Vista Rant

[moo]

Can't argue with ya there. :shrug:

 

Doesn't make it any less frustrating though.

 

moo

[TheBigDog]

whoah, whoah, that's not how microsoft does business... remember, there is market for the OS, it has bugs, there is market for updates, those have bugs, there is market for firewalls, there are things that those allow through, there is market for antiviruses, those allow trusted programs do whatever, there is market for antispyware... its a pyramid with windows at the top, so if you make the first thing secure, the rest of the pyramid collapses, and M$ wants revenues from big companies, no?

Very conspiritorial. Does it have anything to do with the aggressive malicious subculture of M$ haters who could just as easily find exploits in their "pet" systems but choose MS because it is their way of proving their superiority to the richest man in the world while they eat a baloney sanwich on day old bread? Get real. You think MS likes having a reputation of being vulerable? And that they like having teams (of thousands) of people fighting the constant malicious nonsense?

 

Bill

[pgrmdave]

I doubt that Microsoft does what Alex proposes, but I am sure that they are familiar with the concept of Planned Obscelesence. If they release a new OS every few years, then they guarentee themselves more income.

[TheBigDog]

I doubt that Microsoft does what Alex proposes, but I am sure that they are familiar with the concept of Planned Obscelesence. If they release a new OS every few years, then they guarentee themselves more income.

This is absolutly a cornerstone of their marketing plan.

[moo]

Not sure whether it's so much "conspiratorial" as just poor quality. I do know that if other products were regularly so unreliable, the mfr would be out of business in short order.

 

Software seems to be the exception - and while MS isn't the only culprit, they are prolly the most prominent. :D

 

moo

[alexander]

TBD, that is not only the model for M$ and its no mean to pick on them, just that they are the most consistent with this; there seems to be a model for a lot of markets old and new, they come with a product out and create more markets to fix the market which create more markets to fix themselves and so forth, its not uncommon to other companies, even some open-source ones, M$ is just the most commonly used example, because how many people know the securities markets? Put this way, what IPS can you name that 80% of people would be like, "oh yeah, i know them", or even an electronic lock company? See why i use M$ as an example...

 

Here is what i define in the basic structure: You come out with a car, well you need dealerships to sell it at, dealers need to register and insure the car with the state, well now it breaks, you bring your car to a garage, garage needs parts from a catalog (printed or online), catalog needs manufacturers to create similar to stock parts. just think how many markets this involves, and how many i missed on purpose because this could actually extend far far out? The same is happening to sotware with the big corporate giants... and for every market, you pay more and more and more, as if the hardware cost is not enough.

 

aggressive malicious subculture of M$ haters who could just as easily find exploits in their "pet" systems but choose MS because it is their way of proving their superiority to the richest man in the world

that is a common misconseption, most exploits are found for fun, its like, you know they are there, so why not find them so you can have yet another way to break into an insecure system, or better yet a system that someone else thinks is secure...? That is the case with Windows exploits, Linux, BSD and OS X, as well as any software that falls in between. It is not fueled by hate, its fueled by, we find an exploit, they patch it and now there is one exploit less (for most hackes, there are ofcourse black hats out there in the crowd...) But that is what hackers do, get stuff, **** with it, find a volnurability, use it for fun or patch it...

[alexander]

as to conspiracy, M$ works with the government (fact), what the government asks M$ to do is what we can guess. If CIA spy needs access to a windows machine in some middle eastern country, and its running windows (likely) and they want to retrieve some special info, do you think that M$ wont collaborate with the CIA to provide them a fairly easy way to access the machine? I mean there is poor quality in this too, but how much of it is in there, perhaps most exploits, but to be 100% sure and say all? unlikely I'd say...

[Boerseun]

as to conspiracy, M$ works with the government (fact), what the government asks M$ to do is what we can guess. If CIA spy needs access to a windows machine in some middle eastern country, and its running windows (likely) and they want to retrieve some special info, do you think that M$ wont collaborate with the CIA to provide them a fairly easy way to access the machine? I mean there is poor quality in this too, but how much of it is in there, perhaps most exploits, but to be 100% sure and say all? unlikely I'd say...

