New Microsoft Windows

[DjRo]

Hi people!

I heard that because of the bug kuffufle with vista microsoft are going to bring out Windows 8 set to be released in 2010. Not so good for people who are spending loads on vista products and services! thought id let u kno as it is important for sum peeps to kno this if u havent herd alreddy!


DjRo

[conor_j]

I'd say the majority of people using Vista are only using it because it came preinstalled on their hardware (like myself), not actually paying for it as an upgrade

I would have downgraded to XP if it wasnt so much effort, and also the fact that im running two installs of Vista on my laptop and both run pretty smoothly for me

[terminal3]

Exactly, nobody is actually paying for Vista upgrades. Everyone I know on Windows is staying with XP and waiting until Vista blows over, to see if the next one is better...

[krykos]

In 5-10 years, Microsoft are likely to retire Windows anyway. Windows still relies on its operating system using the hardware within the computer to allow it to do tasks, whilst the trend nowadays is to move towards virtualisation (i.e. using computer program instructions to do this job). After Vista, there'll probably be one more version of Windows before Midori (the successor) is brought out.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft sees end of Windows era

[petew]

Originally Posted by DjRo

Hi people!

I heard that because of the bug kuffufle with vista microsoft are going to bring out Windows 8 set to be released in 2010. Not so good for people who are spending loads on vista products and services! thought id let u kno as it is important for sum peeps to kno this if u havent herd alreddy!


DjRo

That isn't really true, it was announced that microsoft had started to create the successor to vista, before it was even released.

infact they started on vista 5 months before xp was released, its the same thing with vista's replacement.

[RedDavid]

Originally Posted by krykos

In 5-10 years, Microsoft are likely to retire Windows anyway. Windows still relies on its operating system using the hardware within the computer to allow it to do tasks, whilst the trend nowadays is to move towards virtualisation (i.e. using computer program instructions to do this job). After Vista, there'll probably be one more version of Windows before Midori (the successor) is brought out.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft sees end of Windows era

I can't see the whole virutalization thing taking off, at least within the home market. Portability isn't our problem - performance is. Virtualization can be extremely fast (I won't bore you with the details of my own nerd research, unless you really want me to), overall, it's just not as hot as code being run directly on the hardware. Latencies especially are an area that suffer, and that's killer stuff for us musicians and general-purpose home users.


And Windows7, that won't be much cop from what I can tell. It's not going to be a new OS - it's based on Vista in the same way that Windows 98 was based on Windows 95. It's going to be better in most areas, but performance won't improve massively, if at all. So it'll still be pish compared to XP.

[saxman]

Originally Posted by RedDavid

I can't see the whole virutalization thing taking off, at least within the home market. Portability isn't our problem - performance is.

I totally agree. The whole virtualisation thing is of big potential interest to large companies but not to home and small business users.

[Dave Boulden]

Originally Posted by saxman

but not to home and small business users.

Unless you have a small IT business

[JAYDMF]

See i dont understand why microsoft havent cottoned on to the point that XP still works for a lot of people especially people related to media and just gone the whole hog in supportng xp64, same with most manufaturers, theres 64 drivers out there but they all seem to have been rushed through and then bypassed for vista.
My experience of xp64 has been a bit flakey to say the least but this was due in part to the fact that at the time most of the drivers i needed werent available so somethings were running on 32 bit drivers whilst others were on 64. This works to a point but not fully. When it did work correctly tho it was just as stable as normal XP but allowed me to use all my RAM or at least recognise it so i could use it which was great, but there were just bugs.

I dont see why microsoft dont release a dedicated streamlined version of xp 64 for the purposes of media, and i dont mean like the MCE version i mean one that has all the crap taken out and actually does what it says on the tin.

[Dave Boulden]

Originally Posted by JAYDMF

I dont see why microsoft dont release a dedicated streamlined version of xp 64 for the purposes of media, and i dont mean like the MCE version i mean one that has all the crap taken out and actually does what it says on the tin.

