CoffeeFiend

There is also noise that the RTM is pushed to the last week of July.

Some of it is definitely true e.g. faster, safer, more privacy. The rest seems to be mostly about new features like accelerators, inprivate browsing and web slices. Nothing really bad here. It's not much of a comparison though... For the most part is OK. Some points are arguable (like better security? not really IMO), some are outdated e.g. "Privacy" and stuff like that. However, they do have certain features (web slices and such) that others don't (not natively anyhow), as for web stantards, IE6 was truly horrible, but IE8 is getting better (not up to par, but "good enough" for now as most people still won't use anything that crappy old IE6 won't handle). Compatibility? Well, if you include sites with ActiveX stuff, then that makes them right... Manageability? Sure, no other browser integrates with group policy and the like. Not unbiased obviously, and a couple points I don't agree with, but not totally wrong either. 1. They're referring more to how you work, rather than benchmarks it seems. Either ways, I don't care much about those "benchmarks", my pages load plenty fast regardless, and most of my wait is caused by network latency, not javascript performance and the like 2. They're looking at it from a "we had private browsing and the phishing filter first". They have a point, although there's more to security than just that (number of vulnerabilities, time to patch vulnerabilities, how critical and so on). It comes down to opinion IMO. Either ways, I haven't caught malware from any site in years, and I'm not worried about phishing sites and the like. The only real points I have issues with in all the links you provided are points 3 and 4 in your last link. 3. Might actually be true for most end users. But it certainly doesn't match Firefox for power users and developers. Then again, I don't spend much time looking at IE addons... 4. This one has no basis in reality. I'll grant you that. I can't think of any way to back a statement like this, or any reasonable reason to think so. To be honest, the aren't many reasons why I'm using Firefox over IE now. There's several little things like form data being saved when you hit back after the page you were posting to didn't work (sucks losing the entire post you typed!). But for the most part, it's extensions. The day IE has extensions as good or better than Firefox is the day I'll likely switch (or not bother installing it anymore). I just can't imagine browsing without them. I've seen much worse comparisons being made before...

Also: Staggered spin-up: no, no and no respectively. I don't care if onboard RAID and cheap "software" RAID cards don't have a costly fancy dedicated processor to do XOR'ing (I'm not using RAID5 or 6 anyways), but I never understood why they don't offer this option yet. It would be great to have, even on systems with lots of drives that aren't in any arrays. A dozen drives spinning up at once takes a lot of power regardless. It sucks having to get a overkill PSU to cope with it but I'm just not spending $800+ on a fancy RAID card for that feature alone. I believe "RAIDXpert" is just the name of a user-friendly piece of software to configure RAID though (instead of using the BIOS to set it up), not the name of the actual feature which they unpretentiously call "RAID" (no fancy marketing name). But I've been wrong before...

Fine, I'll provide some comments then First, it's outdated. Firefox is up to 3.5 and the results are very different. A lot of the items in the list are wrong, and "benches" are off too. With his CPU speed, SunSpider should be about 2800, and ACID 3 is 93/100 (not that it even matters -- nobody uses that stuff being tested regardless). It now has a privacy mode too. It seems like we can mostly ignore that column altogether. And also, that only refers to the barebones/stock Firefox install, lots of the "features" can be added (in ways often superior to what ever other browser has to offer, via extensions, to those who want them) Lots of the points on that list are rather inane e.g. "Save Web Pages, Web Images locally" -- might as well be a "has a X button thingy at the top right of the window to close it"... Lots of it is just plain wrong or sounds deceptive too e.g. IE8 "Software Updates" says no. It sure it gets updates via Windows Update. It just seems like a cheap way of making it look worse than it is i.e. it's not exactly unbiased! Many list items seem to have been added just for that as well, like "Local off-line Help with index" -- yeah, web browsers are so complicated that I need the help, and I need it those times when I don't even have an internet connection... There's a couple things that might be interesting if you take a fair amount of time reading the whole thing though. If you look at all the "no" entries on the list: -QtWeb is the only one that doesn't support Java (not that I actually care mind you -- anything non-IE doesn't support ActiveX either unsurprisingly) -Most seem to support RSS feeds (not that I check mine in a web browser...) -QtWeb is the only one that only supports english ...and not much else. Just my 2 cents. Just install Wireshark. It takes like less than 2 minutes. Easy to use too (I could have an entire trace of what it does at startup in less than 30 seconds1). You'll quickly see Firefox doesn't do anything "bad" like you seem to think it does (well, then again you consider "checking for updates" bad somehow). Which don't actually do anything unless you set some up yourself.

