[mdlug] Cracks in the Evil Empire

[Kevin Jeffrey Smith]

I decided to install Vista Business as a lark on my main desktop last week -
figured I'd try it before I pass judgment on it. I was impressed with the
install process - very painless. I thought the UAC, as much as people love
to make fun of it, might make non-technical end-users think twice before
installing stuff at random (I know this is a pipe dream, but hey). A lot of
the configuration options in Control Panel seem to be a little more logical
in their location/naming, hardware driver installs seem pretty painless for
the most part, etc.

However, I was shocked at how sluggish it was without turning off a ton of
features. Granted, my rig is no God Box (2.6 GHz P4, 1 GB RAM, 256 MB
GeForce 5500FX vid card) and Vista is supposedly optimized for newer
hardware, but I've had to disable every visual effect, System Restore,
remove unnecessary features from the OS, etc. to get this thing to perform
respectably on my hardware (with all drivers, etc.)

As others have pointed out - it's a interesting step in the right direction.

-KJS

On 6/27/07, Dan Pritts <danno at umich.edu> wrote:
>
> > >
> > > > A lot of people have been saying that Vista is just XP with a pretty
> > > > new interface.  I've even seen several IT folks at work saying that.
> > > > This is wrong.  There are many dramatic changes in Vista under the
> > > > hood, but most of them aren't obvious to your typical user.
> > >
> > >  Can you name some of them? I'm not aware of many beyond the user
> interface
> > > stuff.
>
> I believe that they changed the architecture so that display drivers
> (and presumably some other device drivers but I don't know for sure)
> no longer run in kernel space.  This is a huge win compared to XP for
> security and reliability.
>
> They've also vastly improved their development methodology w/r/t
> security; many of the benefits of this showed up with XP SP2 but
> this is the first full release under the new regime.  Not that this
> solves all problems but it was a huge step in the right direction.
>
> tnx
> danno
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