CoffeeFiend

I believe this is what you're doing too. Comparing yesterday's embedded video to today's video cards. If someone had some ancient and poorly performing onboard video and used 64Mb out of the 128MB system memory for the video card, on a lowly P3 system running XP and all kinds of spyware, and using a bad version of the drivers, then yeah, performance would suck like you claim, and putting a dedicated video card would indeed give a noticeable boost in performance. But modern video chipsets - just like the intel one you diss - are actually overkill for most non-gaming use, and perform very, very well for their intended use (and just fine for some older games). Most of the time a pre-radeon PCI video card would suffice (like a Rage XL 8MB), and all embedded chipsets are definitely faster than that. I've seen hundreds of PCs and laptops running such embedded video chipsets, and NONE of them had the kind of problems you've mentioned - not even once. Performance is the same as most video cards installed in most of the other PCs (like GeForce 4 MX440's). Web pages with flash, movies, powerpoint, you name it, runs perfectly fine. Dedicated video cards wouldn't really affect the performance much if at all, but it would certainly cost money.

I beg to differ. Onboard video is every bit as good as a dedicated card IMO - unless you need 3D power and lots of video RAM. Definitely a bad idea for one that might run Vista or that wants to play games. But for anything else, it's more than fine. One of my PCs has onboard Intel GMA 900 video, and I love it. Right now it uses all of 8MB of my system RAM (it has 1.5GB). Big deal. It's plenty for anything that PC will ever do. And drivers wise, I believe you're 100% wrong here. The drivers for that integrated video are about a trillion times better and more stable than all the nvidia/ati drivers I've ever seen. It's also linux friendly (can't say that of many new graphics cards). And the price was more than right. I haven't had much problems with most laptop's integrated video either, and performance's never been an issue even once. Mind you, right now I'd get a card that can run Vista and WPF apps.

I have a hard time believing all these "never" claims. I've had several BSODs. Some due to faulty RAM, some due to a PC being unstable because of a PSU gone bad (or a motherboard with bad caps a while ago), or even just bad drivers -- sometimes when you expect it the least. I tried a program called priority saver a little while ago, which was nice, but it also installed a very crappy network driver, which made it BSOD like everyday until I got rid of it. If it wasn't for hardware gone bad (even quality hardware eventually goes south) or bad drivers, then yeah, I'd be saying "never" too.

I'd second that. HK speakers are usually good. And even though I've seen some good reviews about several Logitech speaker sets, those I've seen (including 5.1 sets) sounded really really BAD (just seems like the logitech product reviewers couldn't give honest reviews for fear of never getting new stuff to review anymore). Perhaps it's bad luck on my part too (I've managed to hear every bad set of logitech speakers ever made?), but either ways I'm not buying those anytime soon.

Last I tried QEMU it was very SLOW (compared to VMWare). Drivers (for the emulated hardware running in the client OSes) weren't as nice either. Lots of little things. And with the other free virtualization products nowadays (vmware server and player), and other affordable options (e.g. parallels workstation for 50$), I just see no need for it - I'd rather pay for a commercial product than using QEMU if I had to. ESX and VirtualCenter are very nice if you have lots of monster servers with infiniband, an iSCSI SAN and all. But that nice hardware plus the software (thousands of $ per server) is just too expensive for most users (for those, there's GSX - reincarnated in a free app that's very good too). Either ways, it's totally overkill for my needs. No mentions of Parallels Workstation or Xen yet? (nor Cygwin or MinGW either?)

...and Zoom Player. And VLC. And possibly QuickTime (not so much for the player itself, but the codecs are technically part of it, and it's used a lot for videos on the web, like movie trailers so still somewhat useful). And that's still ignoring all the DVD playing apps (for those who'se primary media use of a PC is watching DVDs - like PowerDVD, WinDVD, etc). And if you're going to include Linux players, then XMMS should be there too (and perhaps rhythmbox, xine, etc). We're also ignoring every kind of PVR software (MCE, MythTV, etc) which can also playback all kinds of media (and is usually the sole purpose of the PC it's running onto). The only option almost worth voting for on that list is MPC. Couldn't pay me enough for me to use WiMP or iJunk. Besides, it would be hard to pick only one player. Lots of people use different apps for mp3s (audio) and movies. That would be the winamp/zoom player combo as far as I'm concerned (on windows).

