Random thoughts.... [Tech Edition]

rickhamilton620 said:
I just (as in a few min ago) installed Windows Vista as a quick way to get my machine up and running until I can get 7 back on it. I gotta say, I'm still not seeing the hate for it. And this is Vista before any service packs. the machine boots fast, all my devices were detected-handy because my driver's DVD is at home, and it feels pretty responsive.

I will say I miss the convience features of 7 like the taskbar pinning and Aero Snap, so I think that mostly Vista suffered from a perception issue. A few bad experiences that people had, either due to just crap hardware coming with it, (blame MS and Intel for that- MS caved to Intel's desire to clear out old chipset inventory..lesson learned there) manufacturer installed bloatware, (hello Sony and HP...the most egregious offenders in this regard...) or third party hardware makers who didn't get their shit together (Hi nvidia...) caused many to sour on Vista due to word of mouth.

Add in what I like to call "The Apple effect" (how one thing Apple does, seemingly ends up shaping the entire industry...) with their hip, catchy, adverts, and it was the nail in Windows Vista's coffin from a consumer goodwill perspective.
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Dealt with two Vista PCs.
One was my g/f's ThinkPad, first boot up took over an hour (before the whole reg screen bs came up) took another half hour to get a usable desktop. Ubuntu took less time to install AND configure on that same machine. My parent's little HTPC thing also came with Vista and it's hugely unstable, its a 24/7 type of a machine but it needs to be rebooted every couple of days. Sometimes it won't come back from suspend, or stop accepting inputs.

Vista CAN work well on fairly powerful hardware but it can't really scale all that well. For a comparison I had Win 7 on a 6 year old laptop and it was running absolutely fine, faster than XP or Ubuntu actually. There was also the fact that it took a very long time to be introduced, it was missing a ton of features and it introduced the extremely intrusive UAC with its pop ups not to mention that enhanced security requirements broke a lot of software. Not to say that the last one was necessarily MS's fault but it still caused issues for users. There were also a lot of issues with driver support and such. Keep in mind that by the time 7 rolled around a large number of software and drivers were updated for Vista and since 7 and Vista are so similar what worked in one generally worked in the other so overall you got a smoother experience.

Any major OS redesign is going to be received badly. Apple saw that with their OS X when people said that 10.1 was the first actually usable release of the OS. MS saw that with Win2K, originally 2K was supposed to bring together the NT and 9x family but because of cold reception they produced WinME for the 9x crowd (everyone knows how that worked out). Again by the time XP hit the scene there was plenty of development for 2K so quite a bit of software and driver support made XP adoption smoother.
 
Is there any way to check whether your email account has been hijacked for spamming or not?
 
prizrak said:
Dealt with two Vista PCs.
One was my g/f's ThinkPad, first boot up took over an hour (before the whole reg screen bs came up) took another half hour to get a usable desktop. Ubuntu took less time to install AND configure on that same machine. My parent's little HTPC thing also came with Vista and it's hugely unstable, its a 24/7 type of a machine but it needs to be rebooted every couple of days. Sometimes it won't come back from suspend, or stop accepting inputs.

Vista CAN work well on fairly powerful hardware but it can't really scale all that well. For a comparison I had Win 7 on a 6 year old laptop and it was running absolutely fine, faster than XP or Ubuntu actually. There was also the fact that it took a very long time to be introduced, it was missing a ton of features and it introduced the extremely intrusive UAC with its pop ups not to mention that enhanced security requirements broke a lot of software. Not to say that the last one was necessarily MS's fault but it still caused issues for users. There were also a lot of issues with driver support and such. Keep in mind that by the time 7 rolled around a large number of software and drivers were updated for Vista and since 7 and Vista are so similar what worked in one generally worked in the other so overall you got a smoother experience.

Any major OS redesign is going to be received badly. Apple saw that with their OS X when people said that 10.1 was the first actually usable release of the OS. MS saw that with Win2K, originally 2K was supposed to bring together the NT and 9x family but because of cold reception they produced WinME for the 9x crowd (everyone knows how that worked out). Again by the time XP hit the scene there was plenty of development for 2K so quite a bit of software and driver support made XP adoption smoother.
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It sucks to hear your experiences with it were pretty bad, esp. on a ThinkPad system. Usually those are more stable. The machine I reinstalled Vista on is 5 years old (granted, it was designed for Vista...) but pretty modest in terms of components by today's standards. (Core 2 Duo T7100, 2 GB of RAM, 120 GB 7200 rpm hdd) I didn't install with a internet connection, and used the Windows Vista (no SP's) disc that came with my Latitude (This isn't a recovery image..it's a plain Windows Vista DVD-Dell always gave standard OS disc's during this timespan) and everything except for the graphics turned out fine. And Windows Update took care of that. Maybe it's because my machine's so bog standard..who knows? *Shrugs*

I do remember the release taking longer than the typical Windows release cycle, mostly because they decided to rewrite the OS on Server 03, instead of using the XP codebase that some say was like creating an increasingly higher "deck of cards" with more stuff piled onto it. Indeed, a lot of cool things got lost in the process. I remember reading Paul Thurrott's reviews/looks at those early Longhorn builds, (yeah..I'm a pedantic nerd :p) some of the screenshots were definitely radically different from what we have today. :)

I'll definitely agree that people overall resist change. You're certainly correct about OS X's rocky start and Windows 2000.

