Do you mean people are claiming that the new Windows will only let you play legally-obtained mp3s?

That would be a good feature.

I love the type-for-a-program feature. Sometimes I don't have to even run cmd. Like for netstat or ping.

I agree the nVidia drivers for Vista suck *** and probably the sole cause of games going AWOL on me.

I meant in terms of interface improvement and workability.

If I'm doing serious day-to-day work, I usually don't have many cpu-intensive programs running anyway. The only time that would be useful is for 3d rendering, video, and sound work, which is not something that your typical office drone or home user does a lot of.

I'll wait till singularity computers.

There is not a big enough for this.

Tis the point.

Right off the bat, the new start menu with search feature is a huge interface improvement. The new folder navigation and control panel features take getting used to, but are far superior for everyday users that aren't completely sure what they're looking for.


And this makes it less useful...how? Even if you don't like it, guess what, you can turn it off!

Doesn't Vista have something built in for games/3D? I remember hearing about this.

Just tried, and it thinks I'm running a pre-SP2 XP installation.

I pray you're being sarcastic, but if not...

No. No it wouldn't.

Take a look at TweakVI. It's like TweakUI but for Vista. They want a $150/year subscription for the full thing, but the basic one is free and does most of the things TweakUI did.

Home Premium has Aero... And most features aren't gimped at all... Home Premium is the logical upgrade from XP Pro.

Vista Ultimate is more like Windows XP MCE.

No, Home Premium is like Windows XP MCE, except that it's geared towards being used for home or small office use in addition to media center use.

Vista Ultimate is more like Windows XP Professional Home Server Media Center Professional Awesome Plus Pack III edition.

*shrug* I think piracy is bad.

Been running Vista Business on my laptop for a good week or so now, and I must say, I've yet to have one real legitimate complaint with it. Now I messed around with it a lot in the summer on my desktop when it was in beta 2. I liked it then, thought it was a wee bit slow. On a good machine, it performs noticeably better than XP. I've also noticed a pretty big improvement in wireless throughput. I've tested 14 Mb/s down and 15.6 Mb/s up through wireless, which I was never able to get close to in XP. The only other possible explanation for this would be going from an intel 2200 to an intel 3945, which may account for some of the improvement, but I don't believe all of it.

It's a little weird getting used to how it manages resources. It's weird seeing so much memory being used during idle time, but that's mostly because of SuperFetch, which helps a lot. If something really does need that memory, Vista has no problem giving it up either.

Sure it is. But how should Vista recognise an illegal mp3?

I have no idea. I don't know about computers, really. That's why I asked the question.

If DRM could be implemented in a transparent fashion that does not impede the free use of legally obtained content, and can 100% weed out illegally obtained content without false positives, it would be a good thing.

Unfortunately, that's impossible.

Yeah, that's something people don't seem to understand. They call Vista a memory hog, but all they do is look at task manager. When an application needs the memory, the fetch data will either be paged out or dropped, however they handle it.

Oh hey, I noticed that on my dad's Core 2 system, sleep mode shuts off everything except RAM. No hard drives, no fans, nothing. Since Vista doesn't do this on my Athlon XP 3000, can I assume this is a power management features of newer motherboards?

I should measure the current draw of the system during that state, as well as power supply voltages. It may be possible that the power supply's 5v standby rail is the only thing powering the RAM during sleep mode. If that's the case, you could use sleep instead of turning your machine off. You would pay a little more on your electric bill, but it's basically instant boot-up, which is oh so slick.

I think loosing three fourths of my music library is BAD. I assure you there's several million other people in the world that feel the same way.

Is pirating music good? No. I don't think so. But I don't have the money to throw at CDs. I don't even have the money to throw at the iTunes Store, not to mention they don't carry everything I want to listen to anyway. And I despise DRM. I won't even try to say my position is a good one, because I know it's not. But it's where I stand, and I'll keep it up.