Hehe... the gov don't need Microshaft's help in hacking any system with an MS OS anywhere in the world. All they have to do is get any semi-competent high-school nerd who can type faster than two words per minute, and they're in.

 

I promise you...

 

It's that easy.

 

...and don't gimme ****, now... I've got your IP address. You will be hacked.

[cwes99_03]

well i can unload an app from memory in OS X by forcing it to quit, windows does not present the option, and what is even better, when you click start, 2 more megs of ram get hogged away for the menu to operate.

 

First, you didn't play with vista, you played with an unfinished version.

 

Second, this is called the prefetch. It existed in XP as well. You can free up the memory by clearing the prefetch. Check it out.

 

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Gaining-Speed-Empty-Prefetch-XP.html

[GAHD]

I like their claims that now you can plug in your usb thumb drive to make your computer have "more ram", which is really swap space they are talking about. Now i'm no expert, but there are a few things that are lame and wrong about it: USB, even 2 is slow as hell compared to ram or hard drive access, so how does it speed up the system?

well, unless the USB stick doesn't use the standard Random Access Memory style it IS more R.A.M. :Waldo:

"Swap-Space" is exactly that: space allocated to swap data in and out of active R.A.M.

Having a U.S.B. Swap space speeds the system up simply because the HDD's read-head no longer has to dedicate it's physical position to the locations of swap-space on the HDD, allowing it to acces other data. This is the same reason why it's good to have your swap-space located on an entirely dedicated physical(not virtual) drive if possible; it doesn't have to share read-time.

Depending on the actual physical layout of the H.D.D.'s data, the USB could very well be faster in relation to the physical movement of the head(seek time, the A=F/M bottleneck). buuut I can impliment this with some creative registry alterations in XP; no new feature there really (other than the plug-and-play) but an idea I WILL have to try out when I get such a stick.

 

and this is the main argument, they are saying that you can pull the thumb drive out at any time during operation with no consequences what-so-ever, that means that whatever gets written to the drive gets backed up somewhere else, probably the harddrive, then tell me how would plugging in a USB stick accelerate your computer performance?

Simple, The read-head can read other data, while the Swap info is shunted through(from) the USB drive as needed. I assume that if the stick is unplugged the HDD swap-space simply takes controll, which is a pritty nifty codeing trick. Swap doesn't really get used much unless there's some kinda RAM shortage anyways.

[cwes99_03]

I have to side with both of you. Using a Flash Memory device as a RAM memory device would be horribly slower than putting in a new chip, so horribly slower that you might as well use the local hard drive to do so. Which then turns to Ghad's comment about Swap Space. But as noted Swap Space is much better allocated off of a Sys Volume with a Data Volume for all your other goodies. What I am waiting for is AMD or Intel to start manufacturing a on board flash memory (4GB or so would be needed i think) to be used as a Sys Volume. Then any OS would be loaded directly to that and the speed boosts would be huge. Has anyone seen or heard talk of this before? If not I lay claim to it today 10/26/06 8:48 AM CST.

[cwes99_03]

Quote:

Originally Posted by alexander

and this is the main argument, they are saying that you can pull the thumb drive out at any time during operation with no consequences what-so-ever, that means that whatever gets written to the drive gets backed up somewhere else, probably the harddrive, then tell me how would plugging in a USB stick accelerate your computer performance?

 

 

Simple, The read-head can read other data, while the Swap info is shunted through(from) the USB drive as needed. I assume that if the stick is unplugged the HDD swap-space simply takes controll, which is a pritty nifty codeing trick. Swap doesn't really get used much unless there's some kinda RAM shortage anyways.

 

Oh, and as far as this goes, I think that Alex was talking about the quick connect useability of the USB drive, (change of subject from swap space, though great catch of using USB as swap space and disconnecting it without stopping the device.)

USB devices before Windows XP had to be stopped before being disconnected or else run a major risk of damaging the FS on the USB device.

 

Q: Did the removal policies for USB storage devices change in Windows XP?

