Windows Vista Forum / Main Lounge / Off-Topic General Discussion

Internet Explorer 7

Innocent Soul — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 05:55:26 GMT

They say Mozilla Firefox have 100 such features which are unavailable in IE7... will those features b available in IE7

DeskSpace for Windows..i.e. 3D cube desktop

Jason — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:04:04 GMT

I must have missed this but you can now do the 3D cube desktop thingy that ubuntu can out of the box. It costs $20 after the 14 day trial but cool none the less. I will try this out asap.

[img]http://images.pcworld.com//downloads/graphics/screenshots/69432f.jpg[/img]

Win XP forum?

JadePriest — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 13:34:17 GMT

I have some issues with my table top computer that is running Win XP and am looking for a good forum that I can get too. Does anyone know of any. Thanx. Or if I am able to ask my question here please let me know. Hate to get banned...

Is Ubuntu 7.10 really this slow?

Jason — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:05:31 GMT

I recently installed a fresh copy of Vista Ultimate and Ubuntu 7.1 on my laptop. (1.6Ghz AMD Turion x64, 1.5GB Ram) Now Vista boots up in under 7 seconds. If I select Ubuntu from GRUB it literally takes about 1 minute for it to reach the login screen. Now I know Vista is incredibly fast at booting even compared to XP, but is Ubuntu really this slow or is it something wrong with my install?

Note: Once I get to the login screen everything is fine and snappy in ubuntu, except for the fact it won't hibernate. (It just eventually sits at a screen w/ a blinking dos like line).

Thoughts? I am thinking about running some benchmark tests on both OS's since they are fresh install, perhaps put a damper on all those gun-hoe linux people.

Note #2: I almost forgot to mention I have Ubuntu installed w/ a root partition of about 20 GB, and another 2GB partition for the swamp.

Vista Source Code Leaked!

Jason — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 12:28:24 GMT

Despite the intent I find this hilarious:
[img]http://i29.tinypic.com/10gidzr.jpg[/img]

Vista Running 108 Application at the same time

Jason — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 12:26:53 GMT

[url=http://gizmodo.com/377255/vista-running-108-apps-bites-back-mac-os-x-butt]http://gizmodo.com/377255/vista-running-108-apps-bites-back-mac-os-x-butt[/url]

What kind of car do you drive?

Jason — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 00:23:48 GMT

Post up your ride.

Me:
96 Firebird Formula 6 speed 5.7L

webcam/drivers/vista/compatability

setanta2802 — Fri, 04 May 2007 09:15:50 GMT

its my first pc got a dell 'inspirion' 520 32 bit with vista home basic edition and im having hell with it- so im diving in at the deep end! been checking out webcam/drivers/compatability was going to get a web cam but have discovered,(after painful research on my butt!) that skype is not compatable to vista(thats official on their site)and there are serious compat' probs with msn live messenger- so whats to do?i think i'll wait for patches-anybody got similar probs?also discovered that im using a pre-installed adobe programme thats not signed for!!? whats going on? is there strife between adobe and microsoft as adobe are not on microsoft's list of vista friendly programmes!

Problem with forum

Springerrob — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:37:12 GMT

Although I'm logged in, when I click on "Recent posts" then on "Posts since my "Last Visit" I get an error page saying "I'm not logged in".

Is it a problem on my part?

Games

vistafanatic — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:37:25 GMT

hi how do u get games like Chess and ink ball cos i havent got them and my mum and dad have plz tell:w00t:

I new to vista

vistafanatic — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:47:46 GMT

Hi im new to vista if i need to know somethin plz tell me. thanx:hehe: :)

Vista finally hacked in Pwn to Own contest

Jason — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 00:55:51 GMT

[url=http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/blog/2008/03/28/pwn-to-own-final-day-and-wrap-up]http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/blog/2008/03/28/pwn-to-own-final-day-and-wrap-up
[/url]

At least it wasn't one of MS's applications which gave way to the hack.