And for the record, even if they COULD do that, it wouldn't last very long at all. People wouldn't upgrade, people would find a way to break the part of the system that checks for legit music, and people would find a way to start "DRMing" their music themselves to trick the system.

Piracy would continue. The RIAA would continue to ***** and moan. The earth would keep spinning. Nothing would change.

Don't be so hyped up about sleep mode. Sleep causes some problems with shutdown on my box. It would take like 2-3 minutes for shutdown to FINALLY start going. It got to the point where I turned off "sleep computer after X minutes/hours"

I wish there was a way to remotely wake the computer up. I run VNC to use my computer from university. However, with sleep mode enabled I cant use it because the computer goes into sleep mode.

This made my day!

Really, though I have no DRM mp3s, but also no illegal ones. There's no way to tell the difference.

Uh, what?

...glad I could help?:psyduck:

I'm missing the subtext.

Are you mocking me?

:downs: :downs:

I think he is. I think forced DRM would be horrible mainly because that is not the job of the operating system. Windows preventing the playing of illegal MP3s is like Windows having a feature that prevents bloggers typing dissent in China (not fully like it, of course). It is not the operating system's role to prevent illegal activity.

He thinks Piracy is bad. I think loosing 3/4ths of my library to some stupid DRM policy is bad.

Putting aside people like phoenix_9286 who simply don't want to give up their illegal MP3s, there is such a thing as legal, non-DRM MP3s. Some examples that come immediately to mind are local bands who just want to get their name out there (so they release non-DRM tracks to be shared by their fans), and The Smashing Pumpkins' "final" album Machina II which was legally released over the internet without DRM because their unsupportive label didn't want to release it since their previous album hadn't done well commercially.

Anyway, the point is, since illegal non-DRM tracks don't contain some kind of special flag that screams "THIS MP3 WAS PIRATED", there's no way to separate the legal from the illegal, and thus, banning all non-DRM music is a bad idea.

The only thing I can't seem to play anymore in Vista are WAV files, and I think that might be caused by iffy sound drivers.

Not that I'm shedding any tears about it.


I have yet to find a single thing that I could do in XP but cannot do in Vista.

See the drive map while defragging (assuming not using any fancy defrag shells like Diskeeper). That's the only thing that comes to mind.

You don't know what DRM is. DRM can not and would not affect your current music library. It's just a form of encryption to stop legally obtained media from being illegally distributed.

And they are talking about a "feature" of Windows that would not play any mp3 with out DRM. See?

I don't know if you're playing a devil's advocate or what.

Windows has absolutely no way of knowing if a MP3 was legally obtained or not. The MP3 format doesn't even support DRM -- the only files that do are .WMAs and .AACs. Jesus Christ, people, stop reading Slashdot. It's rotting whatever spongy useless tissue you have that you call a brain.

Yeah, and how would they expect to control media players other than WiMP? The OS has no way of knowing if what is playing on your speakers is coming from a file, if it's randomly generated, if it's based off of inputs like a mic, if it's a sound effect from a game, WHAT file it's from if it is from the file... it's the programs that take care of these details and the sound drivers do not care.

[Edit: Slashdot is cool. They haven't said anything like this. There might have been something about TPM some months ago, but that's totally different.]



Both XP and Vista (supposedly) defrag NTFS drives while the computer is idle. I've personally never seen a drive map while this happens on either OS... and I'm glad.



That doesn't make sense to me. Try a different media player or tweak some settings in the one you're using. If you can hear stuff (well, MIDIs/MODs/etc might use something different than full audio like MP3s and WAVs) then there's no reason why WAVs shouldn't play.



Right click EXE, Properties, Compativility, run in XPSP2 mode.

I personally don't see Vista has a gaming OS myself. If you want to see DRASTIC performance in performance on a game, install Ubuntu. A nice light OS that gives more resources towards your games.

Did you really just recommend linux for gaming?

Yes, both of them.

Recommending linux for gaming is like recommending an 8500 and a pentium 2 for gaming.

Stop reading Slashdot like Jon`C said.