Posted by Vince on 4/25/2009, 8:38 am, in reply to "Another article questioning Microsoft's future"
68.144.14.16
To go past W2K, in my opinion.
If Microsoft can totally revamp a system with service packs, they could easily have gradually turned W2K into XP.
Now, TCP/IP in XP was getting obsolete .....granted. It's a TCP/IP4 system and TCP/IP6 is definitely the protocol of the future. The 6 protocol is 128 bit addressing (opposed to 32 bit in TCP4) which permits virtually unlimited IP addresses for as many computers as we can possibly forsee in the far future. The TCP4 protocol was no longer adequate for world needs and couldn't have worked without the use of domestic routers to service multiple addresses on the inside of the router using NAT traversal.
However, NAT traversal slows down speed since it has to process addressing change continually and so TCP6 is significantly faster and more accurate.
But ........ 2 things ......
Microsoft allegedly "borrowed" its TCP4 stack for NT from Unix. It was tested and tried and solid. XP has a really fine and solid network protocol. With Vista, they've rewritten the entire thing from scratch and it has bugs which were already fixed in W95!~ Vista has some consistently big problems connecting with certain routers that XP doesn't have.
Well anyway ....... TCP6 COULD HAVE been integrated into XP via a service pack I'm sure.
Otherwise, Vista is slower than XP per given machine ....... graphics are not as good and sound is not as good as in XP. Skype works better in XP than in Vista.
So overall, what are the benefits of Vista? Vista has ehhh .... more security perhaps. It's extremely irritating but NOTHING can be done to the system without the screen going dark and a box popping up asking the user if they REALLY want to do the action. Because of this persisting annoyance, users tend to get careless and just say yes to everything without giving it any thought. Alternately, it can be turned off and then it's virtually the same secure level as XP.
Vista boots a bit faster (if everything is just fine) but ........ has an annoying habit of corrupting itself and needing to be repaired. It repairs easier than XP but it also breaks down a LOT more than XP.
Vista boots from a software bios stored on the drive itself -(and Mac OS-X does too). Well ........ that "might" be good for some things but it also causes a lot of trouble for things like dual booting. It's a nightmare to do multi booting on Vista, compared to XP.
Overall, I can't think of anything nice to say about Vista. I've found no features whatsoever, that I like better with Vista.
Now, when I took the leap from Millenium to XP, I was dubious. I heard that there were a lot of apps that wouldn't run on XP. I switched to XP in 2003, when XP was still in service pack 1 mode and just 2 years old. Aside from a really bad initial "initiation experience" with XP (where my Quicken program slipped in IE3 after I'd told it not to ..... and it took XP 3 hours to boot and was still useless) ...... I found to my pleasant surprise ... that it would run pretty much everything that ME had run. Even my brother's old 400 mhz AMD ran better with XP on 128 mb of ram than 98 or ME ever had ...... because the drivers for the mobo were finally up to snuff and debugged in XP!~
So how old is Vista NOW? Just over 2 years old. It's still a dog. I think developers have given up on it and never WILL improve or update the bad drivers for it ....... waiting instead, for Windows7 to come out.
Windows 7 has -at least- some good improvements worth mentioning. It's going to be a lot smaller (about 1/2 the size of Vista) and it outperforms Vista by a wide margin and even XP by a small margin. It's rumored to be including a virtual emulator to run XP for apps that are no longer compatible with the 7 system.
I have a hunch 7 will take off and be fairly widely accepted but it might be their last solid system. The company is approaching its expiry date unless it's totally redefined (as Macintosh was done in the late '90s.) I think Gates saw the writing on the wall and stepped down ... not wanting to be associated with further development down the dubious MSoft road.
I think we'll be seeing an end to the Microsoft monopoly in the next 10 years ...as other developers (think WINE) will create a Windows compatible operating system.
-Vince
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