Gone in 2 minutes: Mac gets hacked first in contest

Jason — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:07:30 GMT

It may be the quickest $10,000 Charlie Miller ever earned.

He took the first of three laptop computers -- and a $10,000 cash prize -- Thursday after breaking into a MacBook Air at the CanSecWest security conference's PWN 2 OWN hacking contest.

Show organizers offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810 and the MacBook as prizes, saying that they could be won by anybody at the show who could find a way to hack into each of them and read the contents of a file on the system, using a previously undisclosed "0day" attack.

Nobody was able to hack into the systems on the first day of the contest when contestants were only allowed to attack the computers over the network, but on Thursday the rules were relaxed so that attackers could direct contest organizers using the computers to do things like visit Web sites or open e-mail messages.

The MacBook was the only system to be hacked by Thursday, however, the word on the show floor is that the Linux and Vista systems will meet with some serious challenges on Friday.

Windows Live folder share - Free

Jason — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:05:11 GMT

Ran across this today, I must have missed it but its a free service by microsoft which will sync two folders on any two pc's anywhere on the internet.

https://foldershare.com/welcome.aspx

Xbox 360 Price-drop Live on Amazon.co.uk - Cheaper then Wii

Jason — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:39:18 GMT

[url=http://www.ripten.com/2008/03/10/xbox-360-price-drop-live-on-amazoncouk/]http://www.ripten.com/2008/03/10/xbox-360-price-drop-live-on-amazoncouk/[/url]

Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine?

Jason — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:34:29 GMT

I found this interesting: [url=http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3563/microsoft_excel_revolutionary_3d_.php]http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3563/microsoft_excel_revolutionary_3d_.php[/url]

Sony "in talks" with Microsoft about a Xbox 360 Blu-ray drive

Jason — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:30:11 GMT

About 48 milliseconds after the format war was officially over, rumors started running rampant (again) about Blu-ray making its way over to Microsoft's latest console. Now, however, those rumors actually have some legs -- well, at least a leg. According to Stan Glasgow, Sony Electronics US president, "Sony is in talks with console rival Microsoft about offering a Blu-ray drive for the Xbox 360." For whatever it's worth, the exec also noted that it was having similar discussions with Apple, which has yet to even offer a Blu-ray option on any of its machines. Unfortunately, not a peep was uttered about potential launch dates and the like, but you can rest assured that we'll be keeping an ear dangerously close to the ground.

Bandwidth HOG!!!

SwiftImmortal_1 — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:03:47 GMT

I download a lot of freeware system tools for my job using torrents. However when I run utorrent, it immediately starts soaking up bandwidth like a sponge! Even when I cap my downloads/uploads as low as 30Kbps, the resource monitor in Vista shows me eating up anywhere from 200-600+Kbps! This is not acceptable because when my co-workers have to get online to download drivers, they can't even pull up their homepage! So I get the short end of the stick and have to kill utorrent altogether. I've looked at several different configurations that were supposed to help, but nothing I tried helped the situation.

So I've concluded that I need to find another torrent program...any suggestions?

Acer Desktop

mustang2000 — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 23:45:07 GMT

My local Circuit City had this Acer Desktop {am3100u3202a} in stock, and at a decent price. It was on hold for someone, and they never picked it up. Compared to the only other two Acers they had there, it had the better specs in it. I cant seem to find it on there website, or on any other website really. Was wondering if anyone had any info on this model? In a snap decision i purchased it, so i have 14 days to make up my mind. Any info would be appreciated.
Thanks.

I need a new laptop

MrMagic — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:28:02 GMT

I need to buy a new laptop. My old Toshiba has just about had it. I would love to have an Alienware Area51 but simply can't afford the $3000.00 price tag on it.

In your opinion, what is the best bang for the buck in the $1000.00 range? It must have Vista Home P at minimum, Ultimate preferred, 2gb of mem, a respectably fast processor, around 200gb of disk and NICE screen.