It would be wonderful if they did, however the music "creation" industry is just not big enough a market for Microsoft to warrant creating a seperate fork of the the Windows OS. Compared to business and general home users, our industry (in terms of software sales) is small fry.

[JAYDMF]

Originally Posted by Dave Boulden

It would be wonderful if they did, however the music "creation" industry is just not big enough a market for Microsoft to warrant creating a seperate fork of the the Windows OS. Compared to business and general home users, our industry (in terms of software sales) is small fry.

Yeah but surely if you added together, web design, video, flash, music productions, animation, etc then itd be a fair chunk of people and itd be possible to remove a lot of the junk that comes with windows.

[Dave Boulden]

Unfortunately, that'd probably still be a very small proportion.... and to be fair, it's probably only specifically audio and video studios that have these very specific requirements from an OS.

[RedDavid]

Originally Posted by Dave Boulden

It would be wonderful if they did, however the music "creation" industry is just not big enough a market for Microsoft to warrant creating a seperate fork of the the Windows OS. Compared to business and general home users, our industry (in terms of software sales) is small fry.

Aye - we're far too tiny for MS to care about. There's something in the order of five hundred million living Windows installations in the world, and it's probably a fair bet that the two markets share about a fifty/fifty split of that figure.

Looking at the Cubase forums, they've had something like 30,000 members register with them. Cubase is one of the big ones. Even if you multiply that figure by a hundred, us musician types don't even register as one per cent of the market, and that's too low for them to even consider our needs in their mainstream OS, nevermind a dedicated fork.

It's not a problem, though. Vista's basically a lost cause, but XP's still an excellent OS.

[Dave Boulden]

There are always the various DIY "Lite" stripped down versions of Windows OS's that will do 95% of the job for us musicians. With 64-bit... I really wish this we were further down the road too. I would have loved to have jumped straight to Vista64, but with all the manufacturers playing the "no, you first" game in terms of driver support, it'll take a while... it's the old "chicken and egg" scenario I'm afraid.

[Stagesound]

Business users are rejecting Vista in droves. Although XP is officially end of life, and no longer supplied by Microsoft, it is still effectively selling well via "OS Downgrade" options. (I.e. you buy a PC with Vista license and media, but it comes with XP installed). At this point in time, major suppliers would not dare to say that they can't supply machines with vista pre-installed, as they would loose massive amounts of corporate business.

Vitualisation is taking off, but as RedDavid says, it is not for the small business or domestic market. It will have no impact on the demise of Windows - in fact the opposite is the case - it will allow old operating systems to live on for a while longer on new hardware - where I work we have grotty old Windows 95 software running on a Windows 95 virtual machine, hosted on an XP box. (Because the old software does the job it is needed for, and Win95 will not run on the new boxes).

Vitualisation is based on the concept of running "Virtual Machines", but those Virtual Machines need a real Operating System, and the real Operating Systems which have been tried and tested on Virtual Machines are not the new ones - they're the older ones. (Microsoft Virtual Server 2003 has been around for ages, but it's only since the release of SP2 that it now can host Vista PC's - it still can host Windows NT4!) Virtual server will run on a 64 bit platform, but the guest OS's must be 32 bit, so for the time being Virtualisation, far from threatening the life of old OS's, will actually preserve them.

The huge amount of software now available for the Windows platform, and the difficulty in porting a lot of it to a new platform, will mean that Windows will still be around for quite a bit to come, in som form or other.

JAYDMF - the reason it is unlikely we will see a dedicated version of Windows for media work is as has been said, the lack of volume sales, and the problems with supporting yet another variant. (MS already support 4 versions of Vista, not to mention ongoing XP support, Windows Mobile edition, a raft of server OSs...) And an unfortunate fact of life is that Vista has become bloted because a lot of "the junk that comes with windows" has been added to make it work with the video, flash and animation which you want your specialist version to run! Without all the media add-ons, and the flashy front-end, Vista would probably be just as lean as XP.