Load Vista Beta 2 or stick with media center 2005?

[Spud1]

Just to take your HCI point - 1 second is too long yes, but instant switching is too short. Fine for power users yes, but for the majority of people there needs to be a slight delay. this is true accross the board for computing - extending to consoles where with some Nintendo64 games developers artificially put a few seconds of 'loading' time in because users were put off by the almost instantaneous loading.

No one is saying that Vista is the be all end all, just that it is going to be a big change for microsoft - which certainly looks to be the case.

[javalord]

True, however not even users are so far finding many relevations although its a beta : take this thread , plenty of valid points made by all kinds of users

http://forums.anandtech.com/messagev...&enterthread=y

Although utimately if open standards appear and people arent so afriad of trying something new, Ubuntu is coming on very nicely. Still wouldnt recommend it though, pain in the ass for some things.

[dangel]

Your still missing the point

That's rich fron you! lol.

A lot of these new 'features' are gimmicks. Improved network stack wont help the fact that the SMB protocol is quite slow transferring files over gigabit ethernet.

Did you watch the video? One of the nice things about the new stack is that it's MUCH faster at coping with large file transfers..

Fancy graphics acceleration? Many systems including the macbook I'm about to buy are still leveraging onboard intel GMA. What use is this to anyone? If anything toying around with aesthetic layers will bring even more problems.

And so what if winfx can render the layer without repainting - I use my machine productively not just to glare at its pretty effects, so this would go wasted to many.

Asked and answered - "..except the desktop engine/rendering will sit squarely on top of it and be faster as result, freeing up your cpu for desktop apps." Winfx = .NET 3.0 and has nothing to do with desktop rendering on Vista lol! Intel GMA supports DX 9 so yup, you can benefit too.

Looking at OS X applications, not many are really taking advantage of the acceleration features (aka Core Image etc) and thats been available for how long?

...and again YOU are missing the point - that's exactly the reason MS haven't gone overboard with silly graphic effects on the desktop - it's confusing! At the same time you don't seem to realise you don't need to take advantage of the new features in the engine - it's still accelerating the drawing of legacy apps. Sure, you can make use of the more advanced features for displaying of 3d viewports, or vector based drawing, or text scaling etc etc but that's up to the developer. What next? Are you going to argue that moving GDI functions into the hardware had no benefit on desktop apps?

[QUOTE=javalord]
Why not install 3rd party software? Does the job.
[/QUOTE

...er no - you put up 'topdesk' as being the equivilent of the desktop window manager - and yet _all_ it does is statically rotate or move windows - it's no more than smoke and mirrors and sucks cpu time (unlike dwm). You witter on about 'productivity' but don't seem to care when someone provides something to give your apps more cpu..

Windows indexing service is appauling.

Works ok for me and again, it integrates into the start menu. It's nowhere near the problematic heap of rubbish that shipped with XP.

I dont see why I shouldnt be dimissive given the current track record of Microsoft's lovely operating systems.

Yup, certainly seems like it. I can only point out where your assumptions are plainly wrong - I certainly can't change what seems to be entrenched beliefs in some that MS products are _always_ bad no matter what..

[dangel]

No one is saying that Vista is the be all end all, just that it is going to be a big change for microsoft - which certainly looks to be the case.

Very well put!

Sometimes I think people would of been happier if they'd just carried on lashing up the XP codebase for the next 10 years...

[robg1701]

Well, just regarding Media Centre itself, the vista beta2 media centre got a horrible review at winsupersite for being a really slow and unbearable application at the moment, so if you need your MC for actual MC duties you might want to stick with MCE2005. At the very least, dual boot