Windows Vista Basic Vs. Xp Professional

[cdnvic]

Those of us actually using Vista are all wondering when this great catastrophe that is supposed to occur is going to happen? (sky falling, seas boiling, famine, pestilence, etc) So far it's been quite trouble free. I've got XP still but don't feel the least bit inclined to switch back, even if it does run flawlessly on my Vista machine.

To those out there running osX, you have a great system and I'm not going to trash it Those predicting doom and calamity with the coming of Vista though need to lower the tone of their screeching though, the big disaster that was predicted just isn't happening.

Viva la Vista

[astral]

I've just had the dubious pleasure of setting up two Sony laptops for some relatives. Vista Home Premium was pre-installed, so I really had no choice for the OS, and there were no XP drivers available.

I have just helped a friend revert to XP on his new Sony Vaio VGN FE-48G.

Yes, Sony tells us that there are no XP drivers available, but that is not true.

The XP installation disk found quite a bit of the h/w.

Screen drivers were downloaded from NVIDIA

The chipset and wireless drivers for Intel

The Sigmatel sound card gave us the biggest headache.

Online support from Sony Asia is pathetic.

The US only seems to support Vista.

The biggest ray of hope comes from Europe.

We eventually traced this site with compatible XP drivers. (Download the pre-installed set).

The secret is the little file from Microsoft KB853221 which unlocks the UAA bus.

It is in the Audio driver folder.

Next install the Sigmatel Audio Driver in the XP set.

When it asks for a Modem driver use the one in the XP drivers you downloaded.

Strangely the modem is on the same bus as the audio card.

The only outstanding problem is the in built camera, but I feel sure we will find a suitable driver.

[Firefoxx]

I wasn't really prepared to conduct a worldwide manhunt to search for XP drivers that weren't included. Just too much trouble to go through, and something that I'd have to go through again and again, for varying hardware (three different notebooks so far, more in the future).

I am using Vista, just not on my desktop, but on a laptop. Even through the installation of programs, configuration, various compatibility headaches, the weird screen fonts, and the way programs just don't work as they should, I don't like it. It's got too many loose ends, similar to the way XP was pre-SP1. Yes, the idea is good, but the implementation is not good enough for me.

The Mac is a lifestyle. You either get it or you don't, and those who do don't get along with those who don't. I don't, and probably never will.

[CBinParadise]

Those of us actually using Vista are all wondering when this great catastrophe that is supposed to occur is going to happen? (sky falling, seas boiling, famine, pestilence, etc) So far it's been quite trouble free. I've got XP still but don't feel the least bit inclined to switch back, even if it does run flawlessly on my Vista machine.

To those out there running osX, you have a great system and I'm not going to trash it Those predicting doom and calamity with the coming of Vista though need to lower the tone of their screeching though, the big disaster that was predicted just isn't happening.

Viva la Vista

Let's see: you tell us to lower the tone of our screeching, but you start your post with "sky falling, seas boiling, famine, pestilence".

I never said anything of the sort. I am merely trying to convince people who have not yet gotten Vista to delay as long as possible. I have said many times that Vista no doubt runs great --- on more powerful hardware. I have not predicted doom (although I have warned about excessive DRM on premium content --- which incidentally is exactly what the UAA bus mentioned below is for). I have merely tried to make the point that Vista brings more lockin benefit to MS than it does enhanced function to users.

I don't think I've submitted a single post that lacked references, explanations, or URLs. In return we get unsupported opinion. Can we please remember the rules of polite engineering discourse and stop acting like children whose new toy is being discussed?

And for the record: I use Vista every day, usually to sort out problems for others in my company.

Astral, thank you VERY much for your post on downgrading your Sonys back to XP. Incidentally the latest KB number for the UAA bus download is 888111 --- this is a major discovery, thanks mucho. The url is:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888111/en-us

I think it's instructive to show the exact steps involved in a downgrade. This is directly from the site Astral found:

I am the happy owner of an [sony Vaio] AR31M, which came pre-installed with Vista. The story below explains how I managed to downgrade it back to XP Pro (UK) and got all devices to work: RAID, S-ATA, Video, Bluetooth, sound, camera, network, etcetera.

