. Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

I tried Suse for a couple of months.
It was hellish.
If I ever give Linux another go it will probably be with Ubuntu.

As I indicated a while back, I found Ubuntu to be totally unusable
(i/e uninstallable). The display was unreadable (~.001pt fonts).

Which release?

Since you mention it, which Suse release gave trouble and on what
hardware?

Same hardware[*]; SuSE 10.0. SuSE 9.0 worked, sorta. At least I
could trick it into recognizing both displays (it really didn't want
to). It wasn't perfect and it seemed that the SuSE and Matrox folks
had a long running pissing contest going.
[*] I chose SuSE for its early 64bit support and "full package".

Understood. Since 7.0 most *.0 Suse releases are buggy. If it gets
up to *.2 or higher it is pretty stable. Select distribution and
version with care. Testing with the current Knoppix is a pretty good
way to detect potential problems. Also try maximizing the ram
available.

[krw]

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK
On Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:17:19 +0100, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by krw

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by Martin Brown
My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on
a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed
as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8
GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping. It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives
for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows
DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable. ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via
Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME. Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO. Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

I tried Suse for a couple of months.
It was hellish.
If I ever give Linux another go it will probably be with Ubuntu.

As I indicated a while back, I found Ubuntu to be totally unusable
(i/e uninstallable). The display was unreadable (~.001pt fonts).

Which release?

Since you mention it, which Suse release gave trouble and on what
hardware?

Same hardware[*]; SuSE 10.0. SuSE 9.0 worked, sorta. At least I
could trick it into recognizing both displays (it really didn't want
to). It wasn't perfect and it seemed that the SuSE and Matrox folks
had a long running pissing contest going.
[*] I chose SuSE for its early 64bit support and "full package".

Understood. Since 7.0 most *.0 Suse releases are buggy. If it gets
up to *.2 or higher it is pretty stable. Select distribution and
version with care. Testing with the current Knoppix is a pretty good
way to detect potential problems. Also try maximizing the ram
available.

Wasn't bugs that bothered me. Stuff was missing from 10.0 that was
there in 9.0. I have 3GB in the system. That's almost enough for
Vista. Linux should be happy with it. ;-)

[MooseFET]

Post by JosephKK
On Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:17:19 +0100, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by krw

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by Martin Brown
My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on
a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed
as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8
GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck.  A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance.  It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping.  It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives
for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows
DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage?  Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable.  ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-prob...
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via
Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful.  I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA).  SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu.  I can't get past the live CD.  Installing is no help.    
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not.  Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky.  Try
10.3, it is real nice IME.  Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean.  Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO.  Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

I tried Suse for a couple of months.
It was hellish.
If I ever give Linux another go it will probably be with Ubuntu.

As I indicated a while back, I found Ubuntu to be totally unusable
(i/e uninstallable).  The display was unreadable (~.001pt fonts).

Which release?

Since you mention it, which Suse release gave trouble and on what
hardware?

Same hardware[*]; SuSE 10.0.  SuSE 9.0 worked, sorta.  At least I
could trick it into recognizing both displays (it really didn't want
to).  It wasn't perfect and it seemed that the SuSE and Matrox folks
had a long running pissing contest going.
[*] I chose SuSE for its early 64bit support and "full package".  

Understood.   Since 7.0 most *.0 Suse releases are buggy.  If it gets
up to *.2 or higher it is pretty stable.  Select distribution and
version with care.  Testing with the current Knoppix is a pretty good
way to detect potential problems.   Also try maximizing the ram
available.

Wasn't bugs that bothered me.  Stuff was missing from 10.0 that was
there in 9.0.  I have 3GB in the system.  That's almost enough for  
Vista.  Linux should be happy with it.  ;-)

I've been disappointed with SuSE 11. I am seriously considering
making my home machine run Puppy Linux. I have been experimenting
with it and am impressed. I have made a live CD with SwitcherCad-3 on
it and doseum and a few other things like that. It works just fine.

[JosephKK]

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK
On Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:17:19 +0100, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by krw

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by Martin Brown
My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on
a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed
as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8
GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping. It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives
for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows
DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable. ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via
Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME. Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO. Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

I tried Suse for a couple of months.
It was hellish.
If I ever give Linux another go it will probably be with Ubuntu.

