Ask Your Vista Questions Here.

lucky you I have not had much luck getting rid of WGA so I am stuck with SP1

 

From helping family members with tiher SP2 computers WGA is only 40% of the problem Driver and compatibly issues are the other 60% 0-o

 

Vista won't see the light of day on my computers. Windows XP may give some folks problems, but it has always been rock solid for me since day one.

 

GrandpaBW
XP is alright but hates some programs and hardware its like lunix is nowadays but runs more stuff *L*

 

Zippy, i take it you do realise that if you dare to compare Linux to windows XP again, i will be forced to torture you to death, right ?

 

The_Fiend
Yes dear I know lunix is better but thats not the point,XP has better software/hardware support,Lunix has everything else,Mac is almost the same but Lunix runs on more hardware than mac thus I never talk about mac.

Have I confused you yet?

 

only mac i will ever use is a big mac

 

lol. me too. I never tried linux so i can't judge.

 

Vista Home Basic: of lemons and lemonade

10/28/2006 4:03:45 PM, by Ken Fisher

Back in 1998 there was one consumer Windows OS release tier, just like in 1995. Come 2001, there were two: Home and Professional. In 2007, there will be four: Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate, and Business (I've left out Enterprise since it is a volume licensing product). Of the four editions, Home Basic is decidedly feature light. It will lack the bells and whistles of the fancier consumer tiers, which means no Media Center functionality and no Aero Glass, among other things.

Is it a fundamentally flawed product? Acer is talking openly about what many OEMs are privately expressing frustration over: the weak value proposition offered by Windows Vista Home Basic. The many-headed hydra that is Vista has at least one gimp head, according to complaints.

If you ask Jim Wong, senior corporate VP at Acer, Microsoft has crippled Home Basic so thoroughly that it is essentially just an excuse to wring more money out of OEMs. Wong told PC Pro that "Premium is the real Vista," drilling home his view that Home Basic is a lemon that consumers will shun entirely. The real problem, Wong says, is that "[OEMs] have to pay more [for Home Premium] but users are not going to pay more." This, he says, will result in a 1-2 percent increase in the cost of manufacturing a new PC, and Wong insists that the OEMs will have to eat that cost rather than pass it on to consumers. He did not elaborate why this cost cannot be passed on to consumers.
Demanding Home Premium?

When Vista's pricing was announced, many commentators picked up on the parity in pricing between XP Home and Home Basic. Microsoft hadn't raised prices, it seemed. Yet if Home Basic is not a feasible product, then that is no longer true in some sense.

Wong's views on the weaknesses of Home Basic beg the question: will "consumers" really shun Home Basic? He clearly assumes that they will, but it's hard to have that discussion without noting that more than 90 percent of all Windows sales stem from new PC purchases, and consumers tend to purchase whatever is offered. This is no more clear than in the case of Windows XP Media Center, which is now found on scores of PCs and laptops, with their owners having no idea what Media Center is or what they can do with it. How does this happen?

Consider Dell. The OEM currently offers XP Home and XP Media Center Edition as base options on many of their consumer and home office systems. They're the same price: $0. An upgrade to XP Professional will cost $99, however. This is one of the ways in which Microsoft has been able to dramatically boost Media Center sales, and many OEMs have taken advantage of the situation to market laptops in particular as great entertainment solutions.

The takeaway here is this: there's no evidence that consumers en masse will reject Home Basic. For every guy looking down a a feature list there's a handful of people who don't. This leaves the ball in the OEMs' court.
The role of Anytime Upgrade

Thus to the accusation that Home Basic is a ploy to force OEMs into using Home Premium, we have serious doubts about that, too. First, Microsoft could have simply nixed Home Basic altogether, and raised prices regardless. There's another reason why we think Microsoft takes Home Basic seriously: Anytime Upgrade.

In Microsoft's eyes, a Home Basic sale is an upsell opportunity. If Joe Consumer decides that Aero Glass is the spice of life, the company will sell him an upgrade for a nominal amount. Microsoft has not yet released pricing on Anytime Upgrade, but we fully expect it to be based on the difference between retail versions. With the retail price difference between Home Basic and Home Premium (full versions) coming in at $40, we expect Anytime Upgrade to price an on-the-fly move between Home Basic and Premium somewhere south of that number (but not much, lest the company accidentally create a way to get cheaper upgrades).

The end result is that Microsoft has the best of both words. If OEMs shun Home Basic, Microsoft sees a 10 percent revenue boost on OEM Home Premium sales, but if OEMs keep Home Basic in the lineup, those users may generate significantly more revenue when they drop $30-$40 on an Anytime Upgrade that has no middleman.
Seeing the future

The big unknown here is how Joe Consumer will really react to Home Basic. In expert and enthusiast circles, Home Basic is indeed shunned, but there's big difference between these groups and your average Dell or Gateway customer. Media Center functionality is most certainly not a "must have" feature for an operating system. Then there's Aero Glass. Home Basic lacks the transparencies and other 3D-accelerated Windows Effects of Aero Glass, but otherwise the standard interface looks quite similar. 99.9 percent of all Windows users live without transparency in their User Interface today. When Vista ships are we really to imagine that consumers overnight will shun anything less than a full Aero Glass experience?

