[Nix]

I'm stoked about the modular design rather than the unwieldy design that we currently have.  It's nice to just shut down and restart a component such as a videocard driver upgrade in Linux, without having to restart the machine.  Shutdown X, install, edit config file, start X.  That's how it should be.  We shouldn't have to uninstall current drivers, restart in safe mode, use third party software to REALLY remove the drivers, reboot and install drivers, reboot again and tweak and reboot again.  Seems to be awfully brutal on computers, but as rebooting doesnt really hurt them.. it's just an inconvienence. 

[karajorma]

Is that gay activation gunna be in Vista?  I just cant take that!

Contrary to your beliefs Windows does not contain subliminal messages that turn you gay. Those thoughts you have about sucking dick are purely your own

[neoterran]

 

be nice, karajorma ! 

[aldo_14]

Is that gay activation gunna be in Vista?  I just cant take that!

Contrary to your beliefs Windows does not contain subliminal messages that turn you gay. Those thoughts you have about sucking dick are purely your own

I disagree

[vyper]

Dale Winton

[Deepblue]

Live anywhere is going to be awesome.

[Nix]

What, like a hotdog?

[WMCoolmon]

Is that gay activation gunna be in Vista?  I just cant take that!

Contrary to your beliefs Windows does not contain subliminal messages that turn you gay. Those thoughts you have about sucking dick are purely your own

I disagree

 

[ZmaN]

Is that gay activation gunna be in Vista?  I just cant take that!

Contrary to your beliefs Windows does not contain subliminal messages that turn you gay. Those thoughts you have about sucking dick are purely your own

I disagree

thanks for that.....

[aldo_14]

[Polpolion]

*gives aldo_14 a high-five



Sorry Zman, but it WAS funny!

[vyper]

roofle!

[Cyker]

Live anywhere is going to be awesome.

What the hell *IS* LiveAnywhere anyway?!!

It sounds like some scary mixup of Gamespy, MSN/ICQ and Steam

[camcanr]

I'm pretty sure my uncle is gunna buy it a few weeks after it comes out so I'll just use his copy 

XP has been acting very badly for me lately and I dont know when Im upgrading so i'll rpobably start using it when it comes out.

I got a feeling that it will work better than XP.

sorry to crash your hopes, but like XP, they are going to make sure that you can only install en you enter it, it checks the internet and if your uncle is connected to the net, it detects him(with the same serial #) and tells you your serial in wrong while it is right and you are stuck forever, entering the serial again and again(i know from experiance ).  also like xp, by 30 days, if you dont register your serial number, they dont allow you to use it any more, and if you do it around the same time your uncle does, they are going to find out that it is on 2 computers. and say its wrong and once again. you'll be stuck  ,just to let you know.

[aldo_14]

I'm pretty sure my uncle is gunna buy it a few weeks after it comes out so I'll just use his copy 

XP has been acting very badly for me lately and I dont know when Im upgrading so i'll rpobably start using it when it comes out.

I got a feeling that it will work better than XP.

sorry to crash your hopes, but like XP, they are going to make sure that you can only install en you enter it, it checks the internet and if your uncle is connected to the net, it detects him(with the same serial #) and tells you your serial in wrong while it is right and you are stuck forever, entering the serial again and again(i know from experiance ).  also like xp, by 30 days, if you dont register your serial number, they dont allow you to use it any more, and if you do it around the same time your uncle does, they are going to find out that it is on 2 computers. and say its wrong and once again. you'll be stuck  ,just to let you know.

That's tosh.  My old office had 2 or 3 computers, constantly connected, running the same versions of XP (we had a site licence, but lost the key); all you needed to do was phone up to activate, tell them you'd had to reformat because of a virus, and roberts your fathers brother - activation. 

They can't realistically block out individual machines (even if they have the capacity to do so, I'm not sure), because if there are 2 copies of the same XP (key), then odds are one is a legit user (who you do not want to punish) and the other is the illegit one.  Not to mention the technical difficulties where you have several million+ machines and thus several million keychecks to make.

Also, any properly hacked pirate version of XP would likely remove the code for both checking and any check for blocking machines anyways.

[Descenterace]

Then we have corporate site licences where many machines are supposed to have the same code.

[ZmaN]

*gives aldo_14 a high-five



Sorry Zman, but it WAS funny!

I admit, I was laughing myself...

How did he make those?

I'm pretty sure my uncle is gunna buy it a few weeks after it comes out so I'll just use his copy 

XP has been acting very badly for me lately and I dont know when Im upgrading so i'll rpobably start using it when it comes out.

I got a feeling that it will work better than XP.

sorry to crash your hopes, but like XP, they are going to make sure that you can only install en you enter it, it checks the internet and if your uncle is connected to the net, it detects him(with the same serial #) and tells you your serial in wrong while it is right and you are stuck forever, entering the serial again and again(i know from experiance ).  also like xp, by 30 days, if you dont register your serial number, they dont allow you to use it any more, and if you do it around the same time your uncle does, they are going to find out that it is on 2 computers. and say its wrong and once again. you'll be stuck  ,just to let you know.

Yeah like whatshisname said, I have XP on 5 computers all on na router all connected at the same time.  i dont see ms coming to my doorstep...

[Flipside]

You soon learn to turn off all the bells and whistles anyway, I turn off all non-essential faff from Task Manager before I run any games, I even shut down explorer.exe, for the most demanding games. Although Microsoft dump a lot of junk onto your computer, once you get the hang of the Admin panels, they are more a case of disk-space than memory.

[Fury]

The funny thing with "turning off bells and whistles" is that it might result in worse performance in Vista. For example, turning off Aero also disables hardware accelerated user interface, resulting that user interface is drawn by the CPU instead of GPU/VPU.

Back to Windows XP. Turning off 3rd party programs such as anti-virus programs before running games is fine, but killing Windows processes such as explorer is completely unnecessary and might actually result in worse overall system performance. Don't go overboard with your "optimizations" as uneducated optimizations will make your PC's performance worse, if you have read and collected multiple tweaks from different sources, you might want to re-check whether these so called tweaks actually make things better or worse. I have tested many of the most popular "performance tweaks", and I have often come to the conclusion that default WinXP SP2 system settings are the best, there is hardly no need to do any system performance tweaks as many of these tweaks actually make your system performance worse.

The only thing in Windows XP SP2 that needs tweaking, are the system services. Many of the system services that are set to start up automatically, are unnecessary and thus can be started up manually by XP when needed. I have to stress that do not disable services in WinXP SP2 that have been set to automatic or manual, otherwise it may lead to unexpected behaviour. Setting services to manual is pefectly fine, as these services will be started only when they are needed. However, there are some important system services that should always be set to automatic, otherwise it may lead to unexpected behaviour.

SP2 is recommended update as it applies many fixes and updates to the core OS that are otherwise unavailable, forget any and all system performance tweaks you have collected and use the default XP SP2 settings. You may set many system services from automatic to manual and move XP's pagefile to another physical hard drive to improve paging file read/write performance but that's it, everything else is unnecessary. Of course, installed 3rd party programs that are running in background are entirely another matter.

[Fury]

I forgot to mention one thing. When people tweak their OS, they often blindly look at how much RAM is used and try to get it to as low as possible. This is wrong approach, if XP cannot use the RAM you have installed on your computer, it will have to use disk caches which will make XP perform a lot slower. There is no point in trying to make XP consume as little RAM as possible, instead make note of your pagefile usage. The more your OS and applications have to use pagefile, the slower your system is. RAM is there to be used, so let your OS and programs use it. Now you might want to argue that you want your games to use the RAM, not XP. Now this is where intelligent memory management comes into play, even if XP is not the most advanced OS on Earth, it is smart enough to allocate the needed amount for your games and use pagefile for sleeping processes and programs. Updating to SP2 will also improve XP's memory management a little. Let XP to do its job in managing the memory, you don't have to do it for XP.

Memory management in Vista is vastly improved and quite similar to unix/linux/bsd/osx systems. You will find that Vista uses a lot of RAM because it uses free RAM for caching and thus improving performance. Free RAM is wasted RAM, remember that before you get your hands on Vista, beta or not.