As I indicated a while back, I found Ubuntu to be totally unusable
(i/e uninstallable). The display was unreadable (~.001pt fonts).

Which release?

Since you mention it, which Suse release gave trouble and on what
hardware?

Same hardware[*]; SuSE 10.0. SuSE 9.0 worked, sorta. At least I
could trick it into recognizing both displays (it really didn't want
to). It wasn't perfect and it seemed that the SuSE and Matrox folks
had a long running pissing contest going.
[*] I chose SuSE for its early 64bit support and "full package".

Understood. Since 7.0 most *.0 Suse releases are buggy. If it gets
up to *.2 or higher it is pretty stable. Select distribution and
version with care. Testing with the current Knoppix is a pretty good
way to detect potential problems. Also try maximizing the ram
available.

Wasn't bugs that bothered me. Stuff was missing from 10.0 that was
there in 9.0. I have 3GB in the system. That's almost enough for
Vista. Linux should be happy with it. ;-)

OK. I will add incomplete for Suse *.0 since 10.0. 11.0 has both
completeness and bugginess issues.

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

Post by JosephKK
On Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:17:19 +0100, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by krw

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by Martin Brown
My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on
a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed
as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8
GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping. It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives
for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows
DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable. ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via
Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME. Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO. Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

I tried Suse for a couple of months.
It was hellish.
If I ever give Linux another go it will probably be with Ubuntu.

As I indicated a while back, I found Ubuntu to be totally unusable
(i/e uninstallable). The display was unreadable (~.001pt fonts).

Which release?

Since you mention it, which Suse release gave trouble and on what
hardware?

IIRC 9.1 running on athlonXP 2400+ 1G RAM and a GX440 video card.
My main dislike was that if anything went wrong and KDE or GNOME failed
to come up all I got was a text prompt on screen. I was just not willing
to plough through 500 pages of manual learning Unix command line i/f
from scratch.

[Joel Koltner]

My main dislike was that if anything went wrong and KDE or GNOME failed to
come up all I got was a text prompt on screen.

I've had the same complaint -- I remember very early on with, e.g., Windows NT
3.51 if something went wrong with the video driver the machine might just
crash, but for many years now if Windows can't load the "proper" video driver,
it just uses "generic VGA" mode and at least still gives you a desktop.

Happily, the most recent versions of some distributions (like Ubuntu :-) ) now
take the same approach. Why it took them nearly a decade to implement this is
beyond me, although of course when it's 99+% volunteers writing the software,
prioritization of work perhaps has a larger disconnect with "what the public
wants" than with payware such as Windows.

I was just not willing to plough through 500 pages of manual learning Unix
command line i/f from scratch.

You can get reasonably familiar with *NIX command lines in probably no more
than 25 pages. However, the trick is then knowing which configuration files
to mess around with (a common Windows problem as well) -- and their formats:
Unlike Windows, where 95+% of configuration information is either in the
registry, .inf, or .xml files, in *NIX there are many, many dozens of
different configuration file formats, and while you can often just "figure
out" the format by looking at them, it's still more work than just firing up,
e.g., regedit. Additionally, not all programs use standard parsers (as
Windows provides for the registry and .inf files), having just hacked some
little parser together on their own, so programs are still somewhat fragile if
their configuration files aren't exactly what's expected. X11's configuration
file, Xorg.conf, will still crash the X server (GUI) and dump you back to text
mode if you do something as seemingly benign as forgetting double quotes
around an argument. :-(

Realistically, if you're buying a machine that already has all the hardware
setup from the likes of Apple, Dell, *NIX and Windows both work just fine. If
you're setting up a machine yourself, from scratch, the average *NIX machine
still takes a lot more effort than the average Windoze machine.

But try out, e.g., Ubuntu Hardy Heron, released back in April... it's pretty
good.

---Joel

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

Post by Joel Koltner

My main dislike was that if anything went wrong and KDE or GNOME failed to
come up all I got was a text prompt on screen.

