Windows Vista

[pavanbabut]

Hmm VISTA interesting, but not great. I had a Beta version installed on one of my test machines in my lab, seems they did improve on their good old xp and learned a lot from MAC (mainly) and other competitors. They had a very good improvement in front end graphics rendering section. But still they couldn't come up at a full potential to be as competitent as others. I am talking in perspective of research and high performance ends. I still dont like XP and I would rather prefer MAC both on performance and graphics sides. The only problem is not many of the after market manufacturers support MAC based platforms and boards.

Microsoft has many drawbacks after their release of XP on NT platform. Their processes and IRQ sharing among the pheripherals is not good enough at all times even though most modern boards are having the capability of sharing at high system clock speeds. Its not a predictable assignment on all machines and it does it randomly (depends on the board type too). Hmm coming to graphics, I am sure that MS can never defeat MAC in graphics rendering and processing (but they did a very good improvement in this section in VISTA, but still they r not upto the mark). The process scheduling is very inefficient in XP compared to 2000, beleive me I am talking with experience in this case. Even I went back installing 2000 on one of our research systems which are used for image grabbing at 20MHz and pattern generation boards at 40MHz. Coming to CPU scheduling it all depends on how well your programs uses the memory and how effient your have configured your system using page files.

But I would strongly agree is you use .NET platform versions of softwares on VISTA, it would be a great improvement. I have converted some of my MFC stuff to C# but still in some cases MFC seems to be more efficient in memory management even though MS claims .NET is having a very efficient garbage handling/memory management procedures. But yeh multi threading and hyper threading has a definite improvement over .NET platform, but agian you can make use of this only if you have a very high end processor along with high burst rates of buses on the board and between the components along with a high performance board. Seems MS had learned a good lesson form Firefox (which is obvious if you look a the newer version of IE )

Even now if most of the aftermarket s/w and h/w manufacturers support the MAC platforms to the full extent I would prefer MAC, but for now sticking to MS (even though it really sucks)

Lets see how it will do in the market.....

-Pavan