To Vista or to not Vista, that is the question.

[Reflex]

I'd be running Home Premium except for the fact that I have a domain and such running on my home network.  There really is no reason for your average user to buy more than Home Premium however.

[Crabby Guy]

Fontaine,

They may want a combination of features that you cannot get on either business version or on either home version.  Example:  They want the audio-visual capability of home premium but want to network more than five machines.  There are numerous combinations of features that seem credible to me that you can only get with ultimate.  Also, there are some people who want everything just to try it out.

[Reflex]

You can network as many machines as you want without Ultimate.  You simply cannot put them all on a domain, just a peer-to-peer workgroup.

[Fontaine]

I see, most people I know just pick the ultimate because they fear missing some great feature(s).
Thanks for clarifying.

[Crabby Guy]

Reflex, my references are inconsistent.  Some say that both home versions of Vista are limited to five peer-to-peer computers; others say five on home basic and ten on home premium; and you say no limit on peer-to-peer networks.  (All agree that domains are not permitted.)  

Can you help, please?  I am planning eventually six PCs using home premium on five and one on XP Pro, if allowed.

Also, do you know if connecting to still-in-beta MS home server when available would change these limitation (if they exist)?

[Reflex]

Well as I understand it, and how it was on XP Home, was that you could not have more than five simultanious connections to any ONE machine.  But you could still have drive mappings, and more than five on the network without issue.  Its just that if six users all attempt to access the same resource at once it will fail for one of them with a 'Too Many Connections' error(there is a registry hack around this limitation btw).  I am 95% certain that Vista works the same way, but I am open to being proven wrong.  I have done the user limit testing on XP before for another project, but I have not had the chance to test it specifically on Vista.  I don't know of any realistic way to regulate that, nor does it make much sense when the limitation only exists to prevent customers from using XP Pro/Home as a server.

Not sure on Home Server yet, they have kept that pretty tight, I would guess that it does not have the limitation at all since its a variant of Server 2003, but I could be off base.  I would not be suprised to see a 10 or 20 client limit since its not supposed to be for small businesses and would eat into SBS sales...

[Fontaine]

A little OT but how do you select: file>exit in vista when using explorer?
I can click on explorer symbol en choose ''close'''but where is the ''exit'' so all windows will be closed?

Edit: found answer already: extra> show menu.

[Reflex]

At any time just press the 'Alt' key to get your classic menus.  Press it again to make them go away.

[SoloMalee]

For the record - and just to clarify rubyrod's comment - I DO own a windows OS but (a) never used it, and (b) haven't missed it.

To be fair, I think the question needs to be reframed to acknowledge the fact that it is exceedingly difficult NOT to own a windows OS - unless you are prepared to pay through the nose for Apple hardware.  There's a reason M$ has a monopoly on the desktop - you can't buy a PC without it.

Believe it or not, I've actually warmed to Vista in the past two weeks.  It's got nothing to do with the software and all to do with the hardware.  I'm in the process of buying another PC and I am amazed at the movement in the quality-price ratio of 'old' hardware available on ebay and other auction sites since Vista came out.  Thanks to Vista, we've never had it so good!!!

It's well worth doing a LIKE for LIKE comparison between Apple and Dell devices (particularly Laptops). If you are very careful to match the specs, you will be very surprised at how little difference there is in price between the two. I'm sure if you compare their iMACs to a Desktop and screen (of the same specs), the same is true. In fact, the only thing that made the Apple more expensive was matching the Dell One Year On Site Guarantee with the equivalent Apple Care package.

It's also very easy to NOT OWN an MS licence if you build your own PC from parts (not for everyone I agree).

And, yes I do have Vista, and it works for me, BUT, I wanted it specifically for the Media Center part primarily. I have to say, that works very nicely.

Finally, though, I see great things ahead for Apple, they are gathering momentum against Microsoft during a time of uncertainty with Vista. If MS can't quickly address the Gaming related issues, they are in danger of losing a very loyal and vocal fan base. Imagine what would happen if EA start to release games for MAC at the same time as for the PC. We already saw that MAC hardware running XP in some cases got better benchmarks and framerates than the equivalent 'PC Hardware'.

I'm keeping a close eye on Apple, they could yet steal an advantage while MS struggle to get their OEMs and third parties to support for Vista.

[Fontaine]

Thx Reflex.

Solo, problem with Apple right now is that they are really busy with the iPhone (and other stuff) and Leopard is not getting enough attention. Also they miss alot with not making a mac that people really want badly (small tower and upgradable for lets say $999 (without monitor).
The Apple laptops are selling like crazy and a small upgradable tower would as well, if not better.

