Help me pick my OSes.

[Hitmen]

I'm a bit unfamiliar with Debian.  Why does it have 14GB worth of installation DVDs/CDs?  Are all of them necessary?

l2read, right on the download page

The first CD/DVD disk contains all the files necessary to install a standard Debian system.
To avoid needless downloads, please do not download other CD or DVD image files unless you know that you need packages on them.

[Sidoh]

I've been using Vista for the last several months.  Pretty much since last summer.  I like XP more, lol.  UAC isn't the only thing that bugs me.  How much of a resource hog it is probably concerns me the most.

Do you actually feel a slowdown, or are you just going off of numbers you see in the Task Manager? For me I notice no significant slowdown over XP, and Vista actually outperforms XP by a considerable number once it starts scaling with higher end hardware.

Yes, there's a significant slowdown.  I had to get more RAM to crank the settings in WoW (pre-3.0.0).  I had them cranked in XP before with no problems.

I'm a bit unfamiliar with Debian.  Why does it have 14GB worth of installation DVDs/CDs?  Are all of them necessary?

l2read, right on the download page

The first CD/DVD disk contains all the files necessary to install a standard Debian system.
To avoid needless downloads, please do not download other CD or DVD image files unless you know that you need packages on them.

It's much easier to ask someone who's familiar with the distribution. 

Even so, I looked in a few places, including the "if you only read one document" thing, but I missed it.

[Warrior]

I've been using Vista for the last several months.  Pretty much since last summer.  I like XP more, lol.  UAC isn't the only thing that bugs me.  How much of a resource hog it is probably concerns me the most.

Do you actually feel a slowdown, or are you just going off of numbers you see in the Task Manager? For me I notice no significant slowdown over XP, and Vista actually outperforms XP by a considerable number once it starts scaling with higher end hardware.

Yes, there's a significant slowdown.  I had to get more RAM to crank the settings in WoW (pre-3.0.0).  I had them cranked in XP before with no problems.

I would not be so quick to blame it on the RAM, sure it might have been so, but you could have also just made up in raw performance for a bottleneck elsewhere in the system.

Anyhow, were you running SP1? Or at the very least, Vista with the performance and reliability hot fixes applied, were you running latest (or near latest) graphics drivers?

Were you running in fullscreen mode? Windowed mode?

Initially with Windows Vista I lost something like 10-15FPS compared to XP, but after SP1 and various updates to the crappy ATI WDDM Drivers, I got to within reach of Windows XP (2-5FPS difference give or take I'd say), and in Windows 7 with WDDM1.1 I pass Windows XP by 15-25FPS.

I'm very tempted to believe the problem was with something graphics related as opposed to a RAM issue, that sounds like something that would be pretty universal, and others would experience it, where as a graphics issue could be more specific to your hardware configuration.

It's hard to judge this kind of thing though, due to all the potential bottlenecks, before even speaking about the sometimes questionable CPU usage of a few things in Windows Vista.

How much ram were you dealing with? How soon after install did these problems occur? I ask this because there are many CPU intensive things like Indexing going on, and the fact that SuperFetch has not monitored your memory patterns so it's caching is not up to snuff (which actually means fresh Vista installers have a net loss in initial performance when looking at the tradeoff from the increased occupation of memory).

[iago]

OK, iago's argument isn't very convincing.

wtf, I thought mine was the best of them are.

Let me try another...

Windows XP. Come onnnnnnn!

Perhaps another "Come onnnnn" would have convinced me, but I guess you just don't care enough!  I'm still considering it... idk.

Debian sounds pretty good, though.  Any other suggestions from anyone?

Come onnnnnnnnnnnn!

[Sidoh]

It's extremely unlikely that it wasn't a RAM problem.  I installed 2 GB of additional RAM and it runs smoothly now.

[Warrior]

It's extremely unlikely that it wasn't a RAM problem.  I installed 2 GB of additional RAM and it runs smoothly now.

It is very possible that propping up the PC with ram (especially 2GB of additional ram, that's pretty overboard.) opened up a bottleneck to hide the failings of another bottleneck in the system. The gain of FPS might have been around the same, or even exceeded what you were lacking when compared to XP.

There are still a lot of unknowns in the story to be able to draw a definitive conclusion, I've had great results on Vista with much less hardware, Windows 7 is just a very nice improvement ontop of that.

While Vista initially had problems, I believe a lot of the criticism it gets recently is largely exaggerated, or the result of something out of the control of Microsoft. Microsoft recently made a point of stating exactly how hard it is to pinpoint bottlenecks in performance, and how hard it is to assess reliably what is causing the slowdown without very specific information.

This is probably most true than in anything else in games where there are many factors that come into play: Resource management/Model/Zone Loading (RAM), AI/Physics/Collision (CPU), and Graphics Rendering (GPU).

Then you can get into old Graphics Drivers, faulty ram modules, immature system caching, outside stresses on the system, and even bugs in the engine itself which can arise from the very significant changes in the Driver Model.

Overall though, Vista outperforms XP on higher end hardware especially with multi-core and 64 Bit setups with lots and lots of RAM. Windows 7 even builds on this by removing the general kernel lock on the scheduler (I believe it's comparable to the BKL in Linux) and replacing it with more granular locks and allowing Windows7 to scale to 256 processors (or cores, same thing really).

On lower end machines, Windows 7 performs just about as well as XP does due to optimizations made as opposed to Vista, and boot times are increased since subsystems/services are done on demand / in parallel (This is probably what most cite as the significant gain over Vista).

Overall, I would not go back to XP for anything. The enhanced networking in Windows 7 (Try deploying it to every PC in the house and using HomeGroup, it's a blast), as well as the usability improvements make it a huge winner.

From a PR standpoint, it's going to be a blockbuster, it's gotten nothing but positive press.

[Chavo]

1. Forget about the features.  If you have any applications that require XP compatibility, stick with it. Compatibility mode and XP in a VM are not good solutions for running MatLab or CATIA .  I've played with 7 and while nice, I won't be going anywhere until all the critical applications I use are supported on 7 or I can justify sticking another machine on my desk (kvm'd of course) just for XP applications (dual booting is a pain).  I currently run Vista on my laptop which I use infrequently as my testbed and will likely upgrade it to 7 when the mp3 fix is pushed out.

2. I'm a big fan of apt and use Debian on my web server + Ubuntu on my laptop for that reason.  Not having to research and/or debug installing a new application most of the time is very handy when I'd rather be spending my time on more meaningful tasks. Kubuntu/Xubuntu/etc are obviously just as good.  I'm not a big fan of Fedora or OpenSUSE's package managers. Arch's is pretty good but doesn't have quite the application pool as the others.

[Sidoh]

It's extremely unlikely that it wasn't a RAM problem.  I installed 2 GB of additional RAM and it runs smoothly now.

It is very possible that propping up the PC with ram (especially 2GB of additional ram, that's pretty overboard.) opened up a bottleneck to hide the failings of another bottleneck in the system. The gain of FPS might have been around the same, or even exceeded what you were lacking when compared to XP.

There are still a lot of unknowns in the story to be able to draw a definitive conclusion, I've had great results on Vista with much less hardware, Windows 7 is just a very nice improvement ontop of that.

While Vista initially had problems, I believe a lot of the criticism it gets recently is largely exaggerated, or the result of something out of the control of Microsoft. Microsoft recently made a point of stating exactly how hard it is to pinpoint bottlenecks in performance, and how hard it is to assess reliably what is causing the slowdown without very specific information.

This is probably most true than in anything else in games where there are many factors that come into play: Resource management/Model/Zone Loading (RAM), AI/Physics/Collision (CPU), and Graphics Rendering (GPU).

Then you can get into old Graphics Drivers, faulty ram modules, immature system caching, outside stresses on the system, and even bugs in the engine itself which can arise from the very significant changes in the Driver Model.

