And James.

(Sorry James if this is indeed a site violation).

Sorry to James if this violates site policies and thanks in advance for any explanations.

The thought that I would be pinched to run Vista in a gig of RAM is appalling to me.

Vista aggressively pre-loads frequently used applications. It tracks which programs you tend to use at various times of day and tries to have them ready to launch when you need them.

I'm familiar with the prefetching done on XP, but I think that was just disk caching, not loading into physical memory. I'm kind of surprised they would be loaded them into memory actually, since of the (locate on disk)->(read into memory)->(execute) process, the (read into memory) is usually the fastest.

For example, the registry is now transactional

So the line between the Registry and a database has blurred even further? Well, I suppose this is a good thing.

The filesystem is also transactional so a program can make multiple changes (create directories, delete files, etc) and then decide whether to keep all the changes or undo them all.

Even without WinFS? I thought they were still using the same NTFS as XP and 2000, have they just added transactions as an API extension?

New software written for Vista will be able to take advantage of these new features. Over time, this should lead to a better user experience.

This may lead to a better experience for developers and Q&A, but the end user I don't think will notice them much. After all, how many times do you notice any of the problems these would solve?

I admit I'm not the power user I used to be now that I'm retired. In fact, it seems that my computer is used almost exclusively these days for running my blog and deleting spam email with the occasional memo or letter. My programming skills, while not novice, are only fair. I gravitated to computer graphics way way back and left the programming to others whose brain I can pick when I screw up.

I didn't know about the "fetch" feature of Vista. That is interesting.

Thanks all.

1. begin a transaction
2. make multiple changes to the registry
3. either commit the transaction if everything succeeds or rollback if something goes wrong (e.g. the user clicks 'cancel')

The filesystem is also transactional so a program can make multiple changes (create directories, delete files, etc) and then decide whether to keep all the changes or undo them all.

New software written for Vista will be able to take advantage of these new features. Over time, this should lead to a better user experience.

I better stop now because I think I see Mr. Joyner coming to call me a sock puppet for defending Microsoft ;-)

This is part of the reason Vista tends to look like it is using a ton of RAM.

If you are curious about the details, you can read up on "superfetch".

Having said all that, I agree Vista tends to be much more usable with 2gig of ram.

But they are XP version, so maybe that's why my transferred Office programs aren't working, rather than just needing to be reloaded.

You should re-install any application, instead of just copying the program files over, because a lot of things the program relies on (Registry, system dll's) aren't in the same folder as the program itself. It's always safer to just re-install.

Running Vista without Aero and most of the Asus added programs turned off was sucking up over 600 megs of physical memory.

Is that right? Without Aero it still eats up 600 megs of ram? I have Compiz running, plus firefox and WindowsXP in virtualization (Qemu) and I'm sitting at 375MB.

With Aero and only 1 Gig of RAM I was unable to play music on media player and solitaire (that came bundled with the OS) at the same time.

I heard it was bad, but I didn't know it was that bad. I have just 1GB, and running what I mentioned above, I can still play music and videos with no problem.

The problems I had with Vista were all overcome by upgrading from 1 Gig to 2 Gigs of RAM. Running Vista without Aero and most of the Asus added programs turned off was sucking up over 600 megs of physical memory. With Aero and only 1 Gig of RAM I was unable to play music on media player and solitaire (that came bundled with the OS) at the same time.

If I understand what you are saying, I should be able to load Office 2000 and have it work fine. For some reason, I had those CDs in my computer bag, but I didn't think to try loading from them.

I had heard all kinds of warnings and stay away from Vista hang wringing, but I haven't found any reason not to use it. I have 4 computers all networked together. 1 Vista, 2 XP and 1 Win 2000 Pro. Win 2000 Pro is still my favorite. It has been running on a machine that dates back to the late 90s and nowadays I use it for backup. But in 7 years or more it has never ever had a crash or a single Op sys problem.

The computer industry is in an interesting position. The industry grew up in the revolutionary environment that said next years product would do more and cost less. That changed marketing paradigms. But now while you will get more bang for your buck with next year's model, you may be hard pressed to justify the need.

The open source industry is now in that revolutionary environment, and a lot of what you saw in the early days of commercial software you now see in open source software. Ubuntu (The Vista "alternative" I linked to above) has a new version released every 6 months, and it always contains new/more/better features, and is always free. There is rarely a justification _not_ to upgrade.

The monopolies for Intel and Microsoft (yes they have competitors, but lets face it they own enough of the market to be able to act as monopolies) is showing in the lack of innovation.

Microsoft absolutely, and 10 years ago the same could be said for Intel. But now, Intel's market has become quite competitive, and they are back to innovating in order to keep up. And not just with CPUs, they also compete in GPU and wireless chipset markets.

The monopolies for Intel and Microsoft (yes they have competitors, but lets face it they own enough of the market to be able to act as monopolies) is showing in the lack of innovation.