I'm excited for Windows 8, but nervous that this Vista experience will result in Microsoft not pushing the envelope as much as they did with Vista. The underlying re-engineered code that Vista introduced for things like networking and graphics are very much a solid foundation for them to build upon.

And I'll stop talking about Windows now cause it's boring :lol:
 
Is anyone's else having issues with photos in Facebook?

For about a month now when I go to the photos page where it's supposed to show the latest photos posted by others it's instead showing really old photos from 3 or 4 years ago.

There isn't an ascending/descending option I'm missing, right?
 
Vista update: all was good until I rebooted my computer to install another round of windows updates.

I'm now trapped in a Blue-Screening boot loop, and can't even get into safe mode: the update appears to have borked an early component of the boot process.

This install only has chrome installed. :eek:

/waits for the "I told you so's" :p

EDIT: aannd we're back thanks to Vista's "Startup Repair" thingy.....still annoying though..<_<
 
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rickhamilton620 said:
Vista update: all was good until I rebooted my computer to install another round of windows updates.

I'm now trapped in a Blue-Screening boot loop, and can't even get into safe mode: the update appears to have borked an early component of the boot process.

This install only has chrome installed. :eek:

/waits for the "I told you so's" :p

EDIT: aannd we're back thanks to Vista's "Startup Repair" thingy.....still annoying though..<_<
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Ugg that sux man.
 
prizrak said:
Ugg that sux man.
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Yeah, luckily this install is only temporary and I should be back on 7 by this weekend. I miss my window snapping...:(
 
rickhamilton620 said:
Yeah, luckily this install is only temporary and I should be back on 7 by this weekend. I miss my window snapping...:(
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How about Ubuntu for the time being? I can't say I like it a lot, but would prefer it over Vista as an interim solution.
 
Rockbox is getting on my nerves, keeps forgetting what song I was on when I turned my iPod off and then the order of the songs in the album are fucked when I search around for the song I was on with the FFW/RW.
 
Backdraft said:
Does anyone have any comments on Hybrid hard drives (HHDs)? Supposedly they claim to have the speed of an SSD while the large storage capacity of a normal spinning HDD.
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I was reading an Anandtech review of a Eurocom laptop that came with one and basically for repetitive tasks it will be on par or faster than SSD. Basically if you use the same software all the time HHD will work well enough but overall SSD will still be much faster.
 
If you use the same small set of data again and again, that's exactly what in-memory cache is for. Depending on your operating system and available memory it may allocate several GBs to keep recently used data from the HDDs there.
 
TBH I don't see too much point to the HHDs. If you are using a desktop you can have an SSD for system + heavy applications and HDDs for storage. If you have a laptop you are better off with a real SSD as the main drive and either use a media bay mounted HDD or networked storage. HHDs will speed up some common tasks but cache is just not big enough to really help with most tasks.
 
prizrak said:
TBH I don't see too much point to the HHDs. If you are using a desktop you can have an SSD for system + heavy applications and HDDs for storage. If you have a laptop you are better off with a real SSD as the main drive and either use a media bay mounted HDD or networked storage. HHDs will speed up some common tasks but cache is just not big enough to really help with most tasks.
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So basically, in layman's terms, HHD = normal HD with small cache (for repeat tasks) and SSD = very large cache for all kinds of tasks?
 
prizrak said:
If you have a laptop you are better off with a real SSD as the main drive and either use a media bay mounted HDD or networked storage or a laptop with two proper 2.5" bays.
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FTFY :D


Backdraft said:
So basically, in layman's terms, HHD = normal HD with small cache (for repeat tasks) and SSD = very large cache for all kinds of tasks?
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A hybrid drive is a magnetic drive with a small (e.g. 4GB) flash cache added to the usual 16/32/64MB DRAM cache.
An SSD is flash-only, with some DRAM cache as well obviously.

A pricing example, a 320GB 2.5" HDD is 45?. Add a 4GB flash cache to it and you're looking at 95?.
For that money you can get a 60GB Vertex2.
 
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