What do you mean by unreliable? That's the very first such complain i hear in many, many years of using it. Perhaps that's not the exact word you meant? Because I have no idea why would one say that. The only thing I've seen that came somewhat close to that description is people having problems with corrupted documents (because of bad floppies and such). Your mother struggling with it makes it sound like she needs to pick up a good book or something. It's really not that hard to place most things reasonably well. But then again, it's a word processor - not a a desktop publishing/page layout software (like InDesign), and there's a huge difference. If she needs very precise and powerful positioning, very good typography and all, then she shouldn't use just word alone. As for math (and in academia no less), as LLXX mentioned, LaTeX is the common way. There are lots of editors (even some for windows, such as LEd). But there's a few more things you can try, like MathML. Or as a very last resort, if you can't be bothered to learn that stuff or plain don't have the time, you can try to make the equations in something like mathematica and make screen captures and embed those (cropped) images in your documents (wouldn't cut it for a PhD in math, but would be more than sufficient for a high school math homework - no idea WTF a TIPE is, sorry).

Well, the installer could check if it's a server OS or not (and that does return different values), but more often than not they just check the NT version, and it's the same for both (5.2.3790), so it tends to identify 'em as one and the same.

It happens to me all the time! At least once a week, and it's been doing that for months. Clear your cookies, login again, problem solved!

Wow. So much for posting at like 4AM (that would be before hitting the pillow, not getting up early). I knew I was forgetting a couple things Oh, I forgot to mention the new version of VSTO for office 2007 too. I can't wait for Orcas. But there's more things to come too: Atlas (currently Beta 2), LH server, their new "expression" products (sparkle/acrylic/quartz), .NET framework 3.5 (with things like LINQ, ADO.NET vNext and new language features) which will likely ship with Orcas, and several "2007" apps still in beta or RC (like Exchange, MOM, SMS v4, etc).

Powershell 1.0 was just released (used to be known as "Monad"). There's also a documentation pack (same link above). Other things you might be interested into: PowerShell Analyzer, PowerShell IDE, and "PowerShell Prompt Here" (like "CMD Here", but for the new shell). There's also a few wikis with PowerShell scripts, a script repository, lots of tutorials (google is your friend), various interesting articles, an official FAQ, the m.p.w.powershell newsgroup, etc. Seemingly, there's a few books out too. BTW, the PowerShell team also has their team blog. It looks like the Redmond folks are shipping everything! Vista, Office 2007, .NET Framework 3, PowerShell... Edit: You might want to wait for the extra downloads. The docs are still for RC2. Likely fairly accurate, but one might prefer to wait for the final docs too... Same goes for PowerShell IDE: for RC2 too. Hopefully be updated in a few days. And the PowerShell Analyzer needs updating too. Oh well.

I didn't accuse you of ripping anything, just saying it seemed like much the same, only with less features. Sys Internals is only owned by MS as of last month or something (a few months at most anyways). So you haven't really been competing with MS. .NET is built in Vista, and most people are going to install it on XP so they can use WPF apps and what not eventually. I have nothing against it (I'm actually a C# dev). It's just the one person that chimes in every time someone pronounces ".NET" and whines about the "bloat" and such, and how everything should be coded in hand-optimized asm instead... Like a broken record from the last century, missing his CP/M era, punch cards, and walking in the snow uphill both ways, and how everything's changed for the worst since then (d*mn kids, get off my lawn!) It's getting really tiring to hear the same old whining constantly IMO. If someone doesn't like .NET, they might as well switch to linux, because that's where most development on windows is headed (that, or keep their old OS and old apps for a very, very long time and eventually be totally obsolete). That's the new development platform pushed by Redmond, and much of the new stuff (like WPF for instance) only works with .NET (no backward compatibility of any kind). Adoption is nearly exponential. That just might be the best thing to do... If it doesn't fill a need, or that you can't profit from it/can't compete with the existing solutions, there's no point in wasting time over it. If you want to become a successful micro ISV you have to do a lot of work in that field... It's hard to find genuinely good ideas for software. In over 20 years of computing, I have never needed that one, nor wished I had the possibility to do so. And there are already some apps that control processes like ProcessGuard and such. I honestly can't think of much people who will need to "blacklist" processes enough that they will want to pay for this. And you'd have to have more features than ProcessGuard, and preferably for less $. Again, there's already lots of programs that do sync'ing. There's a bunch free ones, and countless commercial alternatives (lots being inexpensive). You're fighting a battle in a already established market with LOTS of competitors. Unless you're sure you can bring more features for cheaper... It's hard to make money selling shareware and such (even disregarding piracy). It's VERY hard to come up with the idea to solve a problem (what to do/finding a niche), a good name for it, get it known (publicity), establish the perfect price point to maximize profit (profit vs volume), improving it all the time and staying ahead once competition appears, doing support and QA, and all the "running a micro ISV" part (accounting, marketing, and such "business" things programmer-types don't like and aren't inherently good at).