I know this is opening a can of worms but I curious to see the responses.

Steve

Were Is Everyone From?????

niffer022 — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 05:08:21 GMT

As above really post up your names and locations...... so we can get a rough idea as to ever the most vista users are :)

nathan:- castleford, UK..

Vista Screensaver

wabews — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 02:54:54 GMT

My screensaver does not work now, although it was all working normally before. I have done all the usual setting setup,but,the SS will not kick in.Any ideas??

Thanks

Wullie

Vista Problem

Jacota — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:46:04 GMT

Is anyone else having problems in Vista, that when you open the control panel or Windows Explorer it will close by itself in a couple of seconds.

I have ran sever vires scanners and ad removers but they are not turning anything up. Any help appreciated. I wasn't quite sure what form to put this in.:)

3rd Time a Charm - Vista with SP1

nsteblay — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 04:55:53 GMT

I have tried installing Vista three times over the past 18 months. The first time was when Vista was first released. I had to downgrade to XP after a couple of weeks. The Vista system was unstable and slow, and I had multiple driver issues even though the PC I bought was touted as Vista compatable. I tried again the beginning of this year with no more success.

I recently installed Vista with SP1. Though you can't tell from the surface this is a major overhaul of the kernel, aligning with the just released Windows Server 2008 kernel, as well as other fixes and enhancements. No comparison to my earlier experiences. Updated drivers are now available, the system is stable and performs better, I have found everything working as advertised. I will be phasing out XP now and can recommend Vista to friends and family for those who want to run Windows.

Who's responsible for the xbox 360 3 red light?

Jason — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 21:16:38 GMT

I sent mine off to get fixed for it's first 3 red light...1 month later it does it again...jeez.

Anyways watch this:
[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2udm8qSnhLs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2udm8qSnhLs[/url]

Set a Blank Password in Windows XP To Protect the Computer from Internet Attacks

Jason — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:28:20 GMT

I'm skeptical..
http://www.labnol.org/software/tutorials/blank-windows-password-secure-computer-internet-attacks/2517/

ctrl + alt + delete

Mikea08 — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:25:17 GMT

Is there a way to make ctrl alt delete open the task manager immediately on vista?

Plug and Play USB MAC Virus

Jason — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 10:39:40 GMT

Hilarious: [url=http://gizmodo.com/363490/plug+n+play-usb-virus-makes-macbooks-fall-to-pieces]http://gizmodo.com/363490/plug+n+play-usb-virus-makes-macbooks-fall-to-pieces[/url]

Why so many problems

MrMagic — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:15:46 GMT

After having been a member for several months I've watched almost everything that comes across the board and I'm completely mystified by why so many people have so many odd-ball problems with Vista when I have had virtually none.

I installed Vista HP the day it was released and installed it on my 2 year old HP Pavailion, a 3ghz P4 machine with 2gb mem and a 250gb disk and it worked perfectly from the first install and still is.

I then did a full build on a brand new machine as shown below. Again I installed Vista HP on it and it has worked perfectly from day one.

True enough, I've run into a few minor problems with some program incompatibilities but nothing major. Never once in all this time has either machine running Vista HP crashed, done anything stupid or come up with any of these wierd problems that people seem to have.

My most recent purchase was an HP Laptop that had Home Prem loaded and it worked perfectly out of the box and continues to run without a single glitch, so thats 3 machines running Vista that have not given me any more problems than XP did when it first came out, or 2000 for that matter.

As a matter of satisfying my curiosity, why are people having these problems that I don't have and have never seen happen. Any opinions? Since this is the main lounge I thought I'd ask what other people think about this. I couldn't be happier with Vista and wouldn't trade it back for XP for anything.