Overall though, Vista outperforms XP on higher end hardware especially with multi-core and 64 Bit setups with lots and lots of RAM. Windows 7 even builds on this by removing the general kernel lock on the scheduler (I believe it's comparable to the BKL in Linux) and replacing it with more granular locks and allowing Windows7 to scale to 256 processors (or cores, same thing really).

On lower end machines, Windows 7 performs just about as well as XP does due to optimizations made as opposed to Vista, and boot times are increased since subsystems/services are done on demand / in parallel (This is probably what most cite as the significant gain over Vista).

Overall, I would not go back to XP for anything. The enhanced networking in Windows 7 (Try deploying it to every PC in the house and using HomeGroup, it's a blast), as well as the usability improvements make it a huge winner.

From a PR standpoint, it's going to be a blockbuster, it's gotten nothing but positive press.

Again, it's extremely unlikely that it wasn't RAM.  When I cranked the settings, the OS started to thrash.  It was out of physical memory -- period.  I put in more memory, and everything runs smoothly.  Running a bunch of random applications right now (no games -- just stuff like Firefox, Thunderbird, media player, putty, etc), it's using 1.86 GB.  Now imagine WoW ontop of that.

It doesn't run pristine, and I'm confident the problem is with my video card.  It's reasonably good, but I'm sure an upgrade is in order over the summer once I get some monies.

Either way, this is no longer an issue.  I have 4 GB of RAM.  Which is not excessive, by the way, especially considering the price of memory these days and the types of projects I work on.  I'd just rather have something more light weight.  I don't intend to do anything fancy with Windows.

1. Forget about the features.  If you have any applications that require XP compatibility, stick with it. Compatibility mode and XP in a VM are not good solutions for running MatLab or CATIA .  I've played with 7 and while nice, I won't be going anywhere until all the critical applications I use are supported on 7 or I can justify sticking another machine on my desk (kvm'd of course) just for XP applications (dual booting is a pain).  I currently run Vista on my laptop which I use infrequently as my testbed and will likely upgrade it to 7 when the mp3 fix is pushed out.

2. I'm a big fan of apt and use Debian on my web server + Ubuntu on my laptop for that reason.  Not having to research and/or debug installing a new application most of the time is very handy when I'd rather be spending my time on more meaningful tasks. Kubuntu/Xubuntu/etc are obviously just as good.  I'm not a big fan of Fedora or OpenSUSE's package managers. Arch's is pretty good but doesn't have quite the application pool as the others.

Great input. It's not unlikely that I'll wind up using something like mathematica/matlab pretty heavily this semester.  In the past, I've just used the command line interface for Mathematica on my server, though.

Which version of Ubuntu do you use?  Have you had any problems with 8.04?  The sound drivers seem to be the major problem.

[Chavo]

8.10, never had any sound issues

[Warrior]

Again, it's extremely unlikely that it wasn't RAM.  When I cranked the settings, the OS started to thrash.  It was out of physical memory -- period.  I put in more memory, and everything runs smoothly.  Running a bunch of random applications right now (no games -- just stuff like Firefox, Thunderbird, media player, putty, etc), it's using 1.86 GB.  Now imagine WoW ontop of that.

It doesn't run pristine, and I'm confident the problem is with my video card.  It's reasonably good, but I'm sure an upgrade is in order over the summer once I get some monies.

Either way, this is no longer an issue.  I have 4 GB of RAM.  Which is not excessive, by the way, especially considering the price of memory these days and the types of projects I work on.  I'd just rather have something more light weight.  I don't intend to do anything fancy with Windows.
[/quote]

Vista thrashes the disk periodically since it's constantly rebuilding the index, defragmenting the harddrive, running checks for solutions to problems, possibly running Windows Defender, and the most notorious disk thrasher, SuperFetch.

It's not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it indicative of a high amount of page faults. Memory on Vista is released on demand by SuperFetch, so it is extremely unlikely that Vista was having trouble operating with 2GB of ram initially.

