Surreality TV

Man, I thought Vista's network stack was aggressive, and then I met Windows 7. It does all kinds of nifty on the fly TCP optimization (sliding TCP window sizing, variable on the fly MTU, MRU, and MSS values, and rapid scaling up of data throughput as best as I can tell), which are all anticipating ten, forty, and hundred gigabit LANs as normal and expected (and moving data across links like that at wire speed is HARD). Vista's network stack is far better than XP's, and it looks like Windows 7's network stack is Vista's on overdrive. This is all well and good, except when it totally takes over our connection to the outside world and nothing else can get manage to grab any bandwidth. Current incarnations of *BSD and Linux are also doing these same things, for the same reasons. If we manage to get past our current problems and really upgrade our network infrastructure, the future is going to be awesome. The future here being half a decade away.

Man, I thought Vista's network stack was aggressive, and then I met Windows 7. It does all kinds of nifty on the fly TCP optimization (sliding TCP window sizing, variable on the fly MTU, MRU, and MSS values, and rapid scaling up of data throughput as best as I can tell), which are all anticipating ten, forty, and hundred gigabit LANs as normal and expected (and moving data across links like that at wire speed is HARD). Vista's network stack is far better than XP's, and it looks like Windows 7's network stack is Vista's on overdrive. This is all well and good, except when it totally takes over our connection to the outside world and nothing else can get manage to grab any bandwidth. Current incarnations of *BSD and Linux are also doing these same things, for the same reasons. If we manage to get past our current problems and really upgrade our network infrastructure, the future is going to be awesome. The future here being half a decade away.

Since we have MSDN subs here, we have the Windows 7 Beta (which you can DL from MS if you like, but it's almost a 3GB ISO, so don't try this on a modem, kids!).

I did a quick install in a VM for a quick peek. So far it is to Vista what XP was to Windows 2000, it's an interface update with some minor tweaks.

The beta is the full on Ultimate version, and I suspect that the final release will have the same break down as Vista for available versions (Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate), but I think MS would be doing themselves a favor by just going with three: the equivalents of Home Premium, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

I need to install it on some real hardware so I can play with some of the advanced desktop features that the VM install won't run since it's only emulating a ten year graphics chip with a meager eight megs of VRAM.

I get to spend this afternoon doing drudge work in classified areas. Yay.

I know the whole world is trying to download the Winderz 7 Beta, but I need to get updates for standalone machines in classified areas, so, can you like, maybe, oh, I don't know, RATE LIMIT the Windows 7 downloads so the rest of us can still get shit done?

I know the whole world is trying to download the Winderz 7 Beta, but I need to get updates for standalone machines in classified areas, so, can you like, maybe, oh, I don't know, RATE LIMIT the Windows 7 downloads so the rest of us can still get shit done?

You know, for all the shit people give Vista, I didn't just waste five hours of my life on a machine that I'll have to start all over again on because it hung during a driver update. In fact, the only time Vista has ever crashed on me is due to faulty memory. The more I have to deal with XP's bullshit, the more I won't miss it when it finally gets thrown under a bus.

I went ahead and repartitioned, formatted, and started over. I am now primarily using Vista 64bit at home. I have a Windows XP partition for the things that will not run on Vista, and I have 50GB reserved for FreeBSD once -CURRENT gets to a point where it will boot on my machine and is stable (for now, I have my 7-STABLE partition on my laptop when I need it).

The biggest thing I noticed? Disk IO speeds. On XP and Vista 32, my SATAII drives achieve an upper bound of just over 50MB/s read and write speeds. With Vista64 I get just under 80MB/s (for testing, I copied a Solaris 10 x86 ISO from drive to drive in each (using the same starting and end point for each of course)). And of course, Vista64 actually uses all 4GB of RAM.

I wish FreeBSD didn't lock up playing in USB land booting an install disc, as I'd love to benchmark it on my machine. It handily outperforms Vista32 on the laptop, and I'm curious how it would stand against Vista64 on my desktop.

Why am I still at work? Because some idiot fucking subcontractor emailed us something they shouldn't have, and I'll be here for another couple of hours cleaning this shit up. Just how I wanted to start my weekend.