[rubyrod]

Not to mention that a mini version of the Mac G5 case would look fabulous.

[SoloMalee]

Venturing even further OT...never underestimate Apple. They always seem to be able to spring a surprise...who knows what will come at the WWDC.

As far as upgradeable goes, I believe that is a different market and it isn't Apple's target market. If you look at Dell and HP as their competitors, did you ever try upgrading one of those? Sure, memory, disk and CPU are reasonably practical, and in the right box, also the graphics. The same goes for Apple boxes to some degree, although I admit, where you get to embeded graphics there isn't much you can do, but then what could you do similarly in the case of a Shuttle X100 or X200?

[Crabby Guy]

While we're on the subject of Macs and Vista, can someone suggest why a Mac (that I use in a photo class) that is otherwise much slower than an SN95G5V3 with 2GB of RAM and a 3800+ running at 2.6GHz can convert large photograph raw (digital negative) files in half the time of my Shuttle using Photoshop CS2?  Every full 4GB card has about 250 of these files and the difference in speeds is, well, frustrating.

[Reflex]

Until Apple releases a DirectX competitor, there is zero chance of them gaining anything significant in the gaming market.  It just won't happen.  Dev costs on the Mac are significantly higher due to the lack of quality API's.

[Intuit]

Win98 (Win4.1) started out this way, WinNT(5.1) also, but Vista(6.0) is not very customizeable.  I have toolbars and items setup a specific way for specific reasons and all of this is nill in Vista, even when mimmicking XP visually, for now.  One thing I really hate is wasted screen space... that is, space reserved for, and doing, absolutely nothing... and there is plenty of that action going on in Vista as well.  (huge title bars for one example)  I can't even seem to get rid of that annoying "favorites" sidebar.  (and no, don't want to nix the entire pane)

Another caveat... and it is possible that this is driver-related... is the DPI cannot be adjusted below 100%.  In order to recover more functional screen space, I always adjust the DPI down.

Something they STILL haven't fixed or provided for, are reverse color-schemes.  I thought they would've fixed this in Vista.  You setup white text on black background and in over half the screens there's no difference at all (actual XML edits probably required) and the other half are rendered unreadable/unusable because you're trying to look at light text on light background.  Not just text-boxes but especially all the controls are screwed-up by this... and the problem is far WORSE under Vista than it was under XP.  They have clear-type/text code in there... would it have been so hard to include code that sets text-color as the inverse of the background ?  Make it a separate option under "Appearance", "Advanced".  There are mouse cursors that operate this way... why not text ?  (and let's not forget the text-cursor)

I've always wanted to be able to make direct calls to certain applets before and short of using a monitoring tool who's name escapes me for the moment, that was pretty difficult to do under XP without a full blown resource kit.  UAC splashes that info right in front of your face for many items.  For the average user however this would be extremely annoying and on that dialog, there are no instructions linked, for mitigating, adjusting, explaining or disabling this security feature.

Toolbar Screenshots...
HOSTED BY: http://HTTP://WWW.IMAGESHACK.US/
http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/3405/toolbar00cl1.jpg
http://img157.imageshack.us/img157/6895/toolbar01oo6.jpg
http://img157.imageshack.us/img157/6177/toolbar02kq2.jpg
http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/3686/toolbar03nv4.jpg
http://img157.imageshack.us/img157/1641/toolbar04li0.jpg

While we're on the subject of Macs and Vista, can someone suggest why a Mac (that I use in a photo class) that is otherwise much slower than an SN95G5V3 with 2GB of RAM and a 3800+ running at 2.6GHz can convert large photograph raw (digital negative) files in half the time of my Shuttle using Photoshop CS2?  Every full 4GB card has about 250 of these files and the difference in speeds is, well, frustrating.

In general I've heard a lot of praise for Apple's visual processing capabilities.
I really don't know why it may (or may not) have a decidely better advantage.

Is PhotoShop CS2 being used on both computers ?  Do you know if it was entirely developed using an OS-neutral language ?  Similar background compliment of software running on each ?

Guessing it probably has to do with how the software is written and/or compiled.
It would be interesting know which OS is ultimately more efficient if either, at running the same algorithms while using their respectively best compilers.

Jasc/Corel Paint Shop Pro v4 literally operating off the same filter files as Adobe's Photo Deluxe v4 seems able to handily out-do Adobe's software speed wise.

Another example I have several different programs capable of search & replace on text files and occasionally I'll have to perform this search/replace on 100,000s of entries.  With Notepad it would almost literally (somehow) take all day... Edit.Com and Dexter Text Editor both DOS applications could do it lightening quick.  (Edit.Com severly limited in file sizes though) I have three more apps comparable to Dexter but Win32: Crimson, ConText, NotePadPlus... and (NPP untested,) ConText rips them to shreds doing the same Search & Replace function in a mere fraction of the time compared to others.