I've had the same complaint -- I remember very early on with, e.g., Windows NT
3.51 if something went wrong with the video driver the machine might just
crash, but for many years now if Windows can't load the "proper" video driver,
it just uses "generic VGA" mode and at least still gives you a desktop.
Happily, the most recent versions of some distributions (like Ubuntu :-) ) now
take the same approach. Why it took them nearly a decade to implement this is
beyond me, although of course when it's 99+% volunteers writing the software,
prioritization of work perhaps has a larger disconnect with "what the public
wants" than with payware such as Windows.

I was just not willing to plough through 500 pages of manual learning Unix
command line i/f from scratch.

You can get reasonably familiar with *NIX command lines in probably no more
than 25 pages. However, the trick is then knowing which configuration files
Unlike Windows, where 95+% of configuration information is either in the
registry, .inf, or .xml files, in *NIX there are many, many dozens of
different configuration file formats, and while you can often just "figure
out" the format by looking at them, it's still more work than just firing up,
e.g., regedit. Additionally, not all programs use standard parsers (as
Windows provides for the registry and .inf files), having just hacked some
little parser together on their own, so programs are still somewhat fragile if
their configuration files aren't exactly what's expected. X11's configuration
file, Xorg.conf, will still crash the X server (GUI) and dump you back to text
mode if you do something as seemingly benign as forgetting double quotes
around an argument. :-(
Realistically, if you're buying a machine that already has all the hardware
setup from the likes of Apple, Dell, *NIX and Windows both work just fine. If
you're setting up a machine yourself, from scratch, the average *NIX machine
still takes a lot more effort than the average Windoze machine.
But try out, e.g., Ubuntu Hardy Heron, released back in April... it's pretty
good.

I'll probably go for a dual boot system when I get a new machine later
this year. Ubuntu and XP64

[JosephKK]

On Thu, 07 Aug 2008 23:08:50 +0100, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Joel Koltner

My main dislike was that if anything went wrong and KDE or GNOME failed to
come up all I got was a text prompt on screen.

I've had the same complaint -- I remember very early on with, e.g., Windows NT
3.51 if something went wrong with the video driver the machine might just
crash, but for many years now if Windows can't load the "proper" video driver,
it just uses "generic VGA" mode and at least still gives you a desktop.
Happily, the most recent versions of some distributions (like Ubuntu :-) ) now
take the same approach. Why it took them nearly a decade to implement this is
beyond me, although of course when it's 99+% volunteers writing the software,
prioritization of work perhaps has a larger disconnect with "what the public
wants" than with payware such as Windows.

I was just not willing to plough through 500 pages of manual learning Unix
command line i/f from scratch.

You can get reasonably familiar with *NIX command lines in probably no more
than 25 pages. However, the trick is then knowing which configuration files
Unlike Windows, where 95+% of configuration information is either in the
registry, .inf, or .xml files, in *NIX there are many, many dozens of
different configuration file formats, and while you can often just "figure
out" the format by looking at them, it's still more work than just firing up,
e.g., regedit. Additionally, not all programs use standard parsers (as
Windows provides for the registry and .inf files), having just hacked some
little parser together on their own, so programs are still somewhat fragile if
their configuration files aren't exactly what's expected. X11's configuration
file, Xorg.conf, will still crash the X server (GUI) and dump you back to text
mode if you do something as seemingly benign as forgetting double quotes
around an argument. :-(
Realistically, if you're buying a machine that already has all the hardware
setup from the likes of Apple, Dell, *NIX and Windows both work just fine. If
you're setting up a machine yourself, from scratch, the average *NIX machine
still takes a lot more effort than the average Windoze machine.
But try out, e.g., Ubuntu Hardy Heron, released back in April... it's pretty
good.

I'll probably go for a dual boot system when I get a new machine later
this year. Ubuntu and XP64

Notice: There is still a driver paucity in XP64. And there is an
even greater paucity of 64 bit software.

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

Post by JosephKK
On Thu, 07 Aug 2008 23:08:50 +0100, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Joel Koltner

My main dislike was that if anything went wrong and KDE or GNOME failed to
come up all I got was a text prompt on screen.

