--- In [email protected], "i2phd" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], "jr_dakota" <SG2112@> wrote: > > > > One thing I noticed that's kind of odd ... all my serial and > > parallel port programmers and apps work in Vista without an extra > > driver, cripes I remember what a fight is was to get XP to work with > > my programmers, everyone had a different hack for the ports and they > > didn't play very well together, to get my parallel port PIC > > programmer to work I'd have to remove my parallel port > > O-scope/spectrum analyzer > > ... finally I ended up using my laptop for the O-scope and used my > > main box for programming PICs > > ---- snip ----- > > JR, > > many thanks for your impressions about the use of Vista. The > viewpoint of a technically skilled person is always more valuable than > that of a journalist, who, to be inline with his profession, *must* > (and actually does) know nothing...:-) > > About the SATA drives, modern BIOS handle the issue themselves, in the > sense that the SATA drive is mapped as if it were an EIDE drive. With > my Gigabyte motherboard I am even able to boot to DOS and the two SATA > drives are perfectly accessible even under DOS. > > 73 Alberto I2PHD >
Wait until you have a boot sector problem ... and DOS is pretty much worthless for recovering a NTFS formatted drive I did have a problem on this machine, when I built it I put in two SATA drives which the bios numbers drive 4 and 5 .... ATA drives are numbered drive 0-3 ... Well I decided to take the extra 80GB ATA drive from my old computer and put it in here for storing HDTV streams ... Problem is the BIOS named it drive 0 and GRUB from Linux just went haywire, it would always look to drive 0 for the bootsector which was really on drive 4 and nothing I did would change the behavior ... So I had to run the Vista recovery program which rewrote the boot sector and didn't get confused but the BIOS numbering of the drives .... I just found it odd that Linux couldn't handle it but Vista could ... Granted not many people start with SATA drives and go to ATA, it's usually the other way around ... So now I'm kinda screwed because I don't have decent drivers for my soundcards under Vista and I can't run Studio 64 for recording like I planned I wouldn't completely discount supporting Vista because sooner or later you'll have no choice, even the next version of Windows will rely on the Vista (64 bit) core and driver model .... The real problem we are seeing is the transition from 32 bit to 64 bit, even 32 bit Vista has a lot of 64 bit parts in it's core so we are going to see problems, even Apple's new OS is having problems because it's a 'transitional" OS with a mix of 32 bit and 64 bit in the core .... I wouldn't get all wild about supporting it just yet, I wait it out until the 'growing pains' are over hopefully after SP1 (Comparing a beta SP1 with anything is hardly a valid comparison, XP SP1 beta was really ugly too but the final version was an improvement ... Microsoft did the right thing by taking the audio out of the kernel, both the sound driver model and the video driver model as vastly superior to XP and once the vendors finally get their act together you'll get to see just what an improvement it is, latency will be practically non-existent (In other words CW will finally work transparently on a SDR-1000) ASIO will be a thing of the past (It was genius in it's day but it's day has passed) .... I predict that within 1-2 years you are going to see everyone who does serious PC based recording (DSP) going over the Vista and praising it's virtues ... Mainly stability, bad soundcard drivers (Creative for example) and buggy motherboard chipsets (VIA for example) will no longer crash the kernel like they do now One question I have ... has anyone tried running SDRadio under Vista? It might not be a problem if you have a soundcard with decent drivers .... I was going to offer to beta test Vista and SDRadio months ago as soon as M-Audio updated my drivers ... problem is 6 months later I'm still waiting (Looks like a beta version is coming soon for the Delta series) .... Then again M-Audio is now owned by Avid and I have a Pinnacle branded USB HDTV and NTSC tuner from Avid and they've released two drivers for Vista that simply don't work, yet I was able to hack in the reference drivers for the chipset and it works like a charm ... I had to turn off auto updates because the 2nd driver release was sent to MS and released through auto updates and it 'broke' my system before I even realized what was happening, luckily I was able to just unplug the dongle from the USB port to get it to boot again and just re-installed the reference drivers .. Microsoft should share the blame, they certified both drivers from Pinnacle but they haven't for the reference drivers which actually work (Go figure)... Then I turned off auto update (When will I learn, similar things happened to me twice under XP with auto updates) Also, and this is the key to performance, **you should turn off the User Account Control**, you'll be no less (or more) secure than XP, it's great for grandma or the kids so they can't screw up the system with a trojan or spyware but if you can secure XP without it, you can secure Vista without it ... I believe it's the main cause of Vista problems and slowdowns (I have yet to see the rumored Digital Rights Management problems, looks to me like the Linux and Apple people are spreading some reverse FUD on Microsoft but it's kinda hard to feel sorry for them) There are always glitches on the 'cutting edge' but this time I figured I could risk it, if push comes to shove I'll move my old XP system down here just for SDR and recording ... which may be soon because my WB6DHW DDS Controller PCBs should arrive tomorrow, I'll load the components that I already have this weekend and order the rest Monday so I'm thinking I'll be ready two weeks from Friday .... I don't think I could stand not playing with it simply because I have no Vista sound drivers and the old box was no slouch (Athlon XP 2400+) for audio applications but it can't begin to software decode HDTV streams which takes a minimum of a dual core 64 bit processor ... just an idea of Vista's superiority in handle dual core 64 bit processors under Vista the porcessors share the load each running at 35-40% but under XP one processor would spike one core to 90 - 100% and the other ran at about 25-30% .... Now granted this is the only app I have that even begins to stress this system under XP or Vista so with most apps you can't tell the difference in dual core performance but now I use my HDTV setup as my main benchmark because it's like SDR DSP times 10, for example a raw HDTV stream takes up 8.5 GB of disk space per hour and a stripped HDTV stream takes up a bit over 6 GB of drive space per hour after processing Technology is still changing faster than the software can keep up with and 'growing pains' are going to be a reality of life for quite some time JR