One could try the -n or -nodrv switches to prevent driver installation, or even just copy the installed files over...

Extremely slowly, yeah. They've been trying to give it away for over a decade. It's not a good sign at all, when more people switch to Macs every month (despite it costing as much as Windows, being just as closed source, and needing overpriced hardware too) then people switch to Linux in an entire year. That they're having such a hard time giving their stuff away while the rests is expensive is definitely NOT a good sign! it clearly show being free just isn't enough. People are definitely willing to pay for something that actually works. And considering it was just about the only video card with stable drivers under Linux... Mind you the card itself sucks, and the drivers are fairly simplistic (e.g. often no OpenGL). Not at all. There is an open source driver for ATI cards, and it sucks too. And the ATI folks handed out all the infos required to make your own too. fglrx is a sad joke at best. The closest thing to "stable" and working decently, seems to be older nvidia cards (something I definitely don't want of) only when you're using them with the closed/proprietary drivers. All modern hardware is well supported by their vendors. There are lots of such claims, along with "not compatible with software" but that's been FUD for the most part -- just see this list. Not at all! When I buy the hardware, it comes with a "works with Windows" logo. They're promising me they'll have drivers that work. As for Linux, they made no such claims, and most drivers out there aren't written by them either. It works. My ancient hardware (I got rid of a couple months ago) that didn't have x64 drivers still worked perfectly fine under Vista x86 (using the exact same drivers as XP). but not familiar either, and lots of people like familiar and are quickly lost when outside of their familiarity "bounds". As for Evolution, I wonder if you've actually tried it, it's anything but stable. It still definitely is. Go read their blog here. You'll see TONS of disgruntled Linux users complaining a lot about it. Then again, it's largely due to Linux's own issues (like the absolute mess their audio stack is) You're talking about regular end-users, and those do get their OEM Windows installed by Dell or whatever in 99%+ of cases. Of course, Linux wise it's a whole 'nother story (and not exactly an attractive one for most) Vista has a MPEG2 decoder and all that. I belive XP MCE does too. And again, OEMs install all that in advance for "normal" end-users. Only for some stuff (e.g. no DRM'ed songs from ITMS), doesn't work with every device (e.g. iPods with 2.x firmware). Can't say I've been really impressed. It's hardly limited to that. It would be quicker to list problems it doesn't have... The point is, Linux has nothing approaching even simple photos apps meant for everyday users like Aperture on OS X, or Photoshop Elements on Windows. Have a look at this and this for starters. That's just the tip of the iceberg (far better at basicaly everything), and I'm not talking about pro use at all here. Not really... I'd call it spot-on. those happy with OOo (those who don't care about anything beyond the most basic features, and only basic apps) would be just as happy with any old version of any office suite pretty much (or Google apps almost)... 99% of average users get their Dell/Acer/HP/whatever box with Windows already installed and working out of the box. As for the very, very few that get a box with Linux installed (which only seems to happen on netbooks -- not that I've seen anyone with a Linux netbook yet, and the popularity of Linux on netbooks is *very* rapidly decreasing too). Besides, most of the distros installed by netbook vendors tend to suck quite badly. The only decent app I've seen under Linux is Firefox, which runs faster under Windows anyways (even the Windows version running under WINE is faster than the Linux version!). And then again, once you add the Flash problems...

There you go. As for other devices, it would help a lot if we knew which particular board it is (usually written between 2 slots) 845PE... That was entry level, 7 years ago... Socket 478, old ICH4, old slow DDR, AGP 4x, no ATA133.... I just hope you didn't pay much for it