Possible environmental differences (OS, compiler, hardware) aside, it all hinges on the algorithms programmers create and implement.  ConText would probably compete with the others and undoubtedly obliterates NotePad despite running on a PentiumII 233MHz machine with < 1/10th the performance.  (which I've done)  Same end result but the time and number of steps taken are by far among the greatest factors.

It seems a real and true answer can get pretty complex.

[Crabby Guy]

Yes, Photoshop CS2 on both machines.  I don't know what language Photoshop is written in.  I have read reviews of CS3 that say it's faster on a Mac.  Of course, XP is reported at least 10% faster than Vista.  My Windows machine is AMD and I have heard that Photoshop runs faster on an Intel proc., although my processor is 30% overclocked, which should more than make up for that sort of thing.

I am going to build a watercooled machine almost dedicated to Photoshop with a Socket 939 Opteron of a good stepping code and I'm hoping for 3.0GHz clock speed.  It will also have 4GB of RAM (and 1GB of that will end up dedicated for a cache for the scrach file) and a Raptor for a dedicated scratch disk.  If this beast is pokey with CS3 and 32-bit Vista, I'll try 64-bit XP.  If it's still pokey, I will have some exploring to do.

[AlienDS7]

My university was offering students and faculty Vista Business and Office 2007 Enterprise for $10 each...so of course I picked them up.  Turned my system into a dual-boot machine so I could mess around with Vista.  At first I was kind of like, well it looks really nice.  Since then I've kind of customized some things to more of my liking and it has run very well so far for me.  

Question:  Does anyone leave Vista mostly as is, or do most of you find yourselves customizing things, say, to look more like XP and other previous versions of windows?

Eventually as I will probably inevitably will have to make the move to make Vista my main OS, I will go with Vista Ultimate 64bit version, but a $10 copy to get started on was too irresistable for me.

I haven't messed around too much with Office 2007 yet, but the things I have seen have looked very nice.  It's a good thing MS is releasing some compatibility patches that allow you to open and manipulate previous versions with 2007.

[Intuit]

Question:  Does anyone leave Vista mostly as is, or do most of you find yourselves customizing things, say, to look more like XP and other previous versions of windows? ........

My little rant above pretty much answers that question.  
Given the hardware situation I may have to stick with XP but at the same time I can also praise certain manufacturers, such as http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/support/vista.html , for really stepping up to the plate on their older products.  Still I'm counting approximately eight devices that won't likely have any Vista support.

So in effect, the question has been answered for me.  Basically I'll be waiting until after a new computer purchase until upgrading my primary system to Vista... and that's replacing an awful lot of hardware BTW.  Speedwise this system does really well for me especially since (almost) all these devices are old enough, not to have to use the processor for every little function they're supposed to perform.

[Reflex]

I support a lot of clients, so I keep my interface as vanilla as possible.  If I tweak it too much it becomes impossible to step someone through something over the phone since my setup is nothing like thiers.

[Intuit]

VPC is good for those situations... but for the most part XP is thouroughly memorized anyway.

[EastTexas]

Vista in two steps...

1. Wait till SP1
2. Get a Mac, one OS not six...

*Note @ work Novel GroupWise does not work with Vista...


On a funny note the O'Reilly Tech Books (The one with the animals on the cover.)
Well guess what they gave Vista?

A Frog!
I think this one OS that is going to Croak.

[MrbLOB9000]

you guys still use legacy novel stuff?!

[Intuit]

...
2. Get a Mac, one OS not six...

Wow... software for Apple Computers don't have minimum OS requirements on the box !?
That is amazing.

(re Vista they're all the same OS by the way, just with different extras to accompany it)

I think this one OS that is going to Croak.

I think the fact that it (perhaps necessarily) took so long to release complicates things as most people are pretty well rooted in their current OS/Hardware + the fact that "older" systems such as an Athlon 2800+ still perform pretty well.

We're not yet really seeing any software titles that have 100% from the ground up been conceived, designed and released on Vista so it's really way too early to tell.  How long do you think most people ran without Windows XP ?  Basically it was 1 - 2 years before "everyone" was on XP and even then there were still a lot of complaints about 9x compatibility.  Also consider the fact that dual-core has been around for a bit longer than Vista and no one has completely written it off simply because we're not seeing consumer-level software written for it.  So I think you have to take a step back and consider that maybe some of those expectations should be tempered a bit.

[Nighteye]

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[SoloMalee]

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LOL...even better than the If OSs were airlines joke