MS tricks die-hard XP users into liking Vista

[[GSV]Trig]

Could another Vista user point me in the direction of fix or fixes that'll speed up my copying from my Win2003 server to a USB stick on my Vista64B machine, over 30 minutes to copy 600mb is a joke.

[Paul Adams]

can a vista expert tell me how to print multiple photos on one sheet, the way you could using the photo viewer in xp?

Never fiddled with that kind of thing in XP, but it seems easy enough in Vista - in the example below I just selected 4 images then clicked Print from the context menu, then selected the layout I wanted.

[Paul Adams]

Could another Vista user point me in the direction of fix or fixes that'll speed up my copying from my Win2003 server to a USB stick on my Vista64B machine, over 30 minutes to copy 600mb is a joke.

Specifically from a network source to a USB stick?
Is it faster if it is to a local hard drive?
Is it 600MB of files, or a single 600MB file?

Even from a W2K3 x86 server running under Virtual Server I get ~17MB/s throughput to my Vista x64 SP1 client to my local disk, and ~4.5MB/s when saving directly to my USB stick.
Copying the file from my local disk to the stick gives ~6.5MB/s throughput.
(Sample data was a single 170MB WMV file.)

[[GSV]Trig]

It was still slow from the local drive to the USB stick, although it was faster HD to HD on the machine, was getting ~45mb thru...
600Mb of files ranging from a few 100kb to ~50Mb..

[Agent]

Multiple small files increase the copy time a fair bit I find.

In the past I have zipped/rared contents up before copying over and its much faster. Even if you do it with no compression so it makes the archive quickly you should gain in my experience.

[Paul Adams]

It was still slow from the local drive to the USB stick, although it was faster HD to HD on the machine, was getting ~45mb thru...
600Mb of files ranging from a few 100kb to ~50Mb..

Then the bottleneck is the local USB device throughput for whatever reason.
A 100Mbps network typical throughput is ~10-12MB/s.

[[GSV]Trig]

1000Mbps ftw

[Splash]

I'm sure we covered it before somewhere else, but did you ever try another NIC (with a different chipset) in the Vista box to rule out drivers?

[directhex]

oh yeah, i had terrible speed trouble in vista with a r8169 with the bundled drivers in the beta, compared to no issues with the driver on the realtek webby. the man has a point.

[[GSV]Trig]

The machine has a built in Intel 82566DM-2 as well as a Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit card, same results over both cards.

[[GSV]Myocardial]

If the product was leaps and bounds better than XP then why would MS have to trick anyone into upgrading to Vista? Shouldn't it just be the case that people move over.

At my old place of work they had just shelved the idea of moving over to Vista as XP did everything they needed. They understood it's workings and the cost of upgrading was just not worth the effort. They also didn't want to deal with mixed system support of getting new pc's with vista and having to support both. Also with rumours of a vista replacement turning up sometime around 2010 they felt that it would be more cost effective to wait and see what happens at that time and then re-assess their situation as I am sure alot of Corporates have done.

In a corporate environment I can see why people are resisting the change to vista when imo it really doesn't bring huge improvements. Projects are only now going to start considering vista since it has become more stable due to fixes and then only if the environment it is going into is going to ensure compatability. From what IT people have told me the budget for IT spend in corporates has been coming down and therefore new and exciting just isn't going to be taken up if the cost is greater than what has been proven to work. As i am reading in many of the publications about the current recession, I see the steady old fashioned business models are what is exciting investors at the moment and many of those don't involve switching IT product every time another company wants to make a bit more money in licensing out of you.

So if MS can't get the corp's on board, why do people on forums like hexus keep banging on about people who refuse to make the move? It's abit like the fanboyism of AMD Vs Intel or Nvidia Vs ATI arguments and imo totally pointless. I've read so many people who are arguing for vista at the moment, yet whenever people bring up relevant reasons not to upgrade, those reasons are either ignored or are just passed over and not commented on.

I at home currently use Vista Ultimate x64 with a pretty high spec machine, XP on 2 laptops and a small footprint machine (runs specific apps that I can't get on vista or linux), Gentoo based linux box, W2k8 server test machine for me to mess about with. Although I find Vista ok, there are many annoying features including UAC, it's more about the way they are implemented than what they actually do but you tend to just ignore alot of what pops up and click ok as if you spent the time to investigate you'd never actually get anything else done. I will probably give XP x64 a try and see how that compares to Vista on the main machine soon just for a bit of a play as I didn't initially bother installing it to test.

What it seems to me is that even though we get hardware progressing in leaps and bounds, software is just not doing the same. Why is a modern os using more resources than the previous version. Surely programming should be getting smarter and in many other industries relating to technology things are rapidly shinking but not software. Driver libraries etc are just bolted onto the product to make sure it's compatible with every permutation rather than a small piece of software that selectively picks the correct bits and keeps the base small and compact.

