OS wars....to owners of Vista

[Albuquerque]

There is something seriously wrong with the development approach of an OS when an installation of the OS itself can take up to 13 GB of hard drive space. That, to me, bespeaks bloat and lazy development on the philosophy that memory and hard drive space is cheap.

Maybe you should tell us what you've done to use 13GB of storage for Vista? Because a brand new 100% default install of Ultimate takes ~4gb. That's with all the media, backgrounds, fonts, language MUI's and other nonsense that it comes with.

[what3v3r]

everybody who thinks the huge memory footprint of vista is a bad thing, should seriously read this article:

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=4

it explains very nicely why it is not a bad thing, and on the contrary helps make vista faster (if there is enough memory)

the bottom line is, that vista has sophisticated algorithms that try to guess what software you are trying to run at a certain time and preload that software an all its used libraries in the memory. i personally never understood why people buy 1GB of memory and then dont want the OS to use it. thats what you bought it for, remember? If you start applications vista flushes the preloaded stuff to the HDD and makes way for your applications. as you can see theres really nothing bad here.

my point is that vista uses the available memory much better than xp did, and yes, maybe vista needs more ram to do its magic, but its not like you wont benefit from it. if you dont want to upgrade your system now, install vista after you did at some point in the future.

Edited February 6, 2007 by what3v3r

[katalyst^]

There is something seriously wrong with the development approach of an OS when an installation of the OS itself can take up to 13 GB of hard drive space. That, to me, bespeaks bloat and lazy development on the philosophy that memory and hard drive space is cheap.

Maybe you should tell us what you've done to use 13GB of storage for Vista? Because a brand new 100% default install of Ultimate takes ~4gb. That's with all the media, backgrounds, fonts, language MUI's and other nonsense that it comes with.

Err have you tried that yourself? I find it very hard to believe as my Ultimate install with everything cut out by Vlite takes ~4 GB without the pagefile or hibernation file. A quick Google shows that other people with Ultimate are reporting sizes of 8->12 GB.

[Albuquerque]

There is something seriously wrong with the development approach of an OS when an installation of the OS itself can take up to 13 GB of hard drive space. That, to me, bespeaks bloat and lazy development on the philosophy that memory and hard drive space is cheap.

Maybe you should tell us what you've done to use 13GB of storage for Vista? Because a brand new 100% default install of Ultimate takes ~4gb. That's with all the media, backgrounds, fonts, language MUI's and other nonsense that it comes with.

Err have you tried that yourself? I find it very hard to believe as my Ultimate install with everything cut out by Vlite takes ~4 GB without the pagefile or hibernation file. A quick Google shows that other people with Ultimate are reporting sizes of 8->12 GB.

As I have eight licenses for four different versions, I must answer yes, I have tried it myself.

Edit:

I feel the need to post something more relevant to the original thread, so here goes:

I like Windows, I like *nix. I have four machines at home, and all of them either solely boot to a Windows OS or boot to Windows as the default in a dual-boot environment. My job function is entirely based on Windows OS deployment and SMS tools, and as such I use *nix simply out of my own curiosity and only at home.

I'll say this: The "geek" side of me loves Linux of the various flavors. I have more experience with Solaris myself, but I've also played around with RedHat, Suse 10 and FreeBSD. But the learning curve is quite steep; I've been neck-eedp in low-level computer functionality since doing assembly programming on an Apple ][e. Stepping into *Nix is difficult and often confusing, and even more so when you start playing with the multitudes of "flavors" that are available.

The "get stuff done", "play games" and "general day to day tinker" sides of me likes Windows and will probably continue for a long time. Vista adds a lot more "geek" functionality in my opinion, specifically with the advent of powershell (available on XP, granted) and a ton of other stuff under the hood like performance event logs and the like.

Further, while I could certainly build a *nix desktop for my mom to use 1000 miles away, I wouldn't. The learning curve for her would be too severe, even though she has no need or use to get technical with it. She knows where Windows puts stuff, and she understands "My Documents" and she uses plug-n-play functionality with her various devices (printers, flash drives, MP3 players, cameras, scanners). That kind of work would open up a level of confusion for her that would only result in phone calls to ME, and that would just irritate me.

Same goes for my GF. Maybe that relegates Windows to the computer n00bs and idiots of the world? Maybe so. But there's a lot more n00bs and idiots out there, which means so long as that's the case, Windows will still prevail.

Now had this discussion been about Macs, I might have a different end-result...

Edited February 7, 2007 by Albuquerque