On 1/30/08, Dr Skip wrote: > Bob Axtell wrote: > > Xiaofan Chen wrote: > > XP was not supposed to be an improvement over Win98, it was supposed to be > > an improvement over Win2K. It most certainly was NOT. > > > > Win2K remains the pinnacle of Microsoft capabilities. Before and after Win2K > > is simply downhill. > > I run all 3 and wholeheartedly agree. Well, I run Vista 64 on a custom built system and while it has its annoyances, I just don't see why people are having such difficulty. Just as in XP I've disabled certain 'features' and changed some defaults, but I can use all three interchangeably and really not think about it. Vista has a lot of under the hood changes - many subsystems are rewritten. It supports No Execute now included on modern desktop and server processors, which can only be a good thing. It has a different tasking model which better suits how people use their computers now. But no one is going to upgrade for invisible under the hood changes, and the hardware has progressed to the point where it finally makes sense to render everything using the 3D graphics processor's capabilities. So MS has also added a lot of bloaty graphical features to make it flashy. Keep in mind that when 95 was released people had the same reaction - 3.1 is faster, more stable, and everyone was used to it. Win2k had the same reaction from NT, although neither was meant to be a desktop OS, and it seems that no one here remembers the pain of getting some applications working on 2k - it simply was not backwards compatible with 98 (and some fringe NT apps) to a significant degree until a service pack or two later. Further, every new operating system was slower then its predecessor. 2k was slow and bloated compared to NT. 95 was horrible compared to 3.1. XP awful compared to 2k. Microsoft knows that a given OS is going to last for 2-5 years, and so develops the OS to target machines a year or so away. Vista is as different from XP/2k as 95 was from 3.1 - this is a bigger change than the move from 98 to 2k/XP. There are going to be problems, and people are going to complain because it's very different. But 5 years from now most people will be using Vista and complaining about the next version. But at the end of the day, if you want to complain about speed, the constant upgrade mill, DRM, bloatware, etc then you should probably just move to Linux. I guess we have to have this same conversation every time a new OS escapes from Redmond... -Adam -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist