Friday, July 25th 2008
Microsoft Spins Over a 'Mojave' Approach to Grow Vista User-base
Choice is a wonderful thing. Informed Choice is even better, where you choose something after knowing its inside-outs. The very opposite of informed choice is dogma, where you rigidly oppose something and stick to your beliefs. Incidentally, dogma seems to be one of the significant factors keeping users away from embracing Windows Vista OS, of what can be inferred from an experiment by Microsoft in San Fransisco, United States. A group of Windows XP users having negative impressions on Windows Vista were introduced to a "new" operating system they referred to as "Mojave". User experiences on using this operating system were noted and feedback taken. A surprising 90 percent of these users gave positive feedback on this new OS. They were later told that the new OS was nothing else but Windows Vista.
Despite Microsoft releasing numerous updates and fixes to the Vista OS making it a fairly stable, reliable OS close to expectations if not exactly on par, it seems to be mass dogma that's keeping users away from adopting this new OS. Going back to that experiment, a user is reported to have exclaimed "Oh wow", something Microsoft expected users to do with the new OS originally, as portrayed in those numerous television and print commercials going with the tag line "wow". Following the recent announcement of a huge budget allocation towards propagating Vista (covered here) for home and enterprise segments, the message being sent out is that Microsoft is not only being aggressive but also proactive.
Source:
CNET
Despite Microsoft releasing numerous updates and fixes to the Vista OS making it a fairly stable, reliable OS close to expectations if not exactly on par, it seems to be mass dogma that's keeping users away from adopting this new OS. Going back to that experiment, a user is reported to have exclaimed "Oh wow", something Microsoft expected users to do with the new OS originally, as portrayed in those numerous television and print commercials going with the tag line "wow". Following the recent announcement of a huge budget allocation towards propagating Vista (covered here) for home and enterprise segments, the message being sent out is that Microsoft is not only being aggressive but also proactive.
231 Comments on Microsoft Spins Over a 'Mojave' Approach to Grow Vista User-base
you're entering MSconfig! you sure you want to this??
you're disabling UAC! thats cool.
*reboot*
HOLY CRAP YOU DISABLED UAC!
*disable warnings*
*reboot*
hmmmm.... so THIS is what vistas meant to be, lol.
Regarding the link above, that was cool of her to post it.........
The no back folder button really pisses me off that it is now gone. Me and my boss scream about it all the time. It's one of the main things that we hate about vista, besides the new start menu and UAC.
I always thought Kansas was pronounced "Canz-Ass".
- Vista is a resource hog
Completely clean install it ate 800-900MB of DRAM on my system equipped with 2GB.. only after extensive services tweaking did it come down to a more acceptable 512MB. I can run XP with everything my system requires and 3-4 relatively memory hungry apps and just be peaking 600MB or so.
- Unstable
Crashes every 17.5hrs or so, yes, wonderful stability there having to reset once a day :rolleyes:
- Bloated
Seriously, who wants bloody gigs of drivers on their HDD for crap they will never own? Get real.
- Inferior gaming performance vs. XP
Please dont try to deny this you will force me to school you using Crysis as the model.
- The fact (most; ie; the normal user) have to HEAVILY upgrade their system to run Vista to any real acceptable standard.
- No hardware support for soundcards
Turning peoples £200+ cards into something thats little better than an onboard AC97 solution is just retarded. Again I expect no comeback on this, otherwise you will force me to brief you in detail about such things like the Alchemy project and why the Alchemy project had to come about.
- The god awful GUI
Why break something that was perfectly set up? Its lunacy to mess with things that didnt need messing with in the first place.
Now, leaving the obvious flaws of Vista aside for this post, I HAVE used Vista, before and after SP1, regardless Vista sucked (resource hog, bloated, insanely slow at copying files vs. XP, etc) and I put it to you, in fact I heartily encourage you, to pick some of the knowledgeable folk running XP off of this forum and have them run Vista and get their feedback. No trickery (but lets be fair, the people you randomly had do that mojave experiment could not of been very tech savvy to not recognise Vista when they saw it), in a simple "Try Vista, and tell us what you do and don't like about it".
The audio issue is that games can't use direct sound. It now has to be emulated. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectSound
They took a perfectly good system and flat out killed it. I liken it to having opengl then making shitX, especially 11. Except you get zero hardware benefit. Really good stuff, M$, thanks. Dicks.
LOL, I mean directx 10 haha
the sad thing, though, is that some of the bigger issues between XP/Vista can be fixed - DX10 can run on XP . . . and we could have audio hardware acceleration in Vista . . .
Vista, IMO, is currently no better than XP was when it was released, and after SP1. But, Vista gives me the impression of an OS that was ritzed up to compete with MAC, and userability had to fall sacrifice for this. You know how irritating it is to install an application, and then spend 45min trying to figure out why it doesn't want to run, only to realize you didn't install or run the application as "administrator?!" It gives me the impression that it was shoved out the door more half-baked than XP initially was . . . we still have software and hardware companies trying to get stable or "accepted" Vista drivers released . . . c'mon, driver support on the 3rd party side was bad enough that MS delayed the launch of the OS to give some big name companies time to finish developing drivers that the OS would cooperate with.
but seeing as how I don't want to get up on my soapbox about that again - all I'll say is that with onboard audio, the OS seems to be more integrated with it. If you have HD onboard that is capable of 7.1+, there are no down sampling or down mixing issues that I know of, unless you're running 3rd party applications (i.e. PowerDVD). If all you're using is media center, your audio will function correctly, perfectly, and correct.
But, if you're running an audio adapter, be warned that there are issues no matter what the hardware manufacturer - downsampling and downmixing is common, converting 5.1 to 2-channel. No hardware acceleration, amoungst other things.
This all boils down to the audio architecture, and how the audio APIs within the kernel are designed to carryout hardware calls.
And the sad part is, MS was working with a couple other companies to impliment DirectSound support into the DX10 package . . . but after one of their partners dropped the project, so did MS . . .:shadedshu
although, Analogue Devices (ADI) isn't much better; their SoundMAX drivers for this motherboard don't include an EQ and some other stuff for XP . . . but they do for Vista :wtf:
When you plan on upgrading to an audio card for Vista, I'm more than willing to give unbiased recomendations or answer any questions :toast:
as to the guide - yeah, I intend to add more to it at some point. Seeing as how the Vista upgrade is looking inevitable next month (STALKER: Clear Sky - w00t! :rockout:), and I don't feel like running into any issues with the current mod process of getting DX10 to run seamlessly with XP (although it appears the project is still being worked on).
So, I'll start getting some more in depth field work with audio in Vista, and I'll be adding to the audio guide, as well as the X-Fi thread. Possibly, if it turns into a big enough ordeal, I might voodoo up another guide solely for audio in Vista.
If you get the new versions from Asus by searching under newer MBs (intel chipsets seem to be a good place to start), then you can find drivers released this yr and with the equalizer, etc. In fact, for adi 1988, you need to use 1988b drivers b/c they work the best. The only issue I've had now is that digital doesn't output in 5.1 (I had it working ONCE and it won't work again).
Any newer realtek drivers should be good, too. Or I'd use the nvidia drivers if you can.
I'm still waiting for cash for my Xonar :(:(:(
Actually, TBH, if you take a look at the first post in my audio spec guide (forums.techpowerup.com/showpost.php?p=871130&postcount=1) - all results with the red spectrum tests were done with the AD1988B chipset found on this P5E3-Deluxe motherboard.
. . . and ADI are amoung the best in terms of onboard audio chipsets, too.