What you need before you start:

- The AR31M (in my case with 2x 100Gb S-ATA Hitachi drives)

- An XP Pro full pack installer CDRom

- The AR21M XP drivers

- The AR31M Vista drivers (for the VCC4 camera only)

- A USB floppy disk drive for accessing the RAID & S-ATA drivers during the XP-setup (unless you dare to follow this instruction)

- A floppy disk with the RAID & S-ATA drivers, here's the one I created.

- The NVidia unified GeForce Go driver plus the corresponding *.inf file from http://www.laptopvideo2go.com to make it recognize the AR31M's 7600 version. Here's the one I used.

- Patience.

Assuming a clean install, make sure you've backuped all your important stuff to CDRom.

Step one: install the XP basics

The challenge is to get the XP-setup to load two drivers from one floppy disk, this requires merging the txtsetp.oem files from both the S-ATA and RAID driver. Save yourself time and use the one I made, listed above. The rest is easy: press F6 at the installation start, setup will ask for the disk and assign the two drivers from the menu. Once XP is up and running (in VESA mode) run windows update.

Step two: install the video driver

The XP driver from the AR21M is supposed to work, but it doesn't run stable on (my) AR31M. Alternatively, download the NVidia unified GeForce Go driver instead, place the new *.inf file in the install directory and run setup from there. Note, check http://www.laptopvideo2go.com to make sure you have the right *.inf file.

Step three: sound

Install the audio-hotfix KB835221 from the AR21M audio-driver directory before installing the actual driver.

Step four: install all remaining XP drivers and utilities from the AR21M, except for Bluetooth and the camera

It may be a bit of a puzzle, but simply go through all unidentified devices in your device manager and 'update driver' with drivers from the AR21M XP driver CD. Skip the UGX driver for now.

Step five: Bluetooth

The 'unknown' UGX driver is a really annoying one. It's not recognized by XP and you can't seem to download it anywhere. I found this excellent instruction on how to trick XP into using its own driver & stack (instead of the Toshiba one) which works just as well:

Go to Device Manager and find the "UGX" with the exclamation point, and "Update Device Driver". Tell it you'll find the software, and when it gives up, tell it to show you all hardware available. Select Bluetooth, and then "Alps USB Bluetooth Adapter". Let it install the drivers. After a restart, your bluetooth adapter should be functioning normally, but with the Windows stack instead of the Toshiba one.

But... if Windows won't let you use its built-in driver, go to Device Manager, select the UGX, and go to Properties. Under the Details tab, select "Hardware IDs" in the dropdown box, and copy both of those "Vid\Usb...." strings. Edit the "bth.inf" file in your %windir\inf directory (probably c:\windows\inf), and add new lines under the Sony section, with a name of your choosing and the PnP IDs you copied above. Just follow the same format as all the other lines in the Hardware section of that file. It should be easy enough to figure out. Save it and try the above again.

Step six: the Camera

In the device manager, XP will probably already have recognized the camera as a USB Video device, and it may actually already work fine. But on my system it didn't, whenever I installed the VCC4 driver (from your AR31M-Vista driver CD), the device would fail to start. I found an instruction somewhere on the web (can't remember where exactly) suggesting this could be because of faulty power handling at USB-hub level. To bypass this, go to you Device Manager, click view-by-connection and the find the USB Hub to which the Video USB device is connected. Open its properties, click the Power Management tab and then uncheck the option allowing windows to switch the device off. This worked for me.

Step seven: the missing memory stick icon

The annoying 'blank' memorystick icon... luckily there are people on the web looking into stuff like this and publishing solutions. It's actually quite simple:

Copy snymsico.dll to your C:\WINDOWS\

Edit registry (run > regedit): HKLM > Software > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > Explorer > AutoPlayHandlers > DeviceGroups > MemoryStick

Set Icons to %SystemRoot%\snymsico.dll,0

Set NoMediaIcons to %SystemRoot%\snymsico.dll,1

What this does is, gray out the memory stick icon when no media is inserted, then when a memory stick is inserted it changes the icon to blue.