Two separate unique IDs to track you (along with Google's usual cookie), plus the RLZ parameter, and logging every keystroke in the omnibar and so on? Of course, that goes along with the logging everything you've searched for ever. It's over the top for sure. Or did I miss an invisible sarcasm tag? At the risk of sounding like an apologist... I don't really see many problematic things in about:config. An URL being in there doesn't mean much by itself. Show me some HTTP traffic logs of what's problematic, then I'll feel more concerned. Geolocation? It's using Google's service (not mozilla logging your infos), and can be disabled fairly easily. Also, Mozilla's site says "If you say that you do not consent, Firefox will not do anything." so it's not much of an issue in the first place. Safe browsing? You're asked if you want of it or not (just like IE does) on first run. Also using Google's service. That's somewhat useful though (for the n00bs who don't notice the obvious phishing sites and the like -- non-n00bs just have not to opt-in at install time). "updates, updates to extensions, updates to search engines" That's paranoid alright, and can be disabled using the built-in checkboxes under options > advanced > updates. IE8 doesn't really have privacy issues. It has a opt-in phishing filter just like Firefox. It gets updates as well (if you're really worried about those)

It's been mere days, and I'm surprised about hardware support for sure -- but not in a good way. It sucked really bad, and they somehow managed to make it worse (something I believed was impossible), even breaking things like Intel video drivers. "Epic Fail" is a brutal understatement here. LOTS of really basic devices (like common video cards) don't work worth s*** -- and that's when drivers exist at all. Linux is bad enough that it sold me into building a new server to run Win 2008 w/ Hyper-V (not cheap). As for Vista hardware support, all my stuff has worked perfectly from the first day I used it. For the most part, the "vista driver issues" you're talking about is not due to Vista itself but to the switch to x64 many are going through. I had one device without x64 drivers which still worked perfectly fine under Vista x86. Just like it wouldn't work with 64 bit editions of XP or Win 2003 or Win 2008 or Win 7 or Win 2008 R2. There's a lot of those people with ancient pre-XP hardware that like blame their manufacturer's end of support after 10 years onto Vista & Microsoft though. email wise, most average users know outlook. internet wise, Linux's flash port sucks hard. watching movies? As in no Blu-Ray and DVD playback that's not so intuitive and doesn't work out of the box unlike the Windows OEM box they'd be getting instead? Listening to music? no iTunes or the like (sync'ing to portable devices -- like say, phones, is also a real pain). Working with photos? I hope you're joking. Linux has nothing to offer here (don't even say GIMP, nor F-spot for that matter). Document creation, as in OOo (the feature set of MS Office 4.3 -- a Win 3.1 app, but only slower than MS Office 2007). Add to that the unfamiliar interface, having to search for and then re-learn new apps (often with poor usability and mediocre GUI that's slapped on as an afterthought on top of cmd line tools) for everything and so on -- it's not exactly a great fit even for most "average joes". Everything you said sounds like reasons NOT to use it IMO. The solution that sounds obvious to me for these things (other than Windows) would be OS X + iLife and Aperture. Decent apps that are very usable and with nice & consistent "polish", on a platform that supposedly just works (not stuff breaking with every dist-upgrade)

I noticed that before posting. Parent said both 10 and 5, in his post and his subject respectively. I just went along with the flow.

There was some nice stuff back then... No particular tunes. Too hard to pick only 5 albums too. Metallica - Ride the Lightning/Master of Puppets/And Justice for All Slayer - Hell Awaits/Reign in Blood/South of Heaven Megadeth - Peace Sells but Who's Buying? D.R.I. - Crossover/4 of a Kind/Thrash Zone Suicidal Tendencies - How Will I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can't Even Smile Today \m/

There's a fair amount of stuff VLC just won't play (its H.264 decoder seems especially crummy, has glitches, and 4x higher CPU usage than anything else -- when it even works). And the interface is one of the worst ever too. And the video post-processing options are extremely limited too (compared to ffdshow for example), and that makes a HUGE difference (sharpening, scaling and so on). MPC HC is about a trillion times better IMO. Plays mostly everything (I do however have ffdshow tryouts, ac3filter and haali splitter installed though), great interface, good keyboard bindings, good popup menus, nice subtitle support, can use great directshow codecs too (you can force it to use/not use some and so on), far more options in general, support for EVR renderer (looks great), playback of 1080p H.264 @ 10mbit (profile 4.1) using like 1% CPU usage with almost any recent vid card (using built-in decoder too -- no need for coreavc or anything), ditto for VC-1, built-in codecs for most common formats, great audio switcher and tons more. VLC is better for supporting some rather obscure formats out of the box (although any media player with ffdshow tryout installed will play almost anything anyways), playing incomplete & damaged files, and streaming/transcoding. Besides that, it's so far behind MPC HC it's not even funny.

