What's the big deal with Vista?

[Rule]

From what I can see, there are very few "ground-breaking" differences between Vista and Windows XP.  Actually, I think the only difference most people will "feel" is the increased demand on their systems.  All the people on this board who I expected to push and cheer for Vista have (Warrior, Myndfyre, etc.), and everyone who  I expected to be critial of Vista has (iago, ...), and it seems like a bunch of others just got overwhelmed by the cheering crowd and have gotten all hyped about this new operating system themselves. 

Actually, there seems to be a striking resemblance between the attitude towards this product, and a political allegience; it's so predictable, boring, and often has more to do with what you've been conditioned to support than what has shown itself to be worthy of support.

"Wow guys, I just installed an hyped properietary operating system.  I don't know why this is a good thing, but does it mean I can play with the cool kids now?"

[Warrior]

Well

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista
Is the best list of new Vista features on the Internet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_safety_features_new_to_Windows_Vista
Goes specifically indepth about the Security features of Vista

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista
Shows where Vista originated from (codebase wise) and what it had/lost during it's development phase.

Probably the most unbiased answers you will get.

My conclusion:

Vista is lightyears ahead of XP in terms of security and reliability. The performance is lagging a little due to  mainly the new driver frameworks (User Mode, Kernel Mode, and Graphics) which Driver vendors are still struggling to perfect and some of the quality issues with some "version 1.0" platforms in Windows Vista.

I think (and I think iago agreed with me) that Vista will become as big a hit as XP was later on in it's life. It however has failed to capture the crowd it did back when XP or Windows 95 was released.

[Rule]

Do you really think Vista is as groundbreaking as Windows 95 was though?

I think Windows 95 dramatically changed the way people used computers and made personal computing accessible and attractive to a large crowd of people.

[Warrior]

Do you really think Vista is as groundbreaking as Windows 95 was though?

I think Windows 95 dramatically changed the way people used computers and made personal computing accessible and attractive to a large crowd of people.

No. Windows Vista is an update to Windows XP. It's a huge update but nonetheless it isn't anything as groundbreaking as say XP was over 9x or 9x was over the 16 Bit series of the kernel.

It's an evolution in the OS with a hint of innovation. I feel glad knowing my family is using this over XP, obviously because of XP's glaring security issues.

[Rule]

x86] link=topic=8555.msg108166#msg108166 date=1170895811]

Do you really think Vista is as groundbreaking as Windows 95 was though?

I think Windows 95 dramatically changed the way people used computers and made personal computing accessible and attractive to a large crowd of people.

No. Windows Vista is an update to Windows XP. It's a huge update but nonetheless it isn't anything as groundbreaking as say XP was over 9x or 9x was over the 16 Bit series of the kernel.

It's an evolution in the OS with a hint of innovation. I feel glad knowing my family is using this over XP, obviously because of XP's glaring security issues.

Do you honestly think it will affect your family though?  Have they had security issues with Win XP?  I don't think most home users do. 

[CrAz3D]

In my opinion, I dont believe any thing will be as groundbreaking as 95.
I may be incorrect in this, but wasn't it the first/largest operating system that was 'user friendly'?  ...that allowed people to learn as they went along.

I believe there would have to be some new extreme revolution in computing and super changes in every way imaginable inorder to have something as impactive as 95.

I also agree with Warrior that it is a 'natural' evolution of the Windows operating system.  It may not be leap and bounds better than XP, but as it seems today no new updated ANYTHING is better by leaps and bounds than its predecessor.

[iago]

I think Windows Vista will eventually be used by most people. But not because it's good or useful or secure or pretty, but because people use whatever Best Buy or Dell installs for them. So really, Windows can't lose.

I was reading an old article the other day about how awesome Windows XP's security was, and how it was an amazing improvement in stability and everything. Some of the stuff said about Windows XP sounded very familiar from Vista.

[Blaze]

I'm using Vista right on my laptop (what I'm posting on) and I'm able to get updates without activating and with a small program apparently my 30 day trial lasts forever on my NOT downloaded copy ;).  *shrug*

[Explicit]

But you have to consider that when they say improvement in system security and stability, the statement could be made in comparison with the previous dominating OS at the time.  I guess it could be interpreted either way...

[MyndFyre]

Do you really think Vista is as groundbreaking as Windows 95 was though?

I think Windows 95 dramatically changed the way people used computers and made personal computing accessible and attractive to a large crowd of people.

For me, the benefits of using Vista typically won't be enjoyed or employed by the mainstream group of people who will be using it.  Things like having no limit on IIS that benefit me and my job directly as a web developer, or the tablet PC functionality integrated more lavishly.  Honestly, as much as Flip3D is touted, I doubt it will be used by many people other than enthusiasts such as myself.

Say what you will, but I've very much enjoyed using Vista since getting past the UAC annoyances, which took about two weeks.  I don't notice a performance decrease, but I will admit that it could be because of my hardware (I have a Centrino Duo in my notebook, where I've been running it since November; and a Core 2 Duo in my gaming rig). 

