One finger salute to Vista


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It's different because the OS and the hardware is Apple's. It's different because Microsoft artificially broke Windows running on any other DOS except their own. There were internal memos leaked and later brought into evidence of that FACT. You should read up on the legal history of Microsoft before defending them so stoutly.

And Apple artifically broke OS X from working on a Dell PC. So what's the difference? I'm not denying that Microsoft may have done that - I'll even take your word for it. I'm just saying there was nothing wrong with it. I would have done the same thing. There's nothing illegal or immoral about that. Like I said, you defend Apple when they do it. It's just that you have a double standard.

There was nothing preventing early versions of Windows from running on non MS-DOS systems either. You could patch the win.com file to remove that artificial limitation and it ran just fine on DR-DOS. Microsoft didn't tie Windows to its own DOS because it was the right thing to do. They tied it down to keep the dominant position of their OS. Again, you should go read up on the legal history.

There was nothing preventing early versions of OS X 10.4 from running on non Apple systems either. You could patch the bootloader to remove that artificial limitation and it ran just fine on a Thinkpad. Apple didn't tie OS X to it's own hardware because it was the right thing to do. They tied it down to grow the niche position of their hardware. Again, you should go read up on the this-has-nothing-to-do-with-laws history.
I never mentioned the word monopoly. You did. You don't have to be considered a monopoly to have monopolistic business practices. Why do you think Vista costs as much as it does? Because there is no real competition to Windows because of the draconian OEM licensing policies.

Huh? Vista is pretty darn cheap when you consider the number of man-hours spent creating it and the value it provides to consumers. Consider all the things that people pay more for that aren't nearly as important to how they go about their lives. There is competition to Windows, and it's growing too. But historically none of its competitors (at least in the desktop market) have been competent enough.

nice conversation u guys are having...

cant everyone just shut up and wait to see what happens instead of making yourselves look like fools on jan30? well see what happened and no matter how many #%^*(#% or CAPTIAL BOLD letters you put your not gonna change the view of the end user. save some energy, save some breath and wait it out. ur obviously not going to make a difference so just shut it and forget it.

a 19-page thread on weather vista sucks because of drivers or because of itself....sheesh.

IE 7.0 is a good web browser, but whoever did GUI for it is a retard. Why would you put home, RSS, print, page and other icons on the right side?

Why can't they simply have Fire Fox 2 layout? When I look at IE, it looks like beta 1 stage product where programmer placed different GUI objects when you don't care about overall look and feel, just to test those functions. Hmmm maybe they forgot to move the them icons on the left. And file menu should be on by default.

Let me say that Vista looks like somebody slapped together bunch of applications, really there is no consistency at all.

You have got to be kidding me! :|

Vista isnt cheap by a long shot, and if you take the average income of the western world into account, its price puts it out of the reach of most people.

nooo,it's cheap for him...hi's a big boss, microsoft employee and for him vista's not that much ....but vista should cost 10$ maximum ....WTF ,PEOPLE,WAKE UP ...don't buy that crap....if u wanna buy...buy a MAC ,microsoft is full of money,they could use money to get worm in the winter....and us???...what about us ...we still give them $$$ for an os "without taste".

And Apple artifically broke OS X from working on a Dell PC. So what's the difference? I'm not denying that Microsoft may have done that - I'll even take your word for it. I'm just saying there was nothing wrong with it. I would have done the same thing. There's nothing illegal or immoral about that. Like I said, you defend Apple when they do it. It's just that you have a double standard.

There was nothing preventing early versions of OS X 10.4 from running on non Apple systems either. You could patch the bootloader to remove that artificial limitation and it ran just fine on a Thinkpad. Apple didn't tie OS X to it's own hardware because it was the right thing to do. They tied it down to grow the niche position of their hardware. Again, you should go read up on the this-has-nothing-to-do-with-laws history.

Huh? Vista is pretty darn cheap when you consider the number of man-hours spent creating it and the value it provides to consumers. Consider all the things that people pay more for that aren't nearly as important to how they go about their lives. There is competition to Windows, and it's growing too. But historically none of its competitors (at least in the desktop market) have been competent enough.

Brandon, I guess that the difference is two-fold.

Whether you agree with it or not, Apple sells the hardware with the OS installed (much like buying any other piece of consumer electronics, you don't have the right to take that software [firmware upgrades, for example] and install it onto other devices). They sell the PC, and include the OS. Microsoft, on the other hand, sells OSes. The Windows OS is intended to be installed by consumers on third-party PCs.

The second fold is that Apple has an EULA that forbids installing on non-Apple hardware. Microsoft's EULA forbids a great many things (you told me before that you were not a lawywer and did not read and fully digest your own Microsoft EULA). Take my word for it, there are many "thou shalt not" provisions. None of these, however, forbid installing on any particular PC hardware (providing, of course, you comply with the other provisions and do not illegally use multiple instances of the same license).

I don't disagree with your points about Vista being a big step forward for Microsoft, or about the value of what you get. As you know, I just find it doesn't suit my needs and preferences.

But you cannot point to Apple and say "but they forbid it" without looking at it outside of the narrow "we make and OS, and they make and OS" view.

I installed Vista on my notebook, which I treat as a sandbox machine. Using the drivers installed by Vista itself, I've had no problems. If anything, I'm absolutely blown away by the OS. And the notebook is only a Pentium-M 1.8ghz with 1gb of memory and a Radeon 9600. It runs just as fast as XP, boots slower. Only issue so far is games *do* run a bit slower, but nvidia or ATI haven't even released their final Vista drivers yet. So the game performance is expected.

Not gonna install Vista on my main machine until maybe late March or so - or whenever final, stable drivers for my hardware are released. But I'm definitely installing.

guntman's article has been slammed by many as being inaccurate and ott

yeah, and most of them i have seen are people like our "Friend" Brandon Live whos heads are so far up ms's arse that they cant tell if its day or night.

honestly, read the documents listed in his artical, MS's OWN DOCUMENTS are far more condeming then anything guntman said.

Do you even know what commit charge is? I doubt any standard Vista install is going to use 700MB of RAM. Of course, it depends on your definition of "use" I suppose. The total working set of active processes certainly won't be that high. It will be higher than a fresh install of XP - that's a given. You'll also have more process / services running, like the sidebar, the indexer, new networking services, and probably the DWM on a modern machine. Some greater resource usage is expected anytime an OS update with tons of new features comes along.

I also don't understand what you mean by "700mb is a lot of prefetched crap" - do you have less than 700MB worth of stuff on your computer? I highly doubt you do... why wouldn't you want the most frequently used applications and libraries kept around in memory that's otherwise not being used?

That's a load of crap. Vista doesn't do any of those things. It provides some mechanisms for third-party software to identify protected hardware interfaces, but how that capability is used is up to application developers and content providers, not Microsoft. As far as I'm aware, no existing content on the market today should work any differently than on XP.

yes i know what is is, but im talking about a clean install of windows, nothing extra installed, JUST WINDOWS VISTA!!!! no 3rd party apps no extra ms apps, just vista.

as to your "vista dosnt do any of those things" well funny i found at least 10 reports by people with bluray/hd-dvd drives of having vista eather REFUSE to playback their media or RUINING the quility thats in a quick google search!!!!

read your companys own vista documents, for a guy that "works on windows" for his "job" you sure are clueless about the reality of how it works.

and you should really sit down and read the eula as well, you clearly need to because till you do you got no dam clue what ur trying to sell people!!!

the eula for example dosnt allow "problem solving" meaning you cant work around limmitations of the os, even if its due to 3rd party spyware/addware/virus you cant do what we had to do to get rid of blaster and "problem solve" your way around it, you gotta wait for the slow combersom ms support team to chug into acction and patch it up.

oh and comparing MS with APPLE is about as stupid as they come, apple makes the HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE as already stated, they sell them as a packege, ms makes an OS(you know that thing you supposedly work on), get over your fixation with "ms is alwase right" i know you work for them but god no other ms employ i know(and i know a good number) acts like you.

ms is KNOWN for doing what as stated stealing other peoples work and passing it off as their own, i had Stacker, it was GREAT, and kicked "dubblespace" to the curb, but dulspace was a BETA version of stacker ms STOLE and didnt even bother to alter other then adding the ms logo, hence it had alot of problems, drivespace(updated/fixed dbl space) was ok, but stacker still worked alot better.

but it was all STOLEN, you work for a theif, how does that make you feel?

Huh? Vista is pretty darn cheap when you consider the number of man-hours spent creating it and the value it provides to consumers. Consider all the things that people pay more for that aren't nearly as important to how they go about their lives. There is competition to Windows, and it's growing too. But historically none of its competitors (at least in the desktop market) have been competent enough.

oh where do i start.....cheap......HAHAHA, yeah sure, 300bucks(or more) for a decent copy of a desktop os, not bloodly likely, windows server 2003 web is cheaper then vistas best"desktop" version and guess what, it runs faster to :o, with a small reg tweak you can make it support same number of cpus and ram ammounts as ent ;) (i live tweaknt/ntswitch)

check the retail numbers for prices on vista, i think you will find that the majority of people arent gonna beable to afford a decent copy(u know a non "home" edition)

I miss BEOS, had ms not kept it from shiping with prebuilt systems it would by today be a dirrect compeditor with windows, if anybodys intrested in seeing the work thats gone on with BEOS recently google beos zeta and you can get a look at the latest version of beos, its nice, specly for lower end older machiens :)

vista......cheap.........only an ms rep could say that with a strait face.....

EDIT: just wanted to point out that yes ms put man hours into the dev of vista, but that dosnt justify the retail cost of the os being so high, its all about greed, ms could make money selling the os at 35bucks a copy then charging for phone support, corse they would sell a hell of alot more copys of windows if it was even 75bucks then it being 300, but the big wigs who have $$$$$$$$ dont see that the avrage joe who cant afford/isnt willing to spend 300 per copy of windows Would be willing to spend 75 then a couple bucks if he needed phone support for something, when i worked for compusa we sold "tech support cards" you pay like 10-50bucks you get XX minutes of tech support via phone, funny thing is those cards sold like mad, one of our top sellers!!!!

Edited by PF Prophet
oh and comparing MS with APPLE is about as stupid as they come, apple makes the HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE as already stated, they sell them as a packege, ms makes an OS(you know that thing you supposedly work on), get over your fixation with "ms is alwase right" i know you work for them but god no other ms employ i know(and i know a good number) acts like you.

What a sad, misinformed computer user you are. College Professor, huh?

Ooops! I thought the report button said "remorse" and I clicked on it. Darn

Brandon, I guess that the difference is two-fold.

Whether you agree with it or not, Apple sells the hardware with the OS installed (much like buying any other piece of consumer electronics, you don't have the right to take that software [firmware upgrades, for example] and install it onto other devices). They sell the PC, and include the OS. Microsoft, on the other hand, sells OSes. The Windows OS is intended to be installed by consumers on third-party PCs.

But we aren't talking about third-party PCs. We're talking about Windows 2.x or 3.x (whichever it was) being locked to only run on MS-DOS. Do you have a problem with Microsoft doing that? The whole "monopoly" issue complicates things, but this was before that, when Windows was yet to be found on most desktops and MS-DOS certainly wasn't the only option. Windows was never intended to run on third-party DOS platforms... I'm pretty sure MS-DOS 5.x was clearly listed in the system requirements at the time.

I see absolutely no problem with that whatsoever. If any company wants to release a software product that requires another of their products to run that's fine by me. It happens all the time with "expansion packs" and such. It's also the same idea behind Nintendo "locking" their games to their console. Beyond the simple fact that it's a good business strategy, there are obvious benefits to the consumer around support and reliability. As Apple has shown many times, the more of the environment that you control, the more you can refine the user experience with less effort. Had you also expected Microsoft to cover support issues for users running Windows 3.x on DR-DOS, a platform for which it was not developed for nor tested with?