Often that's because the caps' leads are soldered not only on the top and bottom layers, but also into an internal ground plane and the like (sometimes several). Quality boards with thicker copper makes it worse, same for designs that don't use thermal reliefs. You try to heat it up, but the nice layers of copper (which conducts heat quite well) of the PCB dissipates it. And heating it brutally will likely result in lifted pads (especially if you're not too experienced at this, n00bs often manage to lift whole tracks). Doing work on fancy PCBs like motherboards (tiny traces, lots of layers) isn't for beginners. This is where having the proper tools and experience helps. (braid/wick won't do you any good here). Mind you the boards affected by the problem (usually mid-era P4 boards) aren't even worth the time wasted doing it (look at the price of a new board, minus the price of suitable replacement parts with shipping/handling/taxes and all, divided by the time desoldering/soldering/looking for parts and all that, and you'll find it pays very, very little)

Exactly my first though. The built-in spyware in Chrome isn't enough for them? Why not make an entire OS out of spyware too! Not only they know everything you search for, they have all your email with gmail, know the locations you search for (maps), the ads you click, the videos you upload and view (youtube), the blogs you read (blogger) and rss feeds (feeburner), have your photos (picasa web album), know pretty much everything you do in your browser (chrome), and they somehow still need MORE? Besides, it's going to be built on top of Linux (extremely poor hardware support, won't run any of the apps I want or need) You'd have a real hard time coming up with an OS I'd want of less than this. Besides, some their online services may be OK (search, maps, gmail, youtube too but that was bought and stays as-is, their original video site sucked), but other than that they mostly suck (Google docs is a joke, Picasa is a waste of time, SketchUp... meh) And android isn't exactly scoring big either, with major mobile companies like Nokia not wanting anything to do with it. And it's not like Linux needs yet another desktop environment, to go along with gnome, kde, xfce and several others. Yeah, further fragmentation is definitely what it needs!

Actually, the only shared part of cable (the DOCSIS kind, like your ISP is using) is the upstream. But in periods of heavy congestion (anywhere on the network), chances are you'll get less. No, exactly the inverse. With heavy congestion, speeds may go down but sharing any part of the network won't ever make something appear as faster than it really is. Either ways, the speed reported is what you're actually getting *from that particular server*, and that is perfectly accurate (just not a measure of what you were exactly expecting) With every cable ISP I've been, I've been getting at least the advertised speed. Being over isn't that surprising. Also, your particular ISP uses SpeedBoost which makes the beginning part of every transfer faster (like doubling your speed for the first few seconds -- making every transfer much faster, save for really large files e.g. over 100MB) And that often has little to do with your max speed, unless you're on a page with a lot of large files and that the server at the other end is fast (e.g. youtube videos may download lots quicker). Web pages these days include a lot of other files (tons of images, cascading style sheets, external javascripts, favicons and so on), and for every single file you have to make another HTTP request. The network latency just adds up. Try ping'ing a popular server, see how are the round-trip times. Max download speed and network latency are unrelated (much like max throughput and seek times on a hard drive), and varies quite a bit. In fact, just changing which DNS servers you're using may make this a fair bit quicker as most pages have files across different domains (and sub-domains too), like say ads and visitor statistics stuff, and to make HTTP requests to load each of those you have to make a DNS lookup first (latency adds adds up quickly yet again). There is no way to "accurately" measure any internet connection. Using your ISP's test server (like Tripredacus mentioned) is a way to make sure your test won't return a lower speed because of network congestion elsewhere on the internet. But 99% of internet speed tests sites have been ridiculously inaccurate for me. Like speedtest.net, that used to say I had like 700KB/sec speeds, whereas I could easily download from say, Microsoft's website at 1250KB/sec the very second after that test completed, or a relative with a "basic" cable plan, that said he could get 70KB/sec, yet could get 125KB/sec steady downloading from any website anytime we wanted...