SuperFetch scales up with your memory, since it's possible to store more frequent pages in RAM as opposed to the Disk (Which makes sense considering you've just dumped an additional 2GB for it to work with, and which would explain SuperFetch caching World of Warcraft related memory, therefore explaining the speedup).

Vista's memory manager is world's apart from XPs, it's smarter, which people requested. It takes a much more active role in using caching mechanisms which don't stop with SuperFetch, but which actually extend to more fine internal caching mechanisms (As most modern implementations do, I'd assume).

This is why I alluded to in my second post that judging Vista by the Task Manager's reporting is not accurate because it does not distinguish memory used up by the caching mechanisms in Vista, yet still tallys it up in "Used" memory. That's misleading, and has been the center of a lot of undeserved criticism.

My point with the RAM was, dumping 2GB at the problem was excessive because it was not required to fix the problem, especially when the system already had 2GB of ram installed. That's just ridiculous.

I'd understand if you were dealing with 512MB which you upgraded to 1GB, but the system already working with 2GB? There's no way Vista required anywhere near that much.

Any game, any program, any service, will run more quickly if you dump 2GB of ram at the problem, regardless of what caused the problem.

[Sidoh]

Thrashing happens when you're out of memory, so most of what's going on is page faults.  The OS thinks that the processor needs to be used more, so it does more multiprocessing, adding to the problem.

I was out of memory.  Period.  I'm almost positive that this was the problem.  You're lauding praise at Vista's memory management, but I can guarantee you that I was out of memory.  You've failed to give any other reasonable explanation for the symptoms and how they were cured by adding more memory.

I can assure you that 4 GB of memory is far from ridiculous, especially considering the things I do with my computer and how cheap memory is.  I picked up 2 GB (1GBx1GB) at $32 or something.  It's not an expensive upgrade.

Also, look at new mid-range systems.  They almost all have >2GB.  The laptop my dad got for my sister has 4GB.  2GB was more than adequate a year and a half ago when I got this PC, but it's slowly becoming less than adequate.

Duh, but this not a slight performance increase.  Settings-cranked-WoW brought my computer to its knees.  I'm talking super sub-1FPS and it made my computer unusable.  It was thrashing.

[Warrior]

Thrashing happens when you're out of memory, so most of what's going on is page faults.  The OS thinks that the processor needs to be used more, so it does more multiprocessing, adding to the problem.

I was out of memory.  Period.  I'm almost positive that this was the problem.  You're lauding praise at Vista's memory management, but I can guarantee you that I was out of memory.  You've failed to give any other reasonable explanation for the symptoms and how they were cured by adding more memory.

I've given explanations, at least twice already, you speak of disk thrashing from a traditional perspective, but this is not the only time in which a disk will be thrashed, and it is a misconception with Windows Vista that a lot of people have. You can search google for people reporting trashing after bootups, immediately after installs, and during random times of operation.

How is it that memory is fulled up in all of these cases? It's not, it's explained in various articles, by various sources written by various people to be caused by what I outlined in my last point. For the sake of saving myself some typing I will ask you to look back to my post.

My point at any rate, was not that it was one or the other, but that there exists a reasonable amount of doubt so that one cannot be definitively pinpointed as the problem, hence why I went in and talked about how Microsoft considers performance hard to measure. It's very relevant.

I can assure you that 4 GB of memory is far from ridiculous, especially considering the things I do with my computer and how cheap memory is.  I picked up 2 GB (1GBx1GB) at $32 or something.  It's not an expensive upgrade.

I stated 4GB of memory is excessive as a fix to your supposed memory related problems, slow down and read.

This was never about how cheap memory was, but the mere fact that you believe that baseline, 2GB is not enough for Vista. That's ridiculous.

[Sidoh]

No, that's not what was going on.  Thrashing is in no way exclusive to Vista or even Windows.  It's an intrinsic and somewhat unavoidable problem with operating systems in general.  Things don't behave nicely when physical memory is almost completely eaten up.