Customer feedback showed that consumers were unplugging USB storage devices from systems, without going to the "safely remove hardware" tab in the system tray on Windows 2000 systems. Such random removal sometimes left storage devices in a corrupted state.

 

To mitigate the likelihood of data loss in surprise removal scenarios, Windows XP refined the caching policy for removable storage. As of Windows XP Beta 2, for consumer-oriented removable storage (USB, Flash, Zip, and so on), write caching is disabled by default.

 

Disabling write caching means that, instead of saving up changes for a file on a removable storage device and then doing a bulk write, Windows XP writes changes to the file as the changes are made. This keeps data on removable storage devices more current, mitigating the likelihood of data loss. However, disabling write caching also has a performance impact.

[alexander]

First, you didn't play with vista, you played with an unfinished version.

 

Second, this is called the prefetch. It existed in XP as well. You can free up the memory by clearing the prefetch. Check it out.

 

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/art...efetch-XP.html

It is beta2, unfinished, perhaps, but mostly there, definitely! It is sceduled to be released in early 07 and it can not be pushed back any more for fear of loss of money...

 

and yes i know, the functionality is there, but who is going to go clear the prefetch, i mean aside from you, gahd, and a selected few others Who is going to do this, cwes? It will be a problem for a lot of people, and we all know that most people will do the research on how to clear the prefetch, right? err, not.... Microsoft could make it easier, like they do in OS X!

 

GAHD, i know all that, and i get that USB, in certain situations (like when you are accessing the HD) can be faster then HD access, they are on different busses and all that, but if M$ are saying that it is fully redundant (where you can pull out the stick and whatever may be loaded in it those physical swap locations is not interrupted) then it has to write the data to the HD section of SWAP anyways, so what are you realistically gaining? I wouldn't say that its really an incredible boost in performance as M$ advertises it, would you agree?

 

And no, you have to stop the device to avoid filesystem corruption, that swap thing uses free space on the drive, that is different. When you are accessing your files, you have the device (rather filesystem) mounted, if you are acessing (reading/writing) the USB drive and pull it out, you are definitely running a chance of FS corruption (that is just the nature of File Systems, that is supposedly getting fixed with hardware for HDs (aka transaction buffer + battery to complete last transaction safely)), thats true on any platform, that is how that hardware works!

[cwes99_03]

Not exactly on that last part. It is the difference between active mount and passive mount. Read up a bit more Alex.

[alexander]

oh and yes Onboard flash would be amazing, actually there are people working to make ram hold information without power (combining silicone and other things to give it magnetic propperties without external power), this allows you to upgrade to a new style ram, and not have to use HD for running the OS, the kernel is mostly in ram anyways, so boot times will be miliseconds long. Also there are some guys that came up with this concept a while back, they actually created a RAM "hard drive" (a board with a bunch of memory slots and a battery), and put it on a pciex bus... yeah quick... and i want a mobo with builtin flash, that would just be cool.

and swap on a real os is located on a non data pratition... not the case with windows i guess, they have to be stupid...

[alexander]

google searches turn up nothing relevant about passive mounts Cwes, perhaps it was some news article you want to link to?

 

searhed:

Passive mount

passive usb mount

passive mount usb

usb passive mount

mount passively

and the same things with ing endings

[cwes99_03]

You are correct. I think the term must have been used by a friend when explaining write caching to me. I also thought he told me it had to do with the file system in use on the drive or for the OS.

 

Write caching is for performance, as you have already pointed out. (if you look at the properties menu of a USB flash device under policies you have two options one for performance and one for quick removal. The description of quick removal says the following.

 

This setting disables write caching on the disk and in windows, so you can disconnect this device without using the Safe Removal icon.

 

For how NTFS affects this you'll want to read the following article

http://kb.iu.edu/data/aexw.html

Basically it says that

NTFS supports compression of individual files and folders which can be read and written to while they are compressed.

 

 

NTFS is a recoverable file system, meaning it has the ability to undo or redo operations that failed due to such problems as system failure or power loss.