Still... Are you really sure the GBit port is connecting at that speed, and actually maxed out? Because with like 25 users, they would *all* have to pull 5MB/sec non-stop to max that out... It's hard to believe some patient data (mostly text I'm assuming) being looked at by couple dozen users uses 100MB+/second. 10Mbit? Sure. GBit? Sounds just about impossible. Perhaps you could list which counters you're going by (would be nice to know cpu/disk usage as well -- even just a perfmon screenie would be a start) Also, if the network load is that high, chances are it's not from SQL Server. That's definitely worth looking into.

Setting up load balancing in Windows won't automatically make SQL Sever load balance across 2 NICs. Not sure which perf counters you were monitoring, but I would be rather surprised if a couple dozen users managed to max out one gigabit port in the first place, and also CPU usage and disk I/O not being problematic either. I'd be having a serious look at the queries being run if that's the case!

Sepultura, Chaos A.D.

I have some friends who like to call this the "hammer fix" I stop now, before we have to move this topic to the funny farm.

Microsoft has no such thing (unlimited usage/unlimited installs/whatever)

That's built right into WMP12 (Win7). You can right click and select "play to", and then select where you want it to play i.e. another computer (e.g. HTPC with the good speaker set), or any DLNA certified device (Xbox360, PS3, Popcorn Hour, media extenders and hundreds more devices). There are other ways, but nothing that simple and that just works out of the box. DLNA makes this easy and standardized (and hopefully should be in most living room electronics shortly) That also works for video, BTW (including on-the-fly transcoding). Combined with libraries (and homegroup), it's a killer feature. You can tell your DLNA device to play stuff that's on other PCs too, just as easily... Nice for MCE too (MCE remotes are cheap now as well). See this or this for example.

I don't recall having such crazy high temps back when I was using a 8xxx series card. Even my current card, which is passively cooled (Sapphire Radeon HD 4670), is only in the low 40's. I don't think I've even seen it hit 80, even under load. Same thing for the CPU temps. My old E2160 is crazy OC'ed (85% higher -- to 3.4), and on stock cooler no less, and it idles in the 40's still... More like 30 w/o OC. He's not OC'ing, and his temps should be like half that, even on sock cooler. Definitely sounds like he has airflow issues. Either ways, a 8400GS is horribly inadequate, even for casual gaming. Unless he tends to play all the latest games all maxed out, he probably doesn't need a 4890 or anything near that. I'm perfectly happy with my 4670 on my 24". A 4770 would probably be good enough (BIG step up from what he has now, and doesn't break the bank -- 4850's are pretty cheap too). Anyways. A new half-decent card is likely going to require a new PSU as well, and I doubt he'll get good temps anywhere near decent with the stock case either (if it's anything like those I've seen). So now all of a sudden, he's in for a vid card, case and PSU. He could get something like a Antec 300 + Radeon HD 4770 or 4850, and a quality 80+ PSU of decent wattage for about $250 total... Edit: just look inside the poor beast Good luck getting good temps out of that! No space to speak of, crammed like hell, only one cheapo 80mm fan, wires everywhere... Can't say I'm surprised.