I went ahead and repartitioned, formatted, and started over. I am now primarily using Vista 64bit at home. I have a Windows XP partition for the things that will not run on Vista, and I have 50GB reserved for FreeBSD once -CURRENT gets to a point where it will boot on my machine and is stable (for now, I have my 7-STABLE partition on my laptop when I need it).

The biggest thing I noticed? Disk IO speeds. On XP and Vista 32, my SATAII drives achieve an upper bound of just over 50MB/s read and write speeds. With Vista64 I get just under 80MB/s (for testing, I copied a Solaris 10 x86 ISO from drive to drive in each (using the same starting and end point for each of course)). And of course, Vista64 actually uses all 4GB of RAM.

I wish FreeBSD didn't lock up playing in USB land booting an install disc, as I'd love to benchmark it on my machine. It handily outperforms Vista32 on the laptop, and I'm curious how it would stand against Vista64 on my desktop.

Why am I still at work? Because some idiot fucking subcontractor emailed us something they shouldn't have, and I'll be here for another couple of hours cleaning this shit up. Just how I wanted to start my weekend.

After I upgraded my machine at home at the end of last summer, I went ahead and gave MS a bit of my money and bought a copy of Vista Ultimate. Yeah, I know, but it's my money. I got the retail version because it comes with both 32 and 64 bit media, and I wanted to play around with it.

After having Vista on my laptop for six months, I knew the ins and outs, what services to kill, and what interface tweaks to make for my own personal comfort. The one thing the laptop doesn't have is 64bit. OEM versions only come with one or the other, and Dell ships 32bit by default (and makes it difficult to get 64bit at that).

Having run the 64bit version on my desktop? I'm ready to dump the 32bit completely. The only hardware problem is that I have one piece of hardware for which there is no 64bit driver (which is really weird, since the 32bit driver for it is supplied by MS). It's an older video capture board that I don't really use anymore since my camcorder does FireWire, so it's not a loss I'm terribly concerned with. The 64bit version is faster, stable, uses all 4GB of the installed memory, and runs most of my software. The bits stopping me from dumping the 32bit partition are Studio and Nero. I'm running older versions of both, which support Vista 32bit. In order to get 64bit support, I need to upgrade, which I don't really want to do right now.

I also want to move my office out of the basement to the empty bedroom upstairs, but don't really want to run cat5 and coax all over the house to do it. If the Cabling Fairy wants to do it for me, that'd be awesome.

So, it's been a year since I got this here laptop with the Ultimate Vista on it. A year already. Wow.

So, my impression of Vista as it stands right now? I'm shocked at how stable it's been. Not a single crash. I've had some weird software issues with older stuff, but that's normally resolvable by running it in compatibility mode in the Windows version for which it was released (and most things don't need this). For a few, even that doesn't work. For that, I have Virtual PC installed with a Windows XP Pro VM set up. The drivers for this Nvidia card were incomplete initially (all DirectX and OpenGL capabilities were there, but the control panel bits allowing you to tweak them weren't), but that was taken care of after a few months. Everything else has just worked. The USB stack occasionally flakes out if I move the KVM focus to another host while I have a USB flash drive in and Ready Boost turned on (which is odd, since the flash drive is plugged into a USB port directly on the dock, and not the hub on the KVM (IOGear GCS1764)), but I can log in remotely or open the lid and use the built in keyboard to shut the machine down when that happens. This only happens with Ready Boosted flash drives. I'm guessing Vista resets the entire USB subsystem when the KVM hub disappears. This is a fairly major flaw, but easily worked around (take the flash drive out or turn off Ready Boost first).

I haven't seen the massive file access and copy delays a lot of folks have reported, so I can't speak to that. It's pretty. Being able to set a movie as my desktop background only works in Vista Ultimate (Dream Scene), and is only a decade and then some late compared to *BSD/Linux, but I don't normally do that sort of thing anyway, so it's a minor thing.

The Vista Media Center (Home Premium and Ultimate) works, is easy to use, and it's really annoying that you don't get a DVD decoder unless you have one of these two versions. I don't really give a fuck about the media center in and of itself, but it'd be nice to be able to view video content on DVD that we've