Why create a new topic when there's already one you could have bumped? Don't want to come across as rude but... I wouldn't expect much more interest. Name hasn't changed (I think it was fairly easy to tell from last thread it's not exactly great - it's not a good sign when you have to put signs up saying it's "not the virus/...") And the app itself looks like a rather poor clone of sysinternals process explorer. Process Explorer: -has a far better name and is trusted (works fine/reliable, created by windows internals experts) -has a hierarchical process list -has the bottom pane to show what's opened by it -has several times more features/information about processes (yours has like only half of the "Performance" tab's infos only) -has a far better GUI -is far more customizable -can draw some graphs for several things -is tested and is stable -is totally free (another app would have to be exceptionally good for me to consider paying for it!) -is already heavy enough on resources -is already well known and used by most people who need such a tool

Yes, I've never taken anything from that site seriously. Exactly. Pure BS. They should be forced to use a Win95 box that somehow has IE7 and WMP11 (the 2 most useless parts of Vista - a ghetto browser and sub-par media player). Sounds like they couldn't tell the difference either ways -- I wouldn't be surprised if they liked it actually... Just because they don't see the underlying changes (or even changes you can see but that they're not intelligent enough to notice) doesn't mean it's not there. This is every bit as true as Win95 was just a new GUI on top of Win 3.11. FUD and more sensationalist BS to get more page views as always.

VSTO for Office 2007 was just released too: download I'm surprised it came out so fast. And they've released as save as PDF/XPS extension too. Nice of them, especially since Adobe wanted to sue them if they included it in MS Office, even though it's a "free" format (free for anyone to implement, except for MS seemingly). That was totally unexpected really.

Yeah, let's not start a debate again, but then troll about how it "insults the "real" programmer's intelligence"? Real intelligent skilled programmers use what's best for each case. And .NET is often the answer. Nothing comes even CLOSE to WCF out there, on any platform/OS/using any language. Your app can switch from SOAP web services (and extensions), to remoting, to MSMQ and back, without even having to touch a single line of code. It's perhaps the most secure option too (not just WS policies and such, but also .NET Code Access Security and such). And nothing comes even CLOSE to being so quick to develop. The worklflow framework will be a real time saver too. There are countless other great frameworks, utilities and such too, and very good dev tools overall. And WPF is a really amazing set of widgets. It blows winforms away (and pretty much everything else and the other old methods, be it Qt, GTK+, Swing, wxWidgets, MFC, etc). Finally an innovative and futuristic widget set (and it's easy & quick to develop for as a bonus). In the next few months/years we'll see lots of great apps made using it (there's already a few). It hardly insults a programmer's intelligence (no more than Java or any other time-saving framework of any kind). It only saves time and reduces development costs. You're just trolling as always. So much for someone who "didn't want to start a debate again" eh? Not that I ever expected better coming from a .NET-basher (just like the Java-bashers and other "religions" out there), facts matter very little to them.

I don't think so: -The licensing chance cost them 0$ to implement, and took 0 man-hours. And it will result in higher sales (less people not buying it because it can't be transferred) - and not from the home users only. They'd be shooting themselves in the foot if they didn't. That was just a quick business decision, nothing more. -Back porting DirectX 10 would require countless hours of many developers to release, even in some sort of degraded/XP-compatibility mode, and might even require back porting of other significant subsystem features. It could be VERY expensive and take a LOT of time. And then they'd be getting rid a selling point for Vista, costing them even more money. And the blame for DirectX is likely going to be directed at the game makers, for creating DirectX 10-only games/no DirectX 9 version or port. A major undertaking, costing them lots of money and developer time (a limited resource), to reduce their sales? I just can't see it ever happen. Although I fully agree about the Windows pricing. Win XP pricing wasn't too bad, but the server licensing is WAY too pricey - especially for development/non-production boxes!