Personally I don't think vista will ever enjoy the same sucess as XP and think it will be superseeded by something new, built on it's back bone most likely and thats no bad thing as vista is a step in the right direction. But all this can be attributed to MS's decision to extend the production of Vista into 5 years to enabled them to bring out SP2 for XP. Is it going to be better for them to not produce a massive SP2 for vista and just release a new OS instead in the next permutation?

[this_is_gav]

It's not a case of getting them to move to Vista as such, more to enhance the reputation of the OS, so that if you do buy it, or have to use it on a laptop that comes with it, then you'll do so knowing it's OK, not having the perceived thought that it's worse than XP lingering over it.

They're not trying to make people buy Vista (they're quite happy sucking up the sales through OEMs) it's more about protecting the name, especially as Windows 7 will just be another upgrade more than an overhaul (if you could call any MS OS an overhaul - you know what I mean though).

[dangel]

It's not that corps aren't on board - it's that corps never are on board with a new version of Windows until way down the line. Many skip a generation too. This makes sense - a: it's better to wait for fixes and b: it's a big investment in product and training (if you're talking about 1000's of seats).

What mojave is all about is perception that Vista is a bad product - because (hand on heart) it really isn't. It's solid, reliable and does quite a lot of things a whole lot better than it's predecessor. What really did for it though was the new driver model and the inabilty of large third parties to get their drivers working. The former was a damn good technical decision, but as it turned out a bad political one. The knock on effect will be that Seven, when it launches, will probably use the same (mature) Vista drivers and everybody will go "oohhh it's much better than Vista was!". Sigh.

I don't object to people sticking to XP - what i object to is ill-informed ****e being posted about Vista. Mojave exposed ignorance. Nothing more or less. Whether that's also willful is another matter - because that's stupid. The bottom line is: XP is a good OS, and so's Vista (in fact, it's better). The sooner the latter becomes accepted by some the better (and that's not me pointing a finger so don't have a benny).

Yes MS would love you to upgrade - it makes them cash after all - but I don't want you to. It's up to you. Just don't force me to read how terrible Vista is unless you can substantiate that opinion versus "omfg vista iz sooooo ****tttteee"


To be clear - there are perfectly *good* reasons for not upgrading - cost, "it does the job", there's no Vista drivers for my steam-driven printer from the early 1900's etc. It's down to personal decision Oui?

[TheAnimus]

The biggest argument for not upgrading is, we've a network of x PCs all happily running version n.

This is a legitamte reason for not upgrading, hell often its easyer to buy obsolete kit just to end up supporting fewer hardware configurations.

No one is saying your moronic for not using it. Its more a case of the bad rep it has un-justly.

People often get into the 'cool' club of OS's. I had someone who obviously had never used mono + linux in anger, telling me we should use it. Without realising how much the app relies on inter thread communication. In mono on linux, this is piss poor performance compared to NT. The point is the rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbish was shooting his mouth of about it so i had to put him in his place a bit, he obviously had no idea or experiance about what he was telling my team should be doing. This is not something thats unique to IT, but there does seam to be an almost zelous habbit of loving and hating software.

[directhex]

The biggest argument for not upgrading is, we've a network of x PCs all happily running version n.

This is a legitamte reason for not upgrading, hell often its easyer to buy obsolete kit just to end up supporting fewer hardware configurations.

No one is saying your moronic for not using it. Its more a case of the bad rep it has un-justly.

People often get into the 'cool' club of OS's. I had someone who obviously had never used mono + linux in anger, telling me we should use it. Without realising how much the app relies on inter thread communication. In mono on linux, this is piss poor performance compared to NT. The point is the rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbish was shooting his mouth of about it so i had to put him in his place a bit, he obviously had no idea or experiance about what he was telling my team should be doing. This is not something thats unique to IT, but there does seam to be an almost zelous habbit of loving and hating software.

out of curiosity, how does mono on windows deal with your use-case? i've found major differences in the overall behaviour of threads between the platforms, but i suspect it's more OS-related than framework-related

[badass]

The bottom line is: XP is a good OS, and so's Vista

Sorry can't agree with that. Vista is better than XP overall, however neither Vista nor XP are a good desktop OS.
In fact, neither was 2000, 98SE, 98 or any previous version of Windows. NT4 and Prior was also not very good.
That said, all Linux distros are also not very good desktop OS's, and OSX is just as bad.
All modern desktop OS's available to anyone that's not an uber geek are bodged server OS's loaded with bloat and features totally irrelevant to a home computer and you pay for that in performance, complexity and ease of use.
There was a period in history when desktop OS's were generally good, however that passed over 10 years ago now.
OS's like STOS for the Atari ST (spit*) and Workbench for the Amiga were good desktop OS's (for the time)
Things have moved on now, however that doesn't mean that any current easily available OS is actually that good at what it is sold to you to do.

Before anyone starts pointing how these old OS's lacked things like multi user capability, file system security, process isolation etc, please re read my post. That is all irrelevant at that time due to hardware available and what people used to use their computers for.


* Since I owned and Amiga, I was required to hate all things Atari for no good reason