Step eight

Enjoy your awsome AR31M, in a clean, lean and mean XP environment (and forget about Vista).

[solo siam]

I personally like Vista, I probably wouldn't recommend using an older computer for it, but saying that I did just that and used a P4 3.0Ghz with 1Gb RAM, which works well.

Vistas trouble shooting is excellent, I have never seen anything like it - If it ever crashes or theres a problem it lists all the details, suggests fixes etc...

In terms of drivers, lots of things don't even need them anymore - for example my HP printer, just plugged it in and it started working immediately.

[sjaak327]

Wrong. Here's 2 pages describing the overall state of Mac backwards compatability. If you need to you can switch from OS X BACK to OS 9 and then back to OS X AGAIN --- twenty times a day --- without loosing anything. Or as you said, another alternative is to use Classic mode without rebooting. About 25% of Mac users are still running one or the other of these options, five years after OS X was introduced.

Try switching from Vista back to XP today. As many posters have pointed out, it's difficult or impossible because hardware they were forced to buy doesn't come with XP drivers. I am sure that running XP will be a real challenge in about two years. Classic WAS dreadful --- unless you had a piece of hardware or software that needed it --- then it was a lifesaver.

The pages:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106667

http://lowendmac.com/misc/07/0402.html

First of all, there is no problem whatsoever to switch back to XP, if you used XP on your pc beforehand, and then switched to Vista, there is no problem to revert that change. If you bought a new computer, with Vista pre-loaded, then of course there is a chance that some components will not have XP drivers. This is hardly Microsoft's fault though, I mean who decides to not provide XP software drivers for new hardware, the hardware manufacturers do, not Microsoft.

Also going from Mac OS9 to Mac OSX meant that some hardware simply didn't work anymore, I had a sagem ISDN card, no drivers for OSX, ripped out the board since it was absolutely useless. Classic mode was a lifesafer for some programs, and a downright disaster for others. I had to administer some Mac's for DTP people, the classic OS didn't provide enough font support and was crashing the machine several times a day. In the end it was necesssary to upgrade Xpress.

You DON'T have added security in Vista --- unless your BIOS supports TPM, in which case you bought a little additional security for a TON of serious DRM problems. Sure your Vista machine runs faster --- it probably has a lot more hardware to run on. I'd be grateful to hear about the applications that run on Vista but not XP --- I haven't heard of anything significant. Bottom line: Vista users pay a lot for a little eye candy.

Incidentally, it won't be long before Vista closes the door completely on systems running pirated or "illegal" or "unsupported" configurations (like the 10.4.3 system you used yesterday). That's WHY Microsoft is forcing this upgrade on you now.

Lack of information I would say, Of course Vista has way more added security then just the TPM chip and bitlocker, that's just one aspect. It comes with UAC, a protected kernel (the main reason, most of the anti virus software will need to be upgraded) and it is BY DESIGN, safer then anything Microsoft has ever released.

There are several pieces of software that come with Vista (Ultimate or Home Premium) that were not in XP, two examples are Media Center (which was a separate edition in XP) and DVD maker. The reason that Vista runs faster (on the same hardware that XP did run on !) is simply because somehow Vista makes better use of Dual Core and the memory. Also the pricing is more or less the same as XP pricing, so for people who buy a new PC, there is no reason why they would be buying XP.

Your last remark in this section, seem to be warning me of MS's capability to block illigal configurations, I fail to see how, I'm sure they won't be blocking me from running Vmware ?

You fail to see how MSFT could force anyone to use their software???? Try this: Intel introduces the microprocessor, IBM puts it into the first PC, which is hugely successful in businesses, gaining market share (which creates what economists call a network effect). Microsoft, in a brilliant marketing move, arranges for you to pay for a copy of MSFT software when you buy ANY Intel PC --- even if you're not going to use the PC to run Microsoftware. Later, force people to pay for NETBIOS using the same scheme. Now you ARE actually paying for and using MSFT software, like it or not, every time you run an INtel chip OR an Intel clone.