The second fold is that Apple has an EULA that forbids installing on non-Apple hardware. Microsoft's EULA forbids a great many things (you told me before that you were not a lawywer and did not read and fully digest your own Microsoft EULA). Take my word for it, there are many "thou shalt not" provisions. None of these, however, forbid installing on any particular PC hardware (providing, of course, you comply with the other provisions and do not illegally use multiple instances of the same license).

Again, no one was talking about hardware. And as I said, I'm pretty sure it was listed in the system requirements on the packaging.

as to your "vista dosnt do any of those things" well funny i found at least 10 reports by people with bluray/hd-dvd drives of having vista eather REFUSE to playback their media or RUINING the quility thats in a quick google search!!!!

I'm not going to bother answering any more of your rants except this one. So please, do tell me... what BluRay software are those users reportedly using? The only one I'm aware of is CyberLink's PowerDVD Ultra, which works exactly the same on Windows XP and Vista.

You do realize that Vista doesn't play BluRay or HD-DVD videos, right? So it can't "refuse" to playback anything... that would be up to your chosen playback software. Understand? Same goes for any quality degredation (which works exactly the same way on standalone players or consoles).

Also, if you are a college professor with that poor of a grasp on the English language, I shall weep for society.

You have got to be kidding me! :|

Vista isnt cheap by a long shot, and if you take the average income of the western world into account, its price puts it out of the reach of most people.

Huh? Vista costs about the same as XP... so how do you figure? $160 for Home Premium is pretty reasonable to me. That's about the same cost as three computer games. Only $30 more than OSX Tiger.

Of couse, most people will get it with a new PC - in which case the cost is built-in to the price of the computer just like it is today with XP. And I see plenty of cheap computers and no shortage of people buying them without breaking the bank.

ah the joys of watching an ms employ try and justify what his employer dose, still find it funny that you work on windows but know jack sh!t about all this stuff, well other then to say "its not true" and HOME is CRAP, xp home is CRAP, pathetic striped down(via reg settings) security/account setup, missing/dissabled fetures, just useless for a power user.

yes most morons who endup with vista will get it with a new crappy dell/gateway/hp/ibm/sony/exct pc, whats ur point, it still raises the cost of the pc, or in the case of the lower end pc's lowers the "value" your getting out of that pc because they gotta cut cost someplace, and be dam sure thats gonna happen to hardware with the likes of dell( 512 ram on a media system....ROFL...only from dell)

im glad im not buying vista with the likes of you making it, you dont even know whats in the os your supposedly working on, i mean honestly, ms's own tech documents admit to/explain these "fetures" of media protection.

and IE in any form sucks, get opera or even firefox they are free and have far better fetures and layouts then IE, oh and they are faster to!!!

Microsoft has HD-DVd and BD- format support but they have never stated that they have out of the box playback of eaither of them formats, you must have 3rd party software for that and PowerDVD HD or somthing is the only software capable of such playback and well XP and vista as brandon has stated plays exactly the same.