I've had the same complaint -- I remember very early on with, e.g., Windows NT
3.51 if something went wrong with the video driver the machine might just
crash, but for many years now if Windows can't load the "proper" video driver,
it just uses "generic VGA" mode and at least still gives you a desktop.
Happily, the most recent versions of some distributions (like Ubuntu :-) ) now
take the same approach. Why it took them nearly a decade to implement this is
beyond me, although of course when it's 99+% volunteers writing the software,
prioritization of work perhaps has a larger disconnect with "what the public
wants" than with payware such as Windows.

I was just not willing to plough through 500 pages of manual learning Unix
command line i/f from scratch.

You can get reasonably familiar with *NIX command lines in probably no more
than 25 pages. However, the trick is then knowing which configuration files
Unlike Windows, where 95+% of configuration information is either in the
registry, .inf, or .xml files, in *NIX there are many, many dozens of
different configuration file formats, and while you can often just "figure
out" the format by looking at them, it's still more work than just firing up,
e.g., regedit. Additionally, not all programs use standard parsers (as
Windows provides for the registry and .inf files), having just hacked some
little parser together on their own, so programs are still somewhat fragile if
their configuration files aren't exactly what's expected. X11's configuration
file, Xorg.conf, will still crash the X server (GUI) and dump you back to text
mode if you do something as seemingly benign as forgetting double quotes
around an argument. :-(
Realistically, if you're buying a machine that already has all the hardware
setup from the likes of Apple, Dell, *NIX and Windows both work just fine. If
you're setting up a machine yourself, from scratch, the average *NIX machine
still takes a lot more effort than the average Windoze machine.
But try out, e.g., Ubuntu Hardy Heron, released back in April... it's pretty
good.

I'll probably go for a dual boot system when I get a new machine later
this year. Ubuntu and XP64

Notice: There is still a driver paucity in XP64. And there is an
even greater paucity of 64 bit software.

But I can actually use 4G of DRAM.
Still, I'll look into it a bit more when the day comes.

[JosephKK]

On Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:01:16 +0100, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen

My only copy of Vista came preinstalled and is sufficiently unstable on a
Toshiba laptop that I would never recommend anyone to use it.

I actually got Vista to a useable state - meaning: About the same speed as
the old 1.2 GHz Athlon 64 + 1 Gig RAM - But this time on a Dual core 1.8 GHz
Toshiba A300 lapdog with 3 GB RAM!!

Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck. A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

Did the tooth fairy vist you last night?

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance. It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Hard disk "cache" has nothing to do with swapping. It's there for
the drive's use (decoupling the magnetics from the interface), not
the OS'.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage? Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Ah, and here I thought that "removable storage management" was used
to support storage devices that were, well, removable. ...and
printing services for...

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-probably-unnecessary-windows-vista-components/
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME. Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO. Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

I tried Suse for a couple of months.
It was hellish.
If I ever give Linux another go it will probably be with Ubuntu.

Try it any time you wish. It has a very good reputation of just
working for many people.

[krw]

<snip>

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME.

I got totally disgusted at SuSE's arrogance and finger-pointing
that I shelved the whole thing. The hardware has been sitting idle
for a year, except for the Ubuntu attempt.

Post by JosephKK
Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.

I'm pretty sure all the problems with SuSE are due to the graphics
card. Apparently, SuSE and Matrox have been in a pissing contest
for years.

Post by JosephKK
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO. Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

Never tried XP on the hardware. Windows wasn't the point of the
exercise and licenses aren't free.

[JosephKK]

Post by krw
<snip>

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME.

I got totally disgusted at SuSE's arrogance and finger-pointing
that I shelved the whole thing. The hardware has been sitting idle
for a year, except for the Ubuntu attempt.

Post by JosephKK
Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.

I'm pretty sure all the problems with SuSE are due to the graphics
card. Apparently, SuSE and Matrox have been in a pissing contest
for years.

Actually Matrox and the entire FOSS community (including OpenSolaris
and various BSD and OpenVMS) have had a pissing contest for years.
Take a look at Matrox market share, 3D performance and pricing over
some years while you are at it.

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK
10/100/1000 Ethernet, high d 7.2 sound on MOBO. Getting XP running
was ten times the hassle, mostly over sound.

Never tried XP on the hardware. Windows wasn't the point of the
exercise and licenses aren't free.

