So this is what a post from vista ultimate looks likeFollow

I was going to blame that on a crappy non supported onboard cmedea audio quasi driver codec on an older asus P5ad2 premium motherboard. I suppose that could be DRM related, or it could just be **** poor legecy device support. Dunno.

Fixed for source accuracy.

I have xp because work gave me xp. If I had to buy anything, I'd run linux.

Posts from linux look just as good.

Just tried out readyboost using my work Sandisk Cruzer micro 4gb flash drive. It actually had a big impact on startup time. I dropped about 15 seconds off my already pretty fast load time. It doesn't seem to help much in day to day operations but that startup boost was worthwhile in my oppinion. I'm going to have to experiment and see if there are any faster 4gb flash sticks out there I think.

I wonder if you can use multiple drives to increase the effect, or would that just confuse it?

That it's going to kick Linux's ***.

Glad you clarified that "speed" comment! LOL

Hey Kao can ya post a screen shot of the nifty things you've found thus far in Vista?

One of the guys on my linkshell had to buy a new computer and it came with Vista. Sadly, FFXI will not work on it.

Yes it will. You have to disable the annoying User Account Controlls section, turn off the Aero interface, and use the POL thingy from the vandiel collection DVD. then it should work.

Some screenshots. Since they are rather large, I will spare you the image tags

The secondary computer is a dual monitor rig.
The primary desktop:
http://swg.allakhazam.com/kd/Vistashots/LeftDesktop.jpg
Note the round start button. The shortcut icons are customized, they do not come out of the box looking that way.

The secondary desktop:
http://swg.allakhazam.com/kd/Vistashots/rightDesktop.jpg
This is where I keep the gadgets. I'm writing a new one that is more compact, but for now these work well. The Mt. Saint Helens one is real time. The blue rectangle is a persistant notepad. I usually use blank e-mail messages or word or other text windows to take notes because IRL my handwriting sucks, so that comes in useful. The nice thing is they always stay in the background, so they don't interfere with window placement at all

A typical vista aero window:
http://swg.allakhazam.com/kd/Vistashots/Vistawindow.jpg
It's using a slight blue tint on the boarders. out of the box vista is more greyish. You cna customize the base vista color to anything you want.

The classic start menu:
http://swg.allakhazam.com/kd/Vistashots/startmenu.jpg
Not much new here. Still don't like the round button. It encroaches!

The "view all desktop windows toy thingy"
http://swg.allakhazam.com/kd/Vistashots/theAlttabthingy.jpg
You can actually use the computer in that confiuguration. All the windows continue to update, so if you wanted to you could watch a chat session from that view. as soon as you click or keystroke of course it picks a window, but it comes in handy if you have alot of windows open.

Here's a neat little anti-malware feature in Vista that IT folks will enjoy. It's called file system and registry virtualization but the easiest way to explain it is through a little demo:
1. Open IE
2. Right-click a picture and choose "Save Picture As..."
3. Save the file to C:\Windows\System32
4. Now, click the Windows Pearl and in the search box type C:\Windows\System32 and hit return.
5. Look for the picture you just saved there... (it's not there).
6. Back in IE, do a "Save Picture As..." again in the Save Picture dialog look in C:\Windows\System32. Your file appears to still be there.

In reality your file saved to C:\Users\[your user name]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Windows\System32, and this scenario is not restriced to just IE and System32. The details are due to a feature that make applications run in a privilege level, and files and folders (and registry keys) all now have privilege flags in addition to the traditional security we're used to seeing.

Don't worry, traditional executables aren't virtualized like that so you don't have to worry about searching virtual stores if you're an IT person who pushes application updates. But it does help with things like setting files, config files, and executables with renamed extensions.

Another Vista design I like is illustrated in Step 4 of this demo. Since we are all going to have 1TB+ of storage on our PCs soon (if not already) organizing files would get tougher. But just about everything can be found quickly from that search box - apps, files, e-mails... - I hardly navigate anywhere else manually anymore and I pay much less attention to folder structure.


Edited, Feb 11th 2007 12:07pm by JoltinJoe

Dual booting is so 20th century... it's all about virtual machines now.

here is a great review on the Vista Ready Boost:

http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/02/08/analysis_vista_ready_boost/

in short the read boost is just an extension of windows cacheing now called. superfetch.

if your system has less then 1G of RAM, then this will help greatly, but if your system has >1G ram, then you will see much less performance improvement.

top it off that the superfetch is just a use of ram by pre-caching applications so they can be re-opened faster, does not aid in their performance once they are open and running.