The WCS icon? Works perfectly fine. Have yet to see a single glitch (even with the betas). Google nor Google groups can't find references of similar problems from anyone, no matter how hard I try. Like a couple hundred MB more than v2.0, which is not bad at all when you consider all the new stuff it brings. WPF graphics using XAML (the main thing for end-users, and it's no small change!), WCF which is a major selling point for programmers along with WWF, and WCS for authentication. At current storage prices (~110$CDN/320GB), that's less than a dime's worth of space. Considering everything it does it's a total non-issue.

I couldn't live w/o VMWare Server (looks like I'm the only one who voted for that, eh). Price is right too.

Same here. It's a matter of preferences. It doesn't matter what the end result is, some people just won't like it no matter what. They have usability experts and graphic/sound artists working for them (they've spent 18 months to make the sounds!), so it's kinda hard to say it's a 5 minute hack job. I find the results pretty good (this is pretty much the first complaint I hear about the start menu so far, so chances are lots of other ppl don't mind it). As always, if you don't like it, there's going to be more themes and stuff for sure.

There is no reason to use AutoIt for this (that's pretty much a last resort). There are some repacked installers (switchless and unattended) that work just fine. They've been mentioned in countless threads already.

I don't ever play games, so I wouldn't know (a 100% FPS decrease in games is perfectly fine by me ). But new games are eventually going to require DirectX 10, so you'll have little choice in the matter. And as fixban2 said, it'll likely improve soon enough (once Vista's actually "out" and that we have DirectX 10 cards and such).

I've installed it dozens of times already without a single glitch (on XP and 2003, in virtual machines and physical ones). Your one instance of having problems (especially if using a 3rd party installer) hardly makes it unstable. It takes up space, yeah. All frameworks, runtimes, and various other dependencies do. But when you look at what it does, it's totally worth it (and I'm not talking about the .NET framework specifically here, same applies to Java & others). As for crashing, I wonder what you're referring to, and if you could come up with log files or screenshots (supporting evidence) to back that up. The betas have been tested very much, by a LOT of developers and companies, and I have yet to hear a single major complaint (and this is the very first time I see such claims about the RTM), which funnily works perfect here. And if there were such major issues about it, we'd have heard about it by now, and MS would likely have released a new installer or a patch. And if you look at all the previous frameworks (installer/install process hasn't changed much), there has NEVER been such issues (neither with v1.0, 1.1 or 2.0). It's anecdotal evidence at best. For all we know, your problem could be caused by something else, or even be something totally unrelated... (I'm tempted to call FUD on that one really) There's no issues with the RTM, besides perhaps not coming with the .NET FW 2.0 updates.

Geez, that's 2 posts in a rows somehow about "a few of the included new apps being the new OS" or something. You're getting perpahs 5% of the new OS, via a lot of updates. It's FAR from being Vista... And IE7 for XP/2003 is not exactly the same as Vista's. BTW, There is no WMP 11 for Win 2003, just go to their download page, and you'll get the "There is no download available for this operating system. To get Windows Media Player 10, please go to Windows Update and install Windows Server 2003 SP1 or later." error message (yes, it can be made to install, but it's hardly "backported" for it). Yeah, and 2003 is built on XP, and XP is built on 2000, and 2000 is built on NT, so Vista is just NT 3.1, right? "Built-on" means absolutely nothing. That's like saying the Mona Lisa is built on paint and is nothing more than that. You'll still be missing DX10, the new kernel, the new audio stack, the new network stack, the improved scripting (like new WMI classes), the new group policies, etc. Pretty much all of Vista, except a handful of back ported apps really (one of which being inferior, and one not even meant to install). I'll be ditching 2003 for LH Server the very second it comes out. Especially if you use 2003 as a server (its intended purpose), then you might want things like IIS7, which will never be back ported. Edit: Seemingly Office 2007 Enterprise was just leaked too, eh.

Not that much really. Protected Video Path? Big deal. It's just not going to affect people all that much. Videos off my video server are going to work just fine, no extra DRM anywhere involved... A small part of the new apps shipping with Vista can be found for XP indeed. But for the most part (like 99% of the new stuff), you can't, the feature can't be added using 3rd party software (that doesn't exist either). I don't know about that. Mac fanboys seemingly love their new 3D gui thing, and lots of people are all over XGL. I won't be using it regardless...