I'm not saying go run out and buy a copy, I'm saying as a developer of DSP and sound you should try to get ahead of the game and take a good look at the changes in Vista .... the biggest and best changes are in 4 categories
Audio driver model Video driver model (Mainly direct GPU access for the GUI and apps) Multi-core processor management Memory management And all four directly affect your 'product' ... Most reviewers don't notice these things because most software doesn't support them yet or they are subtle changes in the background ... or they think because Vista make better use of available memory that it's a memory hog (Yes the OS core uses more memory than XP but not nearly as big a difference as Win98 to XP did) If all you are going to do is evaluate it (And there are ways to lengthen the evaluation period, http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000778.html) you may as well try Ultimate ... All 4 versions are on every Vista DVD, you can evaluate Ultimate and then later downgrade if you decide to buy and you don't need all the extras, for most development the Business version would probably be adequate ... Or you can try Home Premium and upgrade if it's lacking .... Vista's way of upgrading is unique for Microsoft, for instance I have Home Premium but I can upgrade to Ultimate or Business in a matter of minutes, all you need to do is pay for the upgrade and get a key and run the same install disc you used before, the 'extras' are just added to your existing system without changing your settings Before you go to too much trouble make sure your machine has the guts to run it, to take advantage of the memory enhancement you need a minimum of 2 GB, it will work on less but you don't get the full benefit of the aggressive caching, and most important right now, make sure your soundcard is supported with good drivers, right now the only full support I have is for the Realtek motherboard sound which I've never even enabled, Creative has some support but they hate this new stuff because it no longer gives their proprietary sound formats like EAX an advantage and levels the playing field so I don't expect much from them as far as WaveRT support and so far we are waiting for M-Audio but after talking to one of their driver people I have a lot of hope, they do have a good record of of being conservative on what they plan to do, if they say they want to support WaveRT it's a pretty good bet they are almost there already or they wouldn't say anything ... But I'm still I'm seriously thinking of getting a MOTU product because they've had good drivers from day one and have some support for WaveRT They along with RME and Cakewalk really pushed for this, so hard in fact that Microsoft didn't even provide a decent white paper on WaveRT until mid September ( http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/c/5/9c5b2167-8017-4bae-9fde-d599bac8184a/WaveRTport.doc ) which is why only MOTU and RME have support so far (They more or less defined WaveRT for Microsoft to implement in Vista), everyone else was guessing and are now playing catchup but THAT is better than Microsoft saying let's wait until the next Windows to come out before we implement this ... also you need a good video card, something like a Nvidia 7600 series or better (or a equivelent from another brand), again you can get by with less but for the GUI to take advantage of using the GPU you need a card with a decent GPU, most new cards that have come out the past 2-3 years will do well, gamers will already be all set ... Beware of motherboard video, it usually shares your system memory instead of having it's own and is the main reason Vista doesn't work well on many, if not most laptops Actually Linux's sound model after the low latency patch is still better than Microsoft's and in fact Microsoft borrowed a lot of the ideas from Linux (Or at least developers suggested Microsoft do this like Linux did and that like Mac did)... Linux just doesn't have the support for a lot of things I use and until they change their business model so software authors can actually make a decent living, or at least as good a living as they make writing Windows apps, I don't expect that to change ... I'll probably reload Studio 64 after I get another SATA harddrive ... I thought a pair of 160GB drives would be plenty and it was until I got the HDTV card, 80GB of space for recording just isn't enough (Less than 10 hours) I don't particularly like Microsoft, I sold my stock about 10 years ago because I didn't like their Business Ethics despite it making me good money and I do like Linux, I'm just not a zealot about it anymore like I once was .... Reality does that to a guy as he gets older I guess ... But I am excited about the new sound and video driver models in Vista, they are long overdue and worth a good look JR --- In [email protected], "i2phd" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > JR Dakota, > > your passionate defense of Vista has some merits, especially coming > from a person that has a good working knowledge of Linux. And I start > to see some of your points. So I decided to at least give a trial run > to Vista, to better evaluate it myself. Do you see any conflict if I > will use Boot Magic from PowerQuest to add it to my multi boot system > (Win XP, Win 2000, Kubuntu) ? > > As there are umpteen versions of Vista, and you seem knowledgeable > about it, which one should I buy ? Keep in mind that my goals are > those of having the fastest and more apt environment for SDR and DSP > applications, and for their development. I don't care about all the > rest. Thanks. > > 73 Alberto I2PHD >