OEMs like Acer appear ready to make that decision for their customers, and some would say that they have to, since the company's system-building business focuses on retail PC sales, not the build-to-order (BTO) market. Acer has to worry about how their product looks next to an eMachine at the local Best Buy, which is most likely why Wong feels such pressure to ignore Home Basic altogether.

Will larger BTO OEMs also follow suit? I think the answer to that question is not to be found in consumer preferences, but rather in the OEMs' assessment of Anytime Upgrade's potential to cut into their own BTO upsell efforts. That's a topic for a different (torrentially) rainy day.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061028-8097.html

 

I can gleam what they are tryign to do,force OEMs to use a non media playing version of vista so they can try and limit the music and video playing across the board on new releases of PCs,vista ultra basic is like XP home minus a few thigns,to keep pesky vid and music downlanders at bay...least until someone fixs it..


On the other hand tho tis simple streamlined vista minus all the bells and whistles people like us dislike media palyer..oh wait they cant be that good....its the media center thigny not media palyer..hell....I was hoping for vista lite....never mind ><

 

Well i just got vista up and running so far it has been smooth sailing. I have had no trouble other than retrieving all my sofware compatilibity issues that i have not have. The Version of VISTA is RTM Build 6000 i believe, if im wrong please correct me. However, I was amazed by how fast the installation went. It Was WAY FAST than XP pro it seemed that it took less than an hour to install this amazing OS Comapared to WINXP clean installation and reformatting process. Any how, as for web searching and browsing i have installed Firefox 2.0 it is great. I have had no problems with the add-ons and extensions and themes. My ATI 9600SE is also Great as well. My sounds by Creative Audigy se is superior. It seems that overall i give window vista 10.

 

SO hows video and audio playing?

 

Well my creative sound is not all up to par at the moment since it's still in beta release for Vista. I'm using the Creative Audigy version 6.0.1.1220,and Video is excellent since im using the Catalyst driver version 8.31.100.0. I tried playing a converted Superman Returns ext. .vod file in nero's 7.50.70. will not play i keep getting this error in nero showtime : cannot play this media file. The file is either corrupt or the application does not support the format you are trying to play. however, i am able to watch it in a .avi extension in Windows Media Player 11 which is very good thus far without any hiccups. Also, I have Hp Photosmart2610xi all in one printer and I have talked to hp if they have a compatible software for my device and they said than the all in one has a built in software that would be compatible to Windows Vista. And surely enough they were right. I was able to print my documents and stuff. But, they are working on a compatible software for the hp photosmart2610xi. I even ran Azures 2.5 Win32 on Vista and it work A-okay with out any hiccups as well.

 

cyntek
when they do release it Audio and video will be dead since they will lock down the streams.

I would not be surprised if they started to black list programs altho...the mafaa has not enslaved MS just yet

I am just staying away form vista right now..

 

Yeah...well i've been hearing that a lot lately about blacklisting audio&video streams. I think it sux!!

 

No they are merely lcking down the audio and video feeds for "legit" use's.

Blacklisting is where they make a profile of programs to not install or work.

hopefuly black listing is more paranoia than reality...

--------------
0f coarse are they wiling to lock out video streaming,classic game video and any other legit but non protected media.....

 

Well boys and girls, last night our firm got the pre vista IT pro resource review package so we can get an idea of it's architecture and whatnot.
And after reviewing the details the boss decided we will not be stocking windows vista any time soon, and we will not be offering support for companies that use it.
"Why?" you may ask? well.. the list is very long...

here's some links to give you an idea :
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/security/default.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/mgmntops/default.mspx

After reviewing the way the kernell protection will work, we agreed that this software will not only be more harmfull to the average consumer than mallware, we also felt that the restrictions it imposes on filesharing, legla copying of dvd's, making legal mp3's out of one's cd's, are simply not acceptible.
The firm does not condone piracy, but even my boss likes to make backups of his legally owned dvd's, and he rather enjoys that freedom, and doesn't like the prospect of microsoft taking that liberty away from him.
And the worst problem we where faced with was the fact that no third party AVS or Firewall software can be installed on Vista.
It seems microsoft is trying to gain an even bigger monopoly over the software market this way.
We also realised that vista will ship with windows mediaplayer installed *WITHOUT THE OPTION TO REMOVE IT* once again...

I though microsoft was forbidden to do that by a bunch of commissions and was fined for this practice ?
Such a sad state of affairs.

Long story short : all you people here hyping up this hunk of junk should get your heads examined, cause it might look nice on the outside, but if you take a deeper look, it's all rubbish.

 

The_Fiend
I knew dvd writing was handicapped from the start unlike the VId/audio protection but they are going to lock down on what data you can backup as well? 0-o

 

Yep. And the list goes on.