[krw]

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw
<snip>

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by JosephKK

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

I intend on trying that, though I'm not too optimistic that the
Linux will find enough of my hardware to make it useful. I've given
up (at least temporarily) trying to get Linux to work on my desktop,
and that should have been a piece of cake.

Just for curiosity, what is the desktop hardware configuration? (MOBO,
CPU, RAM size, optional stuff like video, audio, etc.,)

Tyan K8W (S-2875S), Opteron, 3GB, Matrox G550 (all the rest of the
stuff is integrated), two monitors (one DVI, one VGA). SuSE refuses
to deal with the second monitor and a few other issues and forget
Ubuntu. I can't get past the live CD. Installing is no help.
I was running SuSE 9.0 on it for a year or so, but gave up on 10.0
and never went back.

How strange, but maybe not. Suse 10.0 and 10.1 were a bit flaky. Try
10.3, it is real nice IME.

I got totally disgusted at SuSE's arrogance and finger-pointing
that I shelved the whole thing. The hardware has been sitting idle
for a year, except for the Ubuntu attempt.

Post by JosephKK
Handles my A64-X2 dual core nicely and is
very clean. Radeon X2600 and 22 inch 19:10 flat panel as well.

I'm pretty sure all the problems with SuSE are due to the graphics
card. Apparently, SuSE and Matrox have been in a pissing contest
for years.

Actually Matrox and the entire FOSS community (including OpenSolaris
and various BSD and OpenVMS) have had a pissing contest for years.
Take a look at Matrox market share, 3D performance and pricing over
some years while you are at it.

I couldn't care less about 3D performance since I *never* use it
(it's not even enabled on my laptop). I wanted clean 2D graphics,
which was Matrox' forte. Others have since caught up, but the
Millennium series has long been the standard here.

[Joel Koltner]

Post by krw
I couldn't care less about 3D performance since I *never* use it
(it's not even enabled on my laptop). I wanted clean 2D graphics,
which was Matrox' forte.

They certainly tried very hard to become a significant player in 3D as well,
but were one of the first casualities of the great 3D video card wars between
ATI, nVidia, 3dfx, and Matrox.

Kinda ironic that while nVidia, 3dfx, and Matrox were battling it out, ATI was
just sitting on the sidelines, emphasizing cheap cards for OEMs and VIVO cards
for enthusiasts. It was only after 3dfx and Matrox had died that ATI started
really competing in 3D again...

[MooseFET]

On Aug 3, 4:45 am, "Frithiof Jensen"
<***@diespammerdie.jensen.tdcadsl.dk> wrote:

[....]

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw
Not too surprising, since a 1.8GHz processor isn't all that much
more power than a 1.2GHz, given the memory bottleneck.  A laptop
will also be significantly slower than a decent desktop.

It's a dual core should be ~twice as fast.

It depends on many factors that are not the number of cores:

(1)
If your machine can make good use of the dual cores, the speed may be
a fair bit more than 2x the single core case because of a lower amount
of task switching overhead.

(2)
If the dual core machine doesn't also have more cache and some
cleverness in the cache, it can end up slower in some cases because
more time is used up on refilling caches.

(3)
If the external bus bandwidth is the limiting factor, there is
unlikely to be any gain from the extra core.

(4)
If the OS changes what it does a lot depending on whether it sees two
cores or not, all speed comparisons go out the window.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
There is a lot to of things switch off but especially: The service
"Superfetch" whitch sucks away all the RAM and "Readyboost" which I will
never use. Since it is a lapdog one can also set the HDD to use maximum
buffering because we have backup power.

HDD buffering has nothing to do with performance.  It's there for
the disk drive, not the computer.

Vista likes to swap, swap & swap - so we want the disk to appear fast!

Vista may be "thrashing". If it is, it will run very slowly because
the thing it needs next is always thrown out of ram just before it is
needed. Because Vista takes on the order of 5GB to run the "Hello
world" program and it is likely that your computer only has 4GB, the
virtual memory system will have to swap.

On every machine, some things can't be swapped out of memory.
Obviously the code that does the swapping can't be swapped out but for
some technical reason on XP and Vista, Clippy can't be swapped out.