And there are even more to upgrade to newer OS'es, like e.g. good power management support like Vista's sleep, cleartype, fast user switching, remote desktop (and remote assistance) built-in, built-in firewall, Aero (and Flip 3D, Aero Peek/Shake/Snap -- and the new keyboard shortcuts for it all too), the new upcoming multitouch interface which should become more common in the next few years, the amazing handwriting recognition in Win7 (not just using latin alphabet either, and also works for math formulas), speech recognition & tts, newer apps built in (like WMP > v6.4, IE > v5.01, revamped Calculator & tons of others) and new ones which are getting pretty nice like MCE or the photo gallery, the new start menu with the search, the built-in search (works for files, email and what not), the sidebar, the desktop composition (lots of purposes, like the nice thumbnails when you hover in the taskbar), newer DirectX -- and Direct2D for great text and DXVA for high def H.264 and the like and better video quality using the EVR renderer and all that, the desktop skins/themes thing (win2k looks a bit bland to say the least), we also get desktop slideshow now and gadgets too, far better support for a lot of devices like say device stage for portable things and DLNA support for streaming media to everyday electronics & media center extenders that just works (including the Xbox360 and PS3), support for newer CPUs and related technologies including x64 and lots of RAM -- there are some apps where a x64 version is REALLY nice to have, IPv6 and SMB 2.0 and other techs like homegroup & libraries (finally!) which makes networking fantastic, the revamped taskbar as of Win7 (tons of new features everywhere around it too), Windows Installer support over v3.1, apps that require newer than win2k, besides the countless improvements that most people don't notice but are there regardless (WMI, GPO, MMC, deployment and so on) and used heavily by many, things like VHD and GPT and SSD and exFAT support, having a built-in modern shell (PowerShell), newer VPN techs, BitLocker, the new task manager (the services tab is definitely welcomed) and resource monitor, new games, the new XP mode, having better support by modern server platforms (including Windows Home Server), tons of handy little features everywhere (like say, driver rollback in device manager), etc. Or even just being actively supported. It's hardly just a bunch of small fixes and unimportant things. There's a HUGE difference. Sure, there may be some people that don't need or want any of that stuff, but that would be a very small minority (comprised mainly of people with very old computers, not doing much with them). Going from Win7 or Vista down to Win2k feels just like going from Win2k down to MS-DOS + Win 3.1 (a gigantic step behind) Eitheir ways, from the next post, it looks like the OP doesn't actually want a computer (or need for that matter) but a gaming console. His main problem boils down to "it's more than a dumb game launcher" so he'll never be happy regardless. Microsoft's business model isn't making a gaming-only dumb OS (they'd rather make something the other 99.999% of users want), they already sell the Xbox precisely for that. That, and that somehow not backporting everything from Vista and Win7 to XP is just a scam. Wow, corporations trying to make money for their shareholders, by selling new products? What's with that crazy nonsense? Next thing you know, people will be talking about democracy and capitalism! They should also have backported all that new XP stuff to Win2k, and the Win2k stuff to NT4, and all that to Win 3.11 and also to MS-DOS so we don't ever have to buy anything new! To your pitchforks, down with teh eviiil M$ pig$!

I have to strongly disagree here. Win2k sucked hard -- until XP came out (mostly because when XP came out, we started getting better drivers for the NT platform, SP2 also finally made it half-stable). I was really, REALLY happy to get rid of it and never looked back. Funny, because I've run Vista SP1 it on like half those specs, and it ran just as fast as XP does, if not faster. This box is still running Vista SP1 x64 and has more or less the same specs as yours, and it's crazy fast at anything. Never had any problems with memory leaks either (and I sure copy a LOT of large files around). You conveniently failed to answer cluberti's question regarding that. Windows hardly ever breaks over here. We got XP installs from 2002 or so, still running just fine. Haven't had to do a single reinstall of Vista nor Win7 either -- not one! Reboots? I reboot once a month for updates. In fact, I've *never* seen anyone with the kinds of issues you describe (including a LOT of people happily running Vista) so I find it really hard to blame the OS for it. Hate to break it to you, but it sounds like PEBCAK to a lot of us. See this (specifically the quoted part). 'nuff said. You can keep thinking porting DirectX 10 was trivial if that's what you want to believe. Have fun with Linux. I'm very happy to pay $200 for Vista Ultimate instead of using that OS for free (for about a million different reasons). I'd sooner switch to OS X, despite the overpriced hardware, the lack of any hardware option I like (like say, a standard mid-tower with a decent dual or quad core) and many other issues.

No, nothing to do with sound. Level 4.1 is a limitation imposed on the video encoder (who produced the MPEG4 video). That means the hardware decode acceleration only works if the encoder was "limited" (i.e. not use features too complex for hardware to decode easily). Specifically, it limits the encoder to a certain amount of macroblocks/sec and macroblocks/frame, max bitrates to encode at, max buffer sized used, max resolutions/framerates and so on. Sound wise, nothing prevents you from using 7.1 channel audio. Media Player Classic Home Cinema -- the best player around for video IMO (far, FAR ahead of VLC and several others). Although you may be interested in using a "front end" like Media Center (along with the remote) which is getting half-decent as of Win7. MPC HC has a page here on which cards are supported for DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) for formats such as H.264 and VC-1. Anyways. Getting H.264 to decode in hardware is still tricky. It rather often doesn't work due to several reasons (profile > 4.1, bad drivers, player using a codec that doesn't support DXVA, player using the wrong video renderer, and so on). In fact, I never actually managed to get it to work even once using my old geforce card (which I've since donated) -- mostly because of broken drivers.