Thread: Windows Vista--Thumbs up or thumbs down?

Yep, bundling is a bad thing. That's why, when I buy a car, I purchase the tires, radio, air conditioning, oil, engine and body all separately

-just kidding, maybe

Ya know, for us oldtimers in the computer business Microsh*t's tactics are a déjà vu of the way IBM used to do things... they were the original master of "proprietary", "planned obsolescence" and "forced upgrades". IBM has essentially gone the way of the dodo bird... one can only hope that's a trend

I write Desktop and Mibile GPS/GIS applications for Windows. The company I work for is not testing/prototyping/reccommending/supporting Vista

There are just a couple of things I would like to point out.

1: Some of you have talked about retrograde installs of XP on a Vista machine. Microsoft has always made sure that people who try to go backwards are severely punished. I would not attempt this without a true low-level format of the hard drive.

2: Vista is basically the same scam as Windows ME. It is a hastility developed house-of-cards they forced on the market to fluff up cash flow forthe real next release of Windows in early '09. Any time or money you spend making things work on Vista is time and money wasted.

Originally Posted by catbone

2: Vista is basically the same scam as Windows ME. ....

http://darthno.ytmnd.com/


(...could it possibly get any worse???...I think not!...)

-whatever

-Lou

Cat,

By "low-level format," do you mean a regular reformatting? Or is it something even more elementary than that? (I dimly recall stuff about FAT32 formatting and such from the late '90s...)

Josh

Originally Posted by catbone

I write Desktop and Mibile GPS/GIS applications for Windows. The company I work for is not testing/prototyping/reccommending/supporting Vista

There are just a couple of things I would like to point out.

1: Some of you have talked about retrograde installs of XP on a Vista machine. Microsoft has always made sure that people who try to go backwards are severely punished. I would not attempt this without a true low-level format of the hard drive.

2: Vista is basically the same scam as Windows ME. It is a hastility developed house-of-cards they forced on the market to fluff up cash flow forthe real next release of Windows in early '09. Any time or money you spend making things work on Vista is time and money wasted.

Low level formatting means filling the drive with '1''s, and nothing else. It is the only way to really clean up a hard drive. Hard drive controllers used to contain a ROM-based utility for doing so that you could access with a line or two of assembler code. But when the IDE standard came out, low level formatting was deemed unneccesary, so you had to buy 3rd party utilities for low-level formatting. I am not sure if such a thing is still available.

Most people in this coutry now seem to be horrified by privacy and anonymity. So it stands to reason that the marketing of a product that really erases data would be frowned upon.

As I recall, the only known cure for the beta release of Windows 95 was to replace your hard drive.

josh, there's lots of freeware low-level format tools out there.... just google. Some of the disk manufacturers also include the capability in their utility suites (also usually free for download).

Originally Posted by catbone

1: Some of you have talked about retrograde installs of XP on a Vista machine. Microsoft has always made sure that people who try to go backwards are severely punished. I would not attempt this without a true low-level format of the hard drive.

You cannot simply install it on the same partition, but neither do you requrie a low level format. Just pop in the XP cd, delete the old partition, create a new partition and install XP.

Originally Posted by catbone

2: Vista is basically the same scam as Windows ME. It is a hastility developed house-of-cards they forced on the market to fluff up cash flow forthe real next release of Windows in early '09. Any time or money you spend making things work on Vista is time and money wasted.

Not true. ME was a stinking pile of shite, and a greate example of what happens when an arcitecture is stretched beyond its design limits.
Vista is an architectural masterpiece.
The device driver architecture is both extremely powerful, easy to use and supports pnp and powermanagement without needing a blood sacrifice.
The other kernel subsystems have improved a lot as well.
Vista is NOT a hastily developed house of cards (It was born out of the Win2003 server tree) and it will succeed, if only because Microsoft is not selling XP anymore after this year.

Just because a lot of visible things got cancelled / delayed does not mean that the underlying system is bad.
The next version of Windows will not revert back to all the mistakes of XP and earlier (regarding security and architecture stuff). If you are in the software business, you had better clean up your software to run on Vista because if it doesn't that means it is doing things that it is not supposed to do but got away with nonetheless.

Originally Posted by catbone

Most people in this coutry now seem to be horrified by privacy and anonymity. So it stands to reason that the marketing of a product that really erases data would be frowned upon.

If you think that a low level format really wipes your data, then you have a false sense of security. short of melting the platters of your hard disk there is nothing you can do to make previous data really go away.
The reason that low level formats are not in vogue anymore is that they are not necessary.
Low level formats can even decrease disk performance because you are messing with sector layout.

Originally Posted by catbone

As I recall, the only known cure for the beta release of Windows 95 was to replace your hard drive.

A simple fdisk followed by a format sufficed. I've done it tens of times, with NT4, win95, win98 and their betas.

Originally Posted by JoshEarl

Cat,

By "low-level format," do you mean a regular reformatting? Or is it something even more elementary than that? (I dimly recall stuff about FAT32 formatting and such from the late '90s...)

Josh

Hi Josh,
simply starting the XP install and deleting the partitions is all you need to do.
Then create (a) new partition(s) and install XP.
Low level disk tools are not necessary and can damage or degrade your disk. Trust me on both accounts.