Windows Vista

[AtW]

Can you use old UI there? The first thing I do on WinXP install is get back Win2000 classic scheme - fancy colours and 3D are not for me.

64-bitness is the only reason I'd use Vista based kernel, support apparently is pretty bad, but for server with minimum hardware used it should do, might try it this week actually.

[DaveB]

God i'm turning into a Mac zealot. Can someone please shoot me before I turn into the Chico of Mac.

*Points gun*
*Pulls trigger*

[TheMonkey]

Urgh *splat*.

Can you use old UI there? The first thing I do on WinXP install is get back Win2000 classic scheme - fancy colours and 3D are not for me.

64-bitness is the only reason I'd use Vista based kernel, support apparently is pretty bad, but for server with minimum hardware used it should do, might try it this week actually.

Yeah you can crank it right down. Explorer is perpetually ****ed though. It's completely dooooomed.

[Joe Black]

This might be what you want TM, it's been 'cranked down' quite a bit so none of that fancy stuff you don't need.

http://www.vistaultimate.com/windows1_screenshots.htm

[tim123]

If it ain't broke don't fix it.

What is so fundamentally wrong with XP (other than it's written by MS) that requires you to update to Vista?

ISTM that Vista is bound to have some teething problems, why be the person that does Bill's testing for him, he isn't paying you.

tim

[AtW]

What is so fundamentally wrong with XP (other than it's written by MS) that requires you to update to Vista?

64-bit support is not solid - and we do need 64-bits.

Also XPs memory fragmentation is a big problem, this is supposedly done better in Vista.

After some time (year?) Vista will probably be more secure, which is good.

[VectraMan]

I heard they'd rewritten all the networking. I hope that means it'll cope a bit better with failures, and that all my explorer windows won't turn to "not responding" when some network drive has the bare faced cheek to be temporarily unavailable. I suspect a big chunk of the underlying networking of Windows is still based on LanManager.

[AtW]

Yes TCP/IP stack should be a lot better - WinXP bottlenecks at 7 mbits I think or something like that - MSFT people said this and I've seen it myself.

[TheMonkey]

2k3 server ain't much better. TCP/IP concurrency is abysmal. Just ported something from c#.Net to good old fashioned C/sockets/pthreads on FreeBSD for a 600% throughput and concurrency performance increase...

[AtW]

TCP/IP was completely rewritten in Vista, in 2k3 it should be about the same as in XP - think minor changes but that's about it. Don't blame MS for having crap TCP/IP - they got it from BSD...