Post by Frithiof Jensen

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
Remote Differential Compression*, Removable storage management, Servives for
NFS, Print Services, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, Windows DFS
Replication Service, Indexing Service.

You don't use removable storage?  Printers?

Names are misleading: The removable storage management is for legacy
handling of NT backups, the print services are for web-printing; No, i do
not use any of those.

Post by krw

Post by Frithiof Jensen
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-optional-and-prob...
*responsible for hour-loooong drag & drop Vista Experience via Explorer!!!
Next job is to get dual-boot going!

I tried to get dual boot to work with two 'doze sessions (bringing
up a new drive) but one kept stomping all over the other, turning
both to mush.

It will work with Linux. Unfortunately my WLAN hardware is not recognised
when test-booting from a Knoppix CD so there will be work to be done here.

Post by krw
--
Keith

[Robert Baer]

Post by i***@example.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit
Microsoft Tries to Polish Vista By Saul Hansell
Microsoft is really taking the gloves off this time.
ZDNet is reporting that it will spend $500 million to
make a powerful statement to its hundreds of millions
of customers. I imagine the statement would have to go
"Windows Vista isn’t really as bad as they say.
Honest. Please don’t be mad at us. We promise our next
operating system will be better. Pinky swear."
Those aren’t exactly the words they use, but it is
certainly the tone of the ad that Microsoft has started
running on its site. I can’t find it, but Ed Bott at
ZDNet did and has a copy here. It shows a painting of a
tall ship with the headline “At one point everyone
thought the Earth was flat. Get the facts about Windows
Vista.”
That promotion leads to a page that acknowledges that
"But we know a few of you were disappointed by your
early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt
sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest
Windows wasn’t always living up to your high
expectations for a Microsoft product."
It takes a minute to figure out where to find
Microsoft’s response to this criticism: You need to
click some arrows on the page. (Why can’t Microsoft use
the plus Icon popularized by Google and lots of
others?)
The company asserts that it is now compatible with the
vast bulk of software and hardware. It also boasts that
Vista is more secure, faster, uses less energy and is
even “sexier.”
"Sure, Windows Vista gets a lot of compliments on its
to put everything within a click’s reach and make you
more productive."
Microsoft, is probably right that Vista gets a bit of a
bum rap. Lots of people find that Vista works fine and
is an improvement over Windows XP. I use Vista on a
home computer with little trouble. (And no, I don’t
hate Microsoft, despite what some commenters say. I am
a big fan of Word 2007, and I even pay for Microsoft’s
OneCare anti-virus and backup software.)
But this is still a dreadful place for Microsoft to be.
It is fighting Google on one side and Apple on the
other. And both of those companies have flaws, products
that don’t quite work right, have gaps and disappoint
users. But both Google and Apple have products that you
don’t need to be told to notice they are sexy. That
changes how people see the more prosaic parts of their
product lines and makes people far more open to
considering new products.
Even if you are a big fan of Microsoft, consider which
you would rather read about first: a something new from
Google, Apple or Microsoft?
After spending $500 million, Microsoft might be able to
convince people that Windows Vista is not awful. But
just because you can show the earth is not flat,
doesn’t mean you will rule the new world.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/microsoft-tries-to-polish-vista/?ref=technology

...also, consider that this campain not only bypasses the disty and
partnership channels, but has gotten them a bit flustered and worried.

[Eeyore]

Post by i***@example.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit
Microsoft Tries to Polish Vista By Saul Hansell
Microsoft is really taking the gloves off this time.
ZDNet is reporting that it will spend $500 million to
make a powerful statement to its hundreds of millions
of customers. I imagine the statement would have to go
"Windows Vista isn’t really as bad as they say.
Honest. Please don’t be mad at us. We promise our next
operating system will be better. Pinky swear."

My B-I-L says over here Vista is often referred to as ME II.

Graham

[qrk]

Intel went through the same thing with the Pentium 4. Intel's solution
to a crappy processor was spending lots of money on advertising to
push their blunder. John Q. Public ate up the ads. As predicted way
back when, it took Intel 5 years to fix their blunder. AMD was quite
pleased to step in during those dark years.