[SGVLUG] Fw: OT: MS VISTA (more pain)

[Tom Emerson]

This started as an off-topic thread on my HP list about Vista and what it can or cannot do (and the troubles that ensued)  Here is one message I think folks around here should be aware of...

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: John K. <john3000 at COX.NET>

I have hopes for Vista, but I have no interest in putting it on any 
machine I use or manage, at least for the next several months.

Quite frankly, my experience with Vista is such that I don't see any 
overwhelming advantage to moving to Vista, despite the improved 
security (or at least the appearance of improved security).

While I saw a big difference between Windows 98SE and Windows XP Pro, 
I don't see anything approaching that between Windows XP Pro and 
Vista.  And actually I still have two PCs running Windows 98SE that 
run 24-7.  One now spends most of its time as a print server and the 
other is the family music server.  One hasn't been rebooted since a 
power failure earlier this year, and the other was restarted a couple 
of days later (two fans in that box failed to spin up after power was 
restored, so I had to find replacement fans).  Oh, and I don't buy 
that Windows Media hype about how you need Vista to really have a 
media PC.  Both of the Windows 98SE boxes have ATI All-In-Wonder 
cards and both can record, edit, and playback video (the one with an 
ATI All-In-Wonder Rage 9000DV card does it better and can pause and 
resume viewing while recording continues).  Maybe it is a little 
easier in that you don't have to install a lot of drivers, but I 
really haven't found much you can do (media-wise) on Vista that you 
can't do on 98SE.

In comparing Vista to XP Pro, the only factor which leans in Vista's 
favor is its ability to run applications with large memory 
requirements so much better than XP.  I routinely get "out of memory" 
errors with XP, but in using Vista I haven't had that problem.  What 
are these "large memory" applications?  Adobe Photoshop CS2, Corel 
Paint Shop Pro X2, Canon Digital Photo Professional, things like 
that.  While I have 2 GB of RAM in the XP boxes, they don't seem to 
be very adept in managing it, and there seems to be a hard limit to 
how large the virtual memory space can be.  Once the Task Manager 
shows 3.22 GB, the applications start popping "out of memory" 
modals.  Unfortunately, I see this way too often.

Stability is NOT a problem with XP.  My main PC (which is where I do 
my image editing) is not a small system.  Currently it has an AMD 
3800+ dual-core with 2 GB RAM and 12 hard drives for a total of about 
5.2 TB of disc space (hey, when your raw image files come from the 
camera as 11 MB to 16 MB files, you eat up disc space very quickly).

Most of those hard drives are external USB drives, so the amount of 
space on the PC varies from day to day.  Along with all those 
external USB drives, there are many other USB devices - CF card 
readers, webcam, graphics tablet, printers, Spyder 2 Pro color 
calibration sensor, MP3 player, and of course keyboard and 
mouse.  Yup, so many USB devices that there are three external USB 7 
port USB hubs, and there is only 1 empty USB port.  Oh, and it has 
dual monitors (very handy for image editing).

Did I mention that it also runs Apache and MySQL in the background, 
as well as some "services" I developed in PHP which hit certain web 
sites every 15 minutes, capture the pages, parse the pages, and save 
copies of the pages along with metrics from the pages?

So how long does this XP Pro system run between reboots?  Not as long 
as an HP 3000, but not too bad for a PC.  I usually reboot it once a 
month when the Windows Updates come out.  Last month I didn't reboot 
it, so as of a few minutes ago it has now been up 59.66 days since 
the last reboot.

It is true that my Linux box has been up a few months since its last 
reboot, but then it is a pretty basic configuration. It doesn't 
receive the pounding the Windows XP box receives, so I'd expect it to 
run at least two years to see the level of activity the XP box sees 
in two weeks.

So which do I prefer, Windows XP or Linux?  It depends on what I have 
to do.  These days I do a lot of LAMP and WAMP, and with so much open 
source software from the Linux/Unix world now running on Windows XP, 
I'm actually finding that I do a lot of my LAMP development on 
Windows XP Pro and then moving it over to Linux and testing on both 
Windows and Linux, making sure that there is ONE version of the code 
and that it runs on both platforms.

Choose Linux or choose XP?  Nope, can't make that decision, I want them both!

John
*** When replying to this message, please do not delete these ***
*** signature lines. Otakon Katsucon HP3000-L @classiccmp.org ***
*** DigitalCosplay.com    JohnKorbPhoto.com                   ***