My notebook gets a great load, because I use it at work, so at any given time I'll have a couple instances of Visual Studio 2005 open and a SQL Server Management Studio instance running, not to mention any number of browsers and a media player. 

Moral of the story: don't knock it til you've tried it. ;)

[Skywing]

x86] link=topic=8555.msg108163#msg108163 date=1170894027]
[...]My conclusion:

Vista is lightyears ahead of XP in terms of security and reliability. The performance is lagging a little due to  mainly the new driver frameworks (User Mode, Kernel Mode, and Graphics) which Driver vendors are still struggling to perfect and some of the quality issues with some "version 1.0" platforms in Windows Vista. [...]

I don't think your information is very accurate.

Both UMDF and KMDF predate Vista (and both have been available as betas for a long time).  UMDF has been final since October or so of 2006 (and is supported back to XPSP2), and KMDF has been finalized for much longer (in fact, Vista ships 1.5, with 1.1 and 1.0 being previous releases available months before Vista).  KMDF is supported all the way back to Win2KSP4.

I remember hearing extensive details about both of them at Driver DevCon on the order of two years ago.  These are not brand new technologies, and they aren't even Vista-specific.  The driver development community has been aware of them for quite some time.

I can't think of any way that using KMDF could possibly reduce performance in a driver to any noticible way.  KMDF essentially just wraps the complicated state machine logic required to correctly support things like Plug and Play and power transitions (e.g. sleep, hibernate).  These are not performance critical paths, and KMDF's wrappering is quite light.

UMDF does introduce some very minor additional request latency for context switching, but for most USB devices (e.g. bulk transfer devices or one-way isochronous devices like webcams), this is unlikely to be noticible.  For devices that have extremely strict latency requirements, there is nothing preventing USB drivers from being written against the kernel instead of in user mode.

As far as what's good about Vista, aside from the improved user interface (personally, I find the on-by-default integrated search as a much more efficient way to start programs; saves you from having to use the mouse), and the flashy graphics, there are quite a lot of beneficial changes under the hood:

• Built-in ASLR (although PE images must be marked with a new flag to enable randomized based relocations, which partially reduces the effectiveness on third-party binaries).  All of the binaries shipping with the OS are marked ASLR-aware, however, which is a non-trivial improvement over previous versions.  Even the relatively light set of possible randomizations on that Vista's built-in ASLR applies is enough to make it significantly more a "shot in the dark" to successfully deploy something like Blaster in an automate, wide-scale fashion.  Due to some clever tricks relating to relocating individual image pages when they are paged in, Vista's ASLR has a minimal memory footprint.
• Significant improvement of the memory manager's locking model (many of the old "hot" locks have been either minimized or factored out entirely).
• A number of hardcoded address space related limitations (such as the desktop heap) have been factored out entirely.  You might have run into problems with this on previous Windows versions, where if you had opened hundreds of windows simultaneously, you'd have menus and child windows start to fail to appear or draw correctly.
• A significantly more multiprocessor-scalable network stack (among other things, new (NDIS6) NIC drivers can service interrupts on any CPU instead of just a single dedicated CPU on multiprocessor systems).  The new filtering model is also much better performance-wise than old style NDIS IM drivers (used for things like firewalls or NATs), which would often result in packets being unnecessarily copied several times in their lifetime.  Both of these changes are especially important with gigabit and 10-gigabit adapters, where traditional NDIS5/NDIS4 miniport and IM drivers typically run into performance walls at gigabit (and especially 10-gigabit) data rates.
• Baked-in APIs for supporting transactionalized registry operations, and atomic/transationalized complex (multi-read/write) filesystem operations that could be leveraged by programs to provide database-level reliablity relatively easily.
• Expanded set of APIs for dealing with NUMA (i.e. AMD's HyperTransport) memory allocations in NUMA multiprocessor systems (most AMD multi-processor-package (not multi-core) systems utilize HyperTransport to better partition RAM across processors for performance reasons).
• Significantly improved software (user mode and kernel mode) and hardware (i.e. MCE/MCA) error reporting mechanisms, that are now exposed to ISVs as well as Microsoft.

This is hardly an all-inclusive list, and is primarily just an overview of many of the kernel-level improvements.  A number of these changes are things that produce a better platform for software developers and will need third-party applications written against them in order to really shine from an end-user perspective.

Now, certainly, not everything about Vista is going to be welcomed by everyone.  There is, however, a significant amount of new value for developers (and ISVs) that Vista adds as far as new capabilities baked into the platform itself (you might check MSDN to get detailed information on some of the new additions).

From a developer perspective, Vista is absolutely the biggest change to Windows since Win31 to 9x/NT3, or 9x to NT/Win2K.

[Warrior]

I didn't know the UMDF was backported to XP, cool. About the KMDF, I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote that.