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Vista- upgrading and DRM overhead :x

Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2007 8:12 pm
by Teddy
I just got my oem upgrade of vista a day ago and have found it to be VERY unpolished. upon installing vista, it had a fatal blue screen while trying to partition my hardrives.... which i was not able to recover from with out formatting the whole drive loosing my winxp partition. luckly i had ghosted it already so i didnt loose it, but WTF, how can it blue screen on something so basic as the install program???

Well 2 hours later after installing vista and doing the upgrade on the install(d@mn upgrade version wont let you do a real clean istall) i finally got vista all installed and all drivers for all devices. luckly the win32 version has all my hardwares drivers. First thing i noticed was that sound is all f&ck#&* up on vista, no direct sound acceration and my tv card cant get sound over the analog cable???? WTF is up with that??
I have also noticed that simple programs like the picture slide show screen saver causing instant reboots upon crashing while trying to start up, some web forms out there state this is due to the quality of the nvidia drivers, but according to Microshaft, the new driver model is supposed to remedy blue screens from the graphics cards....

As i have only 1 gig of system memory on my machine, it peforms like a dog... simple things like internet explorer takes at least 3x as long to start as in xp ect. and all games are nearly 30% slower. At this point in time i proceded to see what processes i could cut out to speed things up...I did immediatly shut off system restore( i use ghost) and auto update. but most other processes seem to depend on each other or post errors if shut down including windows defender. While checking out what i could shut down to speed up this hog i found a nice aritcle explaining the extreme overhead seen in vista.

Some dude named Peter Gutmann(a computer science lecturer at the University of Auckland) did some research on the matter and wrote up a very long paper that puts the smack down on vista's drm. Of course he talkes a bit about the whole deal where your video playback can be denied ect, but the most disturbing part i read was about how much system overhead is caused by all this.... NO WONDER vista is such a system hog.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/p ... _cost.html

Of course Microsoft had a comeback to it but basicly they state he was right.... Vista's DRM DOES cause your system to waist LOTS of resources just to make sure your not pirating crap.

Microsoft admitted that the CPU will be taxed further but Mr Marsh said \"Vista's Content Protection features were developed to carefully balance the need to provide robust protection... while still enabling great new experiences...\"

Mr Gutmann said it was insincere of Microsoft to lay the responsibility for the increased copy protection systems at the feet of content providers.

He said: \"Saying 'we were only following orders' has historically proven not to be a very good excuse.

this can be read on the BBC found here.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6286245.stm

Personally this pisses me off as a gamer. I know lots of gamers out there are paying lots of money for hardware that gives you those extra fps or that network card for $250 that shaves off that 15 ms... but now it's lost to vista doing encription and making sure your not pirating movies, and even several pipes of my 8800 are dedicated to doing this encription instead of working on graphics!! :x

The worst thing about this is dx10 is only vista,Microsoft has stated that we have gotten our money out of xp and if you want to play dx10 games shell out money for vista or use dx9l for xp which will allow you to play dx10 games but put much of the features on the cpu(making it much slower then vista even if you have dx10 hardware like i do( i have an 8800).
I have even seen some games come out strictly for vista (geometry wars for one). Seems Microsoft needs to twist gamers arms to get them to upgrade.... :x

As for me, I'm sticking with xp while it lasts and eventually switching to Linux as it's approaching the useability of windows.

I am also writing to every game developer that i can to say that if they dont support opengl in thier game engine, i simply wont buy thier games.... Microshaft has way to much control over the gaming industry with directx and it shuts down cross platform developing if opengl is not used.

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 5:30 am
by FunkyStickman
Amen, amen, and amen.

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 7:54 am
by Spooky

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 9:13 am
by DigiJo
good read teddy, and my i add...

amen, amen, amen...

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 9:15 am
by JMEaT
Agreed. I'm using XP as long as possible... and probably still longer after Updates stop coming out.

Edit: Oh yeah. Amen.

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 9:18 am
by Nosferatu
Hey believe it or not, Im still using W2K and still am totally happy with it. :P

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 10:37 am
by Top Wop
I am imagining (and hoping) that somehow a smart programmer somewhere (probably in Russia, I bet you $100 on it) will port DX10 in its fullest form into XP. Otherwise, OpenGL here we come.

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 11:42 am
by JMEaT
I think this will end up being a good thing. Enthusiasts are the majority of hardcore gamers (Solitaire aside).

If the enthusiast market is in an uproar over Vista, developers will see that moving away from a platform (DX10) in favor of something more universal, will be a lot easier on their wallets.

IMHO.

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 11:43 am
by Krom
Wishful thinking, I do not believe the Empire will fall so easily. :P

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 11:46 am
by JMEaT
You're probably right. We were all in an uproar over XP when it first came out and we all ended up sucking the proverbial nipple.

Re:

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 11:50 pm
by Nosferatu
JMEaT wrote:You're probably right. We were all in an uproar over XP when it first came out and we all ended up sucking the proverbial nipple.
Not me. :P

See post above.

Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 6:10 am
by The Lion
I think Wine is also going to develop a DX10 API. Right now they have
almost nothing to work with and it's still in a very early stage, but once
(most of) the work has been done, and if all this DRM really causes
that much overhead, Wine is probably going to run those DX10 games
faster than Vista itself does.

Here, in one of their weekly newsletters, they suggest a DX10 project for
Google's Summer of Code.

Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 9:39 am
by Top Wop
Bah @ wine.

Lets wait for ReactOS to mature, then we would have a REALLY NICE alternative that doesn't require arcane set-up instructions that only work some of the time.

Re:

Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 10:44 am
by Nosferatu
Top Wop wrote:Bah @ wine.

Lets wait for ReactOS to mature, then we would have a REALLY NICE alternative that doesn't require arcane set-up instructions that only work some of the time.
Hu? O_o

FC6
"yum install wine"

Working great right out of the box for me.

Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 2:28 pm
by The Lion
Or \"emerge wine\" with Gentoo.

Then \"winecfg\" will pop a dialog to help you configure it, if that's even necessary.