You fail to see how MS could force a change to Vista ???? Try this: MS forces all its third party software developers and hardware device vendors to create Vista-compatible products (or face severe licensing and branding penalties). Exempt Office 2007 from the penalties, as a bonus. Enforce a new bus-management standard for premium content, and get Intel and AMD to support the new standard. Sit back and wait for 3rd party vendors to realize they must create expensive new forms of their software or devices in order for them to be Vista compatible. Watch as XP computers disappear from shelves, and people are forced to buy the ones that come with Vista.

Also, read your own sentence again abut memory lane again --- it was right before your "I fail to see" sentence. the upgrades from Win95 to Win98 and then to WinNT and Win2K each provided MAJOR improvements in OS functionality. So people went to the trouble of upgrading, because their efforts were rewarded in the form of significantly improved OSes. The move from XP to Vista rewards MS far more than it does customers, which is why MSFT is using the whip this time, instead of the carrot.

Denying that Vista IS a major upgrade from XP of course make every discussion useless. Surely upgrade from Win95 to Win98 was not more then some cosmetic changes, I was talking about moving from Win95 to Win2k, from FAT to NFTS, that was a major upgrade.

Bottom line here is that Vista does provide a major upgrade in functionality, which makes it worthwile to updgrade. For people who buy a new computer, there is no reason to purchase XP with their new hardware. The only reason would be if you use that old application that simply doens't run on vista (I'm sure there are a few). Of course it won't run on the next MS OS release either, as MS has moved on and tighten security. So your old App that stilll runs in admin mode (bad idea) needs to be rewritten. Maybe the software manufacturer will do it, if not it's time to find alternatives.

[CBinParadise]

First of all, there is no problem whatsoever to switch back to XP, if you used XP on your pc beforehand, and then switched to Vista, there is no problem to revert that change. If you bought a new computer, with Vista pre-loaded, then of course there is a chance that some components will not have XP drivers. This is hardly Microsoft's fault though, I mean who decides to not provide XP software drivers for new hardware, the hardware manufacturers do, not Microsoft.

You are badly underestimating the level of influence MSFT exerts on hardware vendors and their driver provisioning and targeting. MSFT's biggest gun in this fight is the Vista Logo program -- see http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/HWrequirements.mspx

If you read its several hundred pages, you'll discover that the primary requirement for, eg, graphics devices isn't, as would be expected, the ability to handle a high-resolution display or display a rich palette of colours. It isn't the presence of a good quantity of memory and powerful graphics rendering. It isn't even the ability to handle Vista's much-touted Aero interface, arguably the primary reason for running Vista. Instead, the number one requirement for Windows Vista graphics device certification, “GRAPHICS-0001” in the specification, is “Display adapter supports output connectors with content protection features and provides control via PVP and COPP DDIs”. It's only the subsequent paragraphs that require that “Display subsystem meets GPU, memory, resolution, and bandwidth requirements for a premium Windows experience”. This is a pretty amazing admission, because it means that Microsoft is placing content protection above all other requirements for Vista, even the ability to handle Vista's primary feature, the Aero interface.

Another you should know is that 64-bit Vista will only load drivers signed by Microsoft (there's a special debug mode invoked by hitting F8 on boot or using the /TESTSIGN flag that allows you to load unsigned drivers on a one-off basis for debugging purposes, but this gets disabled again at the next reboot, and, if you haven't already guessed it, premium content playback is disabled completely in this mode). The whole story is at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platf.../kmsigning.mspx

THAT's how MSFT makes these sorts of decisions for hardware vendors to follow.

Lack of information I would say, Of course Vista has way more added security then just the TPM chip and bitlocker, that's just one aspect. It comes with UAC, a protected kernel (the main reason, most of the anti virus software will need to be upgraded) and it is BY DESIGN, safer then anything Microsoft has ever released.