Turn a 75$ UPS into a $1000+ UPS using car batterys

Jason — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 19:41:02 GMT

http://www.techspot.com/blog/137/turn-a-small-home-ups-into-a-giant-ups-diy/

Microsoft Pulls Plug on HD DVD Players

Jason — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 23:07:32 GMT

"Microsoft said Saturday it would continue to provide standard warranty support for its HD DVD players. Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida last week estimated about 300,000 people own the Microsoft video player, sold as a separate $130 add-on for the Xbox 360."

Vista x86 and x64 Vs. XP Whos Faster? Benchmarks Inside

Jason — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:20:50 GMT

Obviously you must take all benchmarks with a grain of salt, but it doesn't look too good for Vista. At least at this point in time, I predict SP1 will help out as well as future updates. In an attempt to stay neutral when it comes to Vista vs. XP I decided to post this. In these test it appears Vista is slower in nearly all tests: :unsure:

Please note I did not do these tests, they were done by http://www.anandtech.com

Networking Benchmarks

Just to get a quick idea of what these new features can do, we ran our usual networking benchmark suite on a pair of ASUS P5B-Deluxe motherboards using both the on-board PCI and PCIe connected gigabit network controllers (Marvell 88E8056 and 88E8001 respectively). We used two tests for this, a multiple small file transfer test consisting of about 450 files totaling 600MB, and a large file transfer test consisting of a pair of ISO images totaling 3GB. In order to keep the load on our D-Link Gamer Lounge router consistent, we also had the WMV-HD version of Terminator 3 streaming in the background. We tested Windows XP SP2 for a base score, followed by Vista with Compound TCP switched on and off.

Unfortunately for Vista, neither test is particularly favorable. Compared to XP when Compound TCP is disabled, Vista is anywhere between 25% and 50% slower than XP in terms of the total time required for these tests. Without the ability to separate Vista's networking stack from the drivers for our NICs, it's impossible to tell if this slowdown is the fault of the networking stack being worse for this situation, or if the Vista drivers for this line of Marvell NICs are not quite as tuned, so as a comparison to XP this test is inconclusive. Either way, for this particular setup Vista ends up being slower at file transfers than XP.

The one bright spot however is that when enabled, Compound TCP is clearly having some effect even on our low-latency network. The 5% or so boost in Vista's low scores won't bring it back above XP, but it clearly proves that Compound TCP does have a real-world effect on performance. This will be something we will be able to talk more about as Microsoft perfects this algorithm set for the release of Longhorn Server later this year. Hopefully, the relatively slow performance we're seeing right now is being caused by drivers rather than by Vista's "new and improved" networking stack. We will definitely keep an eye on networking performance over the coming months, as most of the people we've talked with expected Vista's networking performance to be faster than XP's.

CPU Performance and Threading in Vista

While we found memory requirements in Vista to be greater than XP, CPU requirements weren't as much of a big deal. There are parts of Vista that will obviously benefit from faster CPUs, but if you have anything in the Core 2 or Athlon 64 X2 class you should be just fine. The argument for dual and quad core processors remains relatively unchanged with Vista. For multitaskers and many CPU-intensive workloads, a dual core CPU makes perfect sense. Vista doesn't make the argument for dual or quad core any more compelling than XP in our opinion; the additional background tasks that run in Vista that weren't present in XP don't really eat up that much CPU time to begin with, so dedicating an entire core to them isn't necessary.

The new applications in Vista don't appear to be any more threaded than XP, despite Vista being heralded as the beginning of a highly threaded future. Microsoft Word remains single threaded, although Excel can now take advantage of multiple cores when performing calculations. Windows Movie Maker seems to be optimized for two cores, while importing and attaching files in Photo Gallery is surprisingly single threaded. Dual core still makes a big difference in the overall experience, while quad core still isn't necessary but remains useful for a handful of situations.

