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would that be the famous i-Pen? I could only afford an i-Pencil, and when it broke, I realised how pointless it all was.

however if you went to France, you could have used a Jean-Marie le Pen, but only if you were right handed, and la plume de ma tante est sur la table and all that.

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J'agite face à votre tante maternelle mes equipments privées.

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TeT, i don't want a more streamlined inteface. the things i have available to me in XP are what i use regularly. in Vista, every time i want to use them i need "administrator permission" when i'm using the only account on the computer.

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Turn off UAC. Your experience is vastly improved. If you've got Vista Ultimate then configure it so it actually does what it's intended to do. I'm all for a streamlined inteface, though. Anything that can knock a few seconds off menial or basic tasks sounds great in my book. Especially if I'm doing them often.

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how has the interface been improved? its all identical but transparent and shiny.

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Off the top of my head, the "Open file location" command.

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we're not complaining about the Security, sure, its the same as that in XP (which is worthless, but thats another discussion)

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Taw is

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hardware-destroying services like Prefetch and DX10.

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I don't know exactly what Prefetch is (I believe it speeds up boot times but I'm not sure how), but Dx10 is not doing my hardware any harm at all. My 3D card is (would be) rumbling away quite merrily and my CPU was due mostly to user negligence, illogically placed radiators notwithstanding.

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a word in Edgewise on Crysis. i've been beta-ing it (AWESOME MULTIPLAYER) the official word is that it will offer identical performance in both XP and Vista in Multiplayer, except in "DX10-Only" servers, where all players must be running vista and a DX10 native card, where there is much more intensive Physics. (destroyable foliage and such)

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I stand corrected, then.

Though if all the naysayers are constantly complaining that Vista is "slow and buggy" then identical performance to an XP system implies a substantial net increase in performance on a Vista system. (Sorry, I am just twisting your words here so feel free to ignore that).

get back to Redmond, evil spawn of Ballmer! go and throw some chairs around.

prefetch is what makes vista thrash the HDD like madness for the first 5 minutes after booting. it basically loads all of the files you use regularly and puts them in Virtual Memory = Stupid.

Okay, that sounds silly, but Prefetch exists in XP too. You can't really criticise Vista for having a feature that was in XP.

Edited by - The Evil Thing on 10/12/2007 11:11:50 AM

but it's rubbish - slows performance down and uses too much disk space. what's the point of a utility that doesn't do what it's supposed to (speed your system up) but exactly the opposite (slows it down to a crawl.) I always turn it off and delete all the wasteful prefetch rubbish.

M$ are good at providing useless things for nothing - prefetch, Office fast find, Office startup, Outlook Express, M$ Defrag, Windows Firewall, Windows Messenger and so on - they're all utter pooh. I could go on with how so much of Windows is by default rubbish or just doesn't work, not as it should, but you can greatly improve the stupid thing, it just takes time to figure out what works for your system.

Yes, that's true, but in the context of "Reasons why XP is sooooo much better than Vista" the criticism didn't make sense.

So how does one go about turning off Prefetch for good?

yes that's right TET, but bear in mind that Vista is XP in a skirt with a load of rubbish shoved in, just as XP was W2K in a skirt with a load of rubbish shoved in. XP is only any good now because it's been patched up more than a harlequin's patchwork cloak, and because so many people have spent so long finding ways to make it work better. it's still not a particularly good o/s but its acceptably stable and functions; myself I saw little or no reason to shove all that extra stuff into 2K, but it worked out alright in the end - sadly M$ didn't learn the lesson that they've been taught over and over - if the latest overhyped o/s is flakey, don't shove more features in and expect them to work!

Vista is ME all over again, except that ME was only ever a transitional and shortlived stopgap between 98Se and 2K (actually it was just 98Se dressed up to look like 2K) There's significant talk amongst corporate users of never even going to Vista - weve made that decision already - and waiting for the next M$ o/s which hopefully will be more compatible with apps. Like ME, Vista is really intended for the home market - business users and sysadmins have given it the kiss of death because it just doesn't do what we want it to do, whilst XP, after a lot of hard work admittedly, does.

JD - now i didn't say turn it off for good (did I?) because you still need the layout.ini file for defrag utilities. You can alter the settings with this registry key:-

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

"EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000003

3 is the default setting, 1 being the lowest, 5 being the highest, or you can disable this key altogether. The other part to this is to delete the contents of the C:\Windows\Prefetch folder, except for the file "layout.ini"

Now some guides and so-called experts will scream "don't turn prefetch off!" but all I've ever seen it do is kill the hard-drive with too much activity and use up lots of unnecessary space and system resources while the cpu load reaches nearly 100%. IMHO it's utter cr*p, but at a controlled setting of 1 or 2, it has it's uses. Combine what I've said above with a good defragger like Diskeeper and a boot-time layout program like Bootvis and it works very well, fast boot times and the hard drive is kept nice n tidy.

and for heaven's sake, be careful what you're doing in the registry!



Edited by - Tawakalna on 10/13/2007 9:41:19 AM

pshaw taw - i edit registry entries with my toes, eyes shut! i have broken XP with registry edits once or twice, but that was when i already had a problem and was looking for it. everyone is paranoid about touching the registry but it is your windows-friend! example? you can take all your Freelancer account information from the registry and -save- it. forget writing down your user ID on paper for future use, you can back it up as a .reg export, change it at will with a double click, and then change it back!

i just noticed regedit has a favorites button... weird i didn't before

I wasn't really lecturing about it, CV, I just wanted JD to be careful if he hadn't done much registry work in the past. Besides, other people read stuff and have a go and if they hamfistedly screw up their pc then TLR gets grief from mums 'n' dads about us giving duff advice to kids, that's why we have a disclaimer about it in the hardware forum and why whenever I mention editing registry entries etc, I cover my back by saying "be careful!" - it's a public forum so one has to give out such advice responsibly, especially given my erstwhile ranking, and if I didn't then BP, Eraser and Stinger would right royally (and deservedly) kick my butt back to Tawakalnistan

And it's always good to be paranoid about such things, because the one time that you aren't, and complacently assume that everything will be ok, it isn't. That should be a Law of Physics!

Edited by - Tawakalna on 10/13/2007 11:44:16 AM

If Taw messed up, he would have to catch a flight to where ever the comp went bad, and go fix it.

it's happened before

apparently vista may come Botnet-enabled right out of the box..
how the NSA and Vista are related

heh - i tried to 'copy' some money the other day I freaked out my friend with the HP 'rulesforuse.org' thing - told him, dude you and 98% of sheeple are clueless - your cellphone is tracking your location, as is your car - your car's also recording when you turn, press the brakes, accelerate, signal etc etc. and of course don't even try to tell someone that you could install a GPS enabled remote control w/ lockouts for their car for a few hundred dollars, they will look at you like some foil hat wearing freak!

if knowledge is power than ignorance is slavery