Ha. Vista wasn't designed -- it was chopped up horribly as more and more components of Longhorn were dropped from the RTM build. I do agree that the original Longhorn design was a thing of beauty --- but Vista is not Longhorn --- which is why Vista was cracked on the day it was launched, and several times since --- and those are only the ones we know about.

Your last remark in this section, seem to be warning me of MS's capability to block illigal configurations, I fail to see how, I'm sure they won't be blocking me from running Vmware ?

Guess again. Here's the relevant quotes from the Vista End User License Agreement:

For Vista Home Basic and Home Premium Editions:

“USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.”

For Vista Enterprise and Ultimate Editions:

“USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system on the licensed device. If you do so, you may not play or access content or use applications protected by any Microsoft digital, information or enterprise rights management technology or other Microsoft rights management services or use BitLocker. We advise against playing or accessing content or using applications protected by other digital, information or enterprise rights management technology or other rights management services or using full volume disk drive encryption.”

In short, this means that if you’re a user and you want to run Vista virtually, you MUST buy the highest end versions of Vista, or you’ll be in violation of the Microsoft EULA.

So how will Microsoft enforce this? Now we come to the crux of the matter, and why DRM and TPM are so important. They are present in Vista for two reasons: 1. To facilitate Vista's licensing controls on premium content, facilitating Microsoft's move from the desktop to TV-top , and 2. To insure, absolutely, positively, that you are running Vista only in the modes and configurations that MSFT likes --- AND to give Microsoft the power to rescind your Vista license anytime it chooses. The shortest explanation I know of how this works is in Symantec's comments on the Vista kernel protections, available at: http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/securit...kernel_mod.html

The elevator version is that Secure Boot, when it's fully deployed, will be the key to giving Microsoft ultimate control over your copy of Vista --- something which no OS vendor has ever enjoyed before, and the reason I urge people to avoid Vista --- at least until the implications of this transfer of control of your computer are more fully understood.

Sjaak327, I thank you sincerely for a very absorbing conversation, but I have spent far too much time on this, at the expense of my real work. I'm going to turn off reply notifications and bow out at this point.

I think people are going to discover the degree to which Microsoft has increased its control of their computers under Vista, and they are not going to like it. Personally I loathe the idea. But I'm guessing you disagree --- it is certainly a hypercomplex topic, with plenty of room for differing opinions.

CB

[Firefoxx]

Everybody is entitled to their opinions, really, and in the end, it's just that: Opinions. There is no real right or wrong in the matter, just how a person feels that something is good or bad (for himself and perhaps others). There will of course be those that disagree, but that doesn't mean in any way, shape, or form, that either party is WRONG. They just think differently. You're a MAC, and I'm a PC (or You're VISTA, I'm XP, etc). Great. Let's live our lives.

I too will keep mum in this thread, as the replies are getting way too long.

[solo siam]

CBInParadise

Those Vista video features are in tune with high definition video transmissions and HDMI. HDMI cables and TV's, DVD players etc... themselves carry all sorts of DRM, requiring identification of devices, hand-shake protocols etc... I'm afraid its par for the course, especially if people want their PC's to play nicely with their TV's.

Microsoft are really aiming themselves towards the digital home, some of their work is quite interesting, like managed copy - but they are under obligation to protect the copyright holders etc.. If you want to blame anyone, it should be the movie and music companies (although they have a bit more experience and are looking at DRM-less media now).

[solo siam]

CBInParadise

Those Vista video features are in tune with high definition video transmissions and HDMI. HDMI cables and TV's, DVD players etc... themselves carry all sorts of DRM, requiring identification of devices, hand-shake protocols etc... I'm afraid its par for the course, especially if people want their PC's to play nicely with their TV's.

Microsoft are really aiming themselves towards the digital home, some of their work is quite interesting, like managed copy - but they are under obligation to protect the copyright holders etc.. If you want to blame anyone, it should be the movie and music companies (although they have a bit more experience and are looking at DRM-less media now).