With high definition video playback and encoding being two very big drivers of CPU performance and number of cores, Vista will be the OS under which new highly threaded applications really start to appear but there's no reason to feel like four cores are necessary to run Vista today. An interesting bit of trivia is that on a Core 2 Duo E6300, simply opening a new Explorer window in Vista will eat up about 19% of your total CPU time while the window opens and animates; turning Aero Glass off doesn't change the CPU usage either. Maybe four cores are necessary...

Vista Search for Fast Drives Only?

In our opinion the two biggest reasons to migrate from XP to Vista are its Search and SuperFetch technologies, as they both dramatically impact productivity. When Mac OS X introduced system-wide indexed search functionality, we wondered if disk performance would dramatically impact how responsive the search was. More specifically, would notebooks running OS X have significantly slower search times than desktops with faster 3.5" drives? Under OS X, while we noticed a difference between desktop and notebook drives, it wasn't large enough to render the feature crippled on a slower drive. Thankfully, the same can be said about Windows Vista.

We noticed absolutely no difference in how long it took indexed search results to appear whether we used a 150GB 10,000RPM Western Digital Raptor, our 500GB WD test drive, or even a 5-year old 100GB drive - the results were always near-instantaneous. In fact, a much larger impact on search performance was how much memory the system had. The less system memory you have the more disk I/O there's going to be due to swapping data in/out of the pagefile, and that I/O ends up reducing search performance tremendously. We noticed a much bigger search performance improvement going from 512MB to 1GB of memory than going from a 5-year old drive to a modern day, high-end 10,000 RPM Raptor.

While performing searches didn't show any difference between various hard drives, there is a noticeable performance difference between drives when it comes to how long it takes to index your drive if you should have to rebuild your index. The chart below shows the amount of time it took to rebuild Vista's search index on the three drives we've been using in this review:

Obviously the larger the amount of data to index, the greater the impact drive speed will make on it, but this should give you a bit of a reference point. Of course all of the normal benefits of moving to a faster drive still apply (faster application launches, documents open quicker, games load faster, etc...), but the point we're trying to make here is that if you've got a reasonably fast drive already, don't feel like you have to replace it in order to keep up with Vista.

Overall Vista Performance: XP vs. Vista vs. Vista x64

Benchmarking in Vista is an extremely difficult task, thanks to features like SuperFetch designed to improve performance at the sacrifice of repeatability. We're in love with SuperFetch as a feature, but it does make our jobs a bit more difficult as we have to be very mindful of what has been cached into main memory and how that impacts the performance of our benchmarks. Testing difficulties under Vista are compounded by the fact that our major test suites don't work under the new OS. SYSMark and PC WorldBench simply won't run and thus we have to rely on individual application tests and home-brew scripts to measure performance.

Our goal for this article was to find out if Windows Vista, on modern day hardware, continues to be slower than Windows XP as it has been in previous beta and RC versions. The secondary goal is to look at x64 performance to see if it too has changed behavior, to the point where you no longer need to worry about losing 32-bit performance if you move to the 64-bit version of Vista. We ran a handful of application tests to compare the three OSes (XP, Vista and Vista x64), and later on we'll focus on gaming tests as well to showcase graphics performance.

PCMark '05 Performance

Despite looking quite synthetic, PCMark has grown into a nice lightweight alternative to the big application suite benchmarks like SYSMark. It was also one of the first benchmarks to get official Vista support, although it remains a 32-bit only test.

Performance under PCMark is fairly close between Vista and XP, with XP generally holding on to a 1% - 4% performance advantage in most of the categories. The only exception to the rule is the graphics score of PCMark which has XP at around 35% ahead of Vista, but we'll address graphics performance shortcomings of Vista later in the article.

The difference between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista are hardly pronounced, with the two being evenly matched across the board. Once again, remember that PCMark is a 32-bit benchmark so it is running in Windows on Windows (WOW64) mode. That it can remain competitive is good news, but whether that's because WOW64 works well in all cases or it is merely optimized for PCMark05 remains to be seen.