I'm not really sure you're familiar with the term thrashing.  It's sort of a technical word (similar to the way "frozen" is used in a technical context) -- I'm not saying you aren't familiar with the concept, but I don't think what you're referring to is thrashing.  Thrashing is when you're out of memory, so the OS has to do a lot of paging.  Additionally, and to varying degrees, this results in the entire system waiting on the disk for an unreasonable amount of time, the OS thinks it needs to increase the degree of multiprogramming -- which only adds to the problem.

The reasonable explanations for the circumstances I described are: it somehow managed to use up all of my CPU, or all of my memory.  I don't care how smart Vista is about paging -- it's not going to make a difference if I'm out of memory.

The evidence is undeniable.  Task manager said nearly 100% of physical memory was being used, and my computer was brought to its knees.  Adding more RAM completely fixed the problem.  It runs extremely smoothly now, and I haven't had the same problem again since.

I stated 4GB of memory is excessive as a fix to your supposed memory related problems, slow down and read.

This was never about how cheap memory was, but the mere fact that you believe that baseline, 2GB is not enough for Vista. That's ridiculous.

Lol, they are memory related problems, man.  It's silly to deny that, I think.

2 GB is more than enough for Vista and everyday use, I'm sure, but it sure as hell wasn't enough to run the background programs I do (nothing fancy, mind you -- Firefox, thunderbird, pidgin, etc) plus WoW with cranked graphics.

[Warrior]

No, that's not what was going on.  Thrashing is in no way exclusive to Vista or even Windows.  It's an intrinsic and somewhat unavoidable problem with operating systems in general.  Things don't behave nicely when physical memory is almost completely eaten up.

I'm not really sure you're familiar with the term thrashing.  It's sort of a technical word (similar to the way "frozen" is used in a technical context) -- I'm not saying you aren't familiar with the concept, but I don't think what you're referring to is thrashing.  Thrashing is when you're out of memory, so the OS has to do a lot of paging.  Additionally, and to varying degrees, this results in the entire system waiting on the disk for an unreasonable amount of time, the OS thinks it needs to increase the degree of multiprogramming -- which only adds to the problem.

The reasonable explanations for the circumstances I described are: it somehow managed to use up all of my CPU, or all of my memory.  I don't care how smart Vista is about paging -- it's not going to make a difference if I'm out of memory.

The evidence is undeniable.  Task manager said nearly 100% of physical memory was being used, and my computer was brought to its knees.  Adding more RAM completely fixed the problem.  It runs extremely smoothly now, and I haven't had the same problem again since.

Actually, Superfetch has been linked to Dish Thrashing. You can find many articles supporting my case with a single search, one of them being this one

As I've stated twice, one time in great detail, there are a lot of factors which come into play when deciding if Vista can and will thrash the disk. For a better explanation than what I can give you, you can search to see people encountering the near-same problem as you.

SuperFetch causes heavy thrashing at certain times, and less intensive thrashing after a while.
That, along with other micro-caching methods, is a very likely explanation for the troubles you were experiencing. At least as likely as anything else, which was the entire point of my posts.

It's one of the most discussed issues with Windows Vista, and I am absolutely right about the scope of Disk thrashing as it's known being enlarged with Windows Vista, because it can happen for more reasons, at more times.

Lol, they are memory related problems, man.  It's silly to deny that, I think.

2 GB is more than enough for Vista and everyday use, I'm sure, but it sure as hell wasn't enough to run the background programs I do (nothing fancy, mind you -- Firefox, thunderbird, pidgin, etc) plus WoW with cranked graphics.

This has nothing to do with the second half of my post.

[Sidoh]

You're such a defensive person, man.  I think you should just take it easy.

I can nearly guarantee you I accurately diagnosed my problem -- it's fixed now.  I no longer care about it, and I don't want to use Vista.  You haven't given me any good reason to stick with it, so I'll probably be using something else.