Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
Should it be doing more "under the hood", though? You know what would have impressed me as a new release of Windows? If they had taken XP, dropped its memory footprint down by a third, tightened the security, cut the bootup time in half, increased the speed, increased the stability, and left the interface alone except for maybe some snazzy transparency effects. And done it in late 2005/early 2006.
We don't *need* an OS that takes up hundreds of megs of memory just to run, and we don't *need* any more "features". What we *do* need is stability, security and usability.
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Most of the memory footprint of Vista is taken up by Superfetch, which pre-loads system and application libraries into memory to improve application launch speed and performance. If you disable Superfetch, you'll see that Vista doesn't take much more RAM than XP did. Superfetch does also slow down boot times - you'll see a lot of hard drive activity when you boot up, and for a couple minutes after loading the OS, as it pulls in those libraries. That's also why power management is vastly improved in Vista - you should be sleeping machines regularly, not always shutting them down.
Your also ignoring so many of the advances in Vista that position it well for machines released now and in the next few years. The GDI has been largely replaced with new graphics libraries that are finally accelerated, Vista actively uses the Shadow Copy technology that debuted in XP to backup your files on the fly, it's got a better, although not perfect, security layer bolted in, etc. Not to mention a better network stack, vastly improved wireless networking, etc. Wait till SP1 hits, and you got hot-patching (no more reboots for patches interrupting your work), plus lots of the inevitable bugs worked out of a .0 release.
So maybe you don't need or want an OS that is maturing with hardware capabilities, but to dismiss Vista out of hand is silly.
-Scott