3DMark '06 Performance

We chose to include 3DMark '06 performance here instead of with our game tests to look at the gaming performance of Vista on a system level rather than a GPU level:

Overall XP is about 6% faster than Vista, although the 3DMark06 CPU score is nearly 13% higher on XP than it is on Vista. As a 32-bit benchmark, it's once again good to see no negative performance difference between the Vista x86 and x64 versions.

General Application Performance

3dsmax Performance

Our 3dsmax 8 tests are particularly interesting under Vista because they showcase the poor OpenGL performance of current Vista GPU drivers in something that isn't a 3D game:

If we switch to Direct3D for 3dsmax, the performance delta narrows considerably to the point where XP only has a 2% performance advantage over Vista.

Encoding Performance

Encoding Performance using DivX and WME9 are both slightly slower on Vista than under XP, but the difference is negligible.

Application Launch Performance

Similar to our earlier ReadyBoost testing, we timed how long it took to open Adobe Photoshop CS3 and 14 images under the three OSes,

Finally we have a benchmark with Vista is faster than XP, and for some reason Vista x64 is even faster than that.

Office 2007 Performance

Our final two Vista vs. XP tests are from Intel and they measure performance in Microsoft Word 2007 and Excel 2007.

Document comparison performance in Word is about 7% faster under XP than under Vista, while numerical calculations under Excel are about equal under both OSes.

Who has problems logging into this forum?

Jason — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 20:21:47 GMT

I am trying to judge how wide this problem is so please vote! The forum software is starting to get under my skin, and I am contemplating a switch.

SP 1

mrjuke4859 — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 08:09:42 GMT

I hear that SP 1 for Vista is on hold. Anyone know when it will come out?

hi, I come from Hong Kong

yorkmak — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 10:26:12 GMT

Nice to meet u all here

Domains

Psylosyfer — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:32:28 GMT

Hey guy's does anyone know how to find a record of ownership for a domain that has changed hands?

I need to prove that I used to own a domain, But the host has changed hands or gone under. Anyone know if a record is kept and where to find it?

Thanks Ray P.

Windows Vista Ultimate

hughes5d — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 05:33:05 GMT

[Deleted by Moderator]

Comments by Moderator:

Guess you missed the Rules part about NOT double-posting, huh?

IF this is a retail version, you have the right to uninstall it and sell the DVD yourself, but you have no legal right to lift a copy of Vista off a preinstalled machine and install it again, let alone sell it.

This is your first and only warning. Don't post this kind of stuff here again, or you'll be banned.

The macBook Air...The slowest Apple machine on the block...What do you think?

Jason — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:32:07 GMT

[img]http://regmedia.co.uk/2008/01/19/macbookcommodorecompare.jpg[/img]

Benchmark test:
[url=http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/24/first-benchmarks-macbook-air-is-the-slowest-apple-machine-on-th/]http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/24/first-benchmarks-macbook-air-is-the-slowest-apple-machine-on-th/[/url]

Can we roll back to XP?

gregrocker — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 01:31:28 GMT

We recently killed our Gateway after 7 years and replaced it with an eMachine preloaded with genuine, activated Vista Home Premium. So far, so good. Since we had the certified Vista install disc we tried it in our other home p.c. and it loaded easily. Now I see we only have 3 days until it must be activated, which the linked page says will cost $250 - too much since XP worked fine anyway. What I need to know is how hard it will be to roll it back to XP? I have a geniune XP disc we bought 5 years ago for the dead Gateway but have no idea if it will work on another home p.c. I got great tech support from MS for that XP; they helped me reload it on the Gateway once. If I can't download it after I uninstall VISTA on the other p.c., then is there any other way to roll it back to XP?

Also, would extending the Vista activation period on the second home p.c. put my VISTA license on the pre-loaded computer at risk?

Looking for Vista Experts

wewonk — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 17:39:48 GMT

OK Sir!