M
Moshe Goldfarb
On Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:18:29 +0200, Richard Rasker wrote:
> Today I had the chance to play with a fully functional Vista box, this one
> to be precise: http://www.medion.de/md8830/uk/flash.html, offered
> as "Multimedia Entertainment PC".
You're a Linux user, what would you know about Multimedia?
> Well, of course it sucked, although it wasn't as bad as my first Vista
> experience.
Which expereince was that?
The girl on the train fairy tale or the one about the 2 ladies and a
donkey?
> Cold boot time was impressive (for Vista, that is): after 40
> seconds, the desktop showed, and after another minute, the machine was
> quite responsive -- that is, with a working network connection present.
You sat there and measured this?
How do you know it wasn't 38 seconds?
Or maybe 45 seconds?
Are you certain it was 40 seconds?
> Without a network connection, boot time is almost 5 minutes don't ask me
> why this is. Anyway, under normal conditions, it boots only twice as slow
> as Linux/KDE (Mandriva), so that's pretty good.
Which one of the 1000+ versions of Linux would this be?
Do you know for a fact that the Vista machine booted slower than all 1000+
different Linux versions?
> Other minor annoyances: the mouse wheel doesn't work, the sound output has a
> tinny quality and infrequently produces soft interference clicks (although
> hardly audible), the TV output picture frankly sucks, and so far, no-one
> has succeeded in getting the built-in tuner card to work (I couldn't even
> get it to show up in Vista's hardware list).
Fairy tales can come true they can happen to you if your yourg at
heart.....
I think you must have been on the Linux machine for that one.
Or, you are telling tales again Ritchie....
> And of course it's sluggish.
So you've said.
> In a lot of tools and dialogs (e.g. nVidia's screen settings), Vista takes
> a full second or more to respond to mouse clicks. And when I created a
> recovery DVD with the factory preinstalled image, the system completely
> froze for fully four minutes, during which literally nothing appeared to
> happen -- and if there hadn't been a warning dialog that "the machine may
> become unresponsive for a few moments", I probably would have rebooted it
> after a minute or so. But burning the DVD actually seems to have succeeded
> (although I couldn't find any verification tool).
Ohhhhhh, you should have left that one out Ritchie.......
So this was a preloaded system and you expect us to believe that all the
above (TV etc) didn't work out of the box?
You're not a good story teller Ritchie.
> On the bright side: in the four hours I checked out the machine and tried
> getting the tuner card and dual screen output to work (failing miserably on
> both counts -- but then again, I'm not a Windows expert) I only got two
> expection errors, and nothing actually crashed or froze (at least for more
> than a second or so), so Vista seems pretty stable.
More tales....
There is no point in even going any further with this one because obviously
you are making up yet another story.
And I thought your last tale of woe with the pretty young girl on the train
was a humdinger!
You need to take fairy tale writing lessons from Kelsey.
She is the best at this.
> Anyway, the owner was rather disappointed with his "multimedia machine", and
> wanted to see if Linux could do better. After creating a 20GB empty
> partition with Vista's disk management tool (which wasn't too bad), the
> installation of Mandriva took less than 15 minutes, and most hardware was
> installed and recognized fine. It took half an hour more to update the
> installation and install the multimedia stuff (nVidia drivers, codecs and
> other non-free software), after which all worked just fine -- except the
> tuner card. Unsurprisingly, Mandriva was much faster and snappier than
> Vista: total boot time between power-up and a fully loaded desktop is a
> mere 45 seconds, and most things happen at a blistering speed, with
> Mandriva immediately responding to every user action. Even OpenOffice
> starts in only three seconds
And oh, the mouse wheel functions, and the
> sound quality is vastly better too.
>
> The only disappointment was that I couldn't get the tuner card (Creatix
> CTX953) to work. It was recognized, but there appears to be no Linux
> support for it yet (and I didn't want to go through the trouble of
> compiling experimental support for this beastie in a kernel module).
> Another drawback is that the man is still tied to Vista because of a few
> apps (AutoCAD and something I didn't rememeber the name of) for which
> there's no viable Linux equivalent. So I wonder if he's going to use Linux
> at all -- he seemed impressed with what he saw, but I know from experience
> that having to reboot on a regular basis is quite a turn-off people will
> rather stick with what they're most familiar with, even though they don't
> really like it much.
>
> So the verdict is that yes, Vista sucks -- but for most people, it's not bad
> enough to make them switch to something completely different and
> unfamiliar. They simply put up with the crap ("Ah well, I guess I'll have
> to stick to the TV + VCR a little longer.")
>
>
> Richard Rasker
--
Moshe Goldfarb
Collector of soaps from around the globe.