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Steam Summer Sale 2026 kicked off with discounts for everything from the newest games and retro gems to all sorts of DLC packs, until July 9. Meanwhile, NVIDIA GeForce NOW added support for several new titles, including Dark Scrolls, SAND: Raiders of Sophie, and EMPULSE. That said, here are some more stories from the gaming world: Age of Empires Mobile comes to PC, here's how to carry over progress from your phone Xbox Insiders get Xbox 360 achievements and Gamertag character upgrades Grand Theft Auto VI pricing revealed alongside Ultimate Edition and pre-loading details Sony announces Bungie layoffs that will affect "significant number of employees" From the review corner This week, Steven published a review of the TerraMaster F4-425 Pro AI-powered NAS, featuring an all-metal exterior on the lines of the four-bay F4-425 series. Powered by the octa-core Intel Core N350, the TerraMaster F4-425 Pro is highly energy-efficient, operates quietly, and offers three M.2 slots. On the flip side, OpenClaw support requires removing security hardening (SPC), AI requires a paid subscription, the software feels like a beta, and the rubber feet constantly come unstuck. ZimaBoard 2 1664 Starter Kit Another NAS setup reviewed this week is the ZimaBoard 2 by IceWhale Technology. It comes in a small footprint with great modern hardware through a combo of Intel N150 and DDR5 memory support. On the downside, the memory is not upgradeable, ZimaOS is a bit barebones, factory reset requires USB flashing, and there is no automatic backup via the mobile app. Synology's BeeCamera software Christopher wrote his review of the software that powers BeeCamera Plus and said "the BeeCamera app is a great way to add private home monitoring to your network but there are some limitations." It's free with an easy setup process, fast response time, and good AI and detection features. However, there is no desktop version; it only works with Synology cameras, some configurations are difficult to set up on a phone, and it lacks the features of the surveillance station. More price drops! We got you covered with some hot tech deals all week. For some reason, if you missed out on a great discount, here is a summary of some recent deals that are still alive: Onkyo Dolby Atmos AV receivers are really solid deals 4TB TEAMGROUP MP44Q, 2TB T-Force G50, and 2TB WD My Passport SSDs drop to great prices Edifier S3000MKII hi-fi audiophile grade bookshelf speaker is at its lowest price now The best controller for XBOX and PC is down to the lowest price Limited time Prime Day deal cuts price of this Hisense 65" 4K smart TV in half To view all of our recent deals, click here. So, these were some of the biggest tech news and other updates from this week. There will be more issues of our 7 Days series in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned. You can also support Neowin by registering for a free member account or subscribing to extra member benefits, along with an ad-free tier option. Have a great weekend!
    • Zen Browser 1.21.4b by Razvan Serea Zen Browser is a privacy-focused, open-source web browser built on Mozilla Firefox, offering users a secure and customizable browsing experience. It emphasizes privacy by blocking trackers, ads, and ensuring your data isn't collected. With Zen Mods, users can enhance their browser experience with various customization options, including features like split views and vertical tabs. The browser is designed for efficiency, providing fast browsing speeds and a lightweight interface. Zen Browser prioritizes user control over the browsing experience, offering a minimal yet powerful alternative to traditional web browsers while keeping your online activity private. Zen Browser’s DRM limitation Zen Browser currently lacks support for DRM-protected content, meaning streaming services like Netflix and HBO Max are inaccessible. This is due to the absence of a Widevine license, which requires significant costs and is financially unfeasible for the developer. Additionally, applying for this license would require Zen to be part of a larger company, similar to Mozilla or Brave. Therefore, DRM-protected media won't be supported in Zen Browser for the foreseeable future. Zen Browser offers features that improve user experience, privacy, and customization: Privacy-Focused: Blocks trackers and minimizes data collection. Automatic Updates: Keeps the browser updated with security patches. Zen Mods: Customizable themes and layouts. Workspaces: Organize tabs into different workspaces. Compact Mode: Maximizes screen space by minimizing UI elements. Zen Glance: Quick website previews. Split Views: View multiple tabs in the same window. Sidebar: Access bookmarks and tools quickly. Vertical Tabs: Manage tabs vertically. Container Tabs: Separate browsing sessions. Fast Profile Switcher: Switch between profiles easily. Tab Folders: Organize tabs into folders. Customizable UI: Personalize browser interface. Security Features: Inherits Firefox’s robust security. Fast Performance: Lightweight and optimized for speed. Zen Mods Customization: Deep customization with mods. Quick Access: Easy access to favorite websites. Open Source: Built on Mozilla Firefox with community collaboration. Community-Driven: Active development and feedback from users. GitHub Repository: Contribute and review the source code. Zen Browser 1.21.4b changelog: New Features Updated to Firefox 152.0.2 and 152.0.3 Added 'Edit pinned tab' context menu item to manually set a pinned tab's URL Added 'Add Route for Domain' context menu item to quickly add a tab's domain to the Space Routing settings Fixes Prevent sidebar from flickering when moving a tab (#14131) Full-screening while on a glance tab will now expand the glance tab to a normal tab (#11766) Fixed space routing tabs opening in background when it should be in foreground (#14183) Other minor bug fixes and improvements. Download: Zen Browser | 90.2 MB (Open Source) Download: Zen Browser ARM64 | Other Operating Systems View: Zen Browser Home Page | Screenshots 1 | 2 | Reddit Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware
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