Please visit The Hall of Linux Idiots:
http://linuxidiots.blogspot.com/
> Today I had the chance to play with a fully functional Vista box, this one
> to be precise: http://www.medion.de/md8830/uk/flash.html, offered
> as "Multimedia Entertainment PC".
You're a Linux user, what would you know about Multimedia?
> Well, of course it sucked, although it wasn't as bad as my first Vista
> experience.
Which expereince was that?
The girl on the train fairy tale or the one about the 2 ladies and a
donkey?
> Cold boot time was impressive (for Vista, that is): after 40
> seconds, the desktop showed, and after another minute, the machine was
> quite responsive -- that is, with a working network connection present.
You sat there and measured this?
How do you know it wasn't 38 seconds?
Or maybe 45 seconds?
Are you certain it was 40 seconds?
> Without a network connection, boot time is almost 5 minutes don't ask me
> why this is. Anyway, under normal conditions, it boots only twice as slow
> as Linux/KDE (Mandriva), so that's pretty good.
Which one of the 1000+ versions of Linux would this be?
Do you know for a fact that the Vista machine booted slower than all 1000+
different Linux versions?
> Other minor annoyances: the mouse wheel doesn't work, the sound output has a
> tinny quality and infrequently produces soft interference clicks (although
> hardly audible), the TV output picture frankly sucks, and so far, no-one
> has succeeded in getting the built-in tuner card to work (I couldn't even
> get it to show up in Vista's hardware list).
Fairy tales can come true they can happen to you if your yourg at
heart.....
I think you must have been on the Linux machine for that one.
Or, you are telling tales again Ritchie....
> And of course it's sluggish.
So you've said.
> In a lot of tools and dialogs (e.g. nVidia's screen settings), Vista takes
> a full second or more to respond to mouse clicks. And when I created a
> recovery DVD with the factory preinstalled image, the system completely
> froze for fully four minutes, during which literally nothing appeared to
> happen -- and if there hadn't been a warning dialog that "the machine may
> become unresponsive for a few moments", I probably would have rebooted it
> after a minute or so. But burning the DVD actually seems to have succeeded
> (although I couldn't find any verification tool).
Ohhhhhh, you should have left that one out Ritchie.......
So this was a preloaded system and you expect us to believe that all the
above (TV etc) didn't work out of the box?
You're not a good story teller Ritchie.
> On the bright side: in the four hours I checked out the machine and tried
> getting the tuner card and dual screen output to work (failing miserably on
> both counts -- but then again, I'm not a Windows expert) I only got two
> expection errors, and nothing actually crashed or froze (at least for more
> than a second or so), so Vista seems pretty stable.
More tales....
There is no point in even going any further with this one because obviously
you are making up yet another story.
And I thought your last tale of woe with the pretty young girl on the train
was a humdinger!
You need to take fairy tale writing lessons from Kelsey.
She is the best at this.
> Anyway, the owner was rather disappointed with his "multimedia machine", and
> wanted to see if Linux could do better. After creating a 20GB empty
> partition with Vista's disk management tool (which wasn't too bad), the
> installation of Mandriva took less than 15 minutes, and most hardware was
> installed and recognized fine. It took half an hour more to update the
> installation and install the multimedia stuff (nVidia drivers, codecs and
> other non-free software), after which all worked just fine -- except the
> tuner card. Unsurprisingly, Mandriva was much faster and snappier than
> Vista: total boot time between power-up and a fully loaded desktop is a
> mere 45 seconds, and most things happen at a blistering speed, with
> Mandriva immediately responding to every user action. Even OpenOffice
> starts in only three seconds
And oh, the mouse wheel functions, and the> sound quality is vastly better too.
>
> The only disappointment was that I couldn't get the tuner card (Creatix
> CTX953) to work. It was recognized, but there appears to be no Linux
> support for it yet (and I didn't want to go through the trouble of
> compiling experimental support for this beastie in a kernel module).
> Another drawback is that the man is still tied to Vista because of a few
> apps (AutoCAD and something I didn't rememeber the name of) for which
> there's no viable Linux equivalent. So I wonder if he's going to use Linux
> at all -- he seemed impressed with what he saw, but I know from experience
> that having to reboot on a regular basis is quite a turn-off people will
> rather stick with what they're most familiar with, even though they don't
> really like it much.
>
> So the verdict is that yes, Vista sucks -- but for most people, it's not bad
> enough to make them switch to something completely different and
> unfamiliar. They simply put up with the crap ("Ah well, I guess I'll have
> to stick to the TV + VCR a little longer.")
>
>
> Richard Rasker
--
Moshe Goldfarb
Collector of soaps from around the globe.
Please visit The Hall of Linux Idiots:
http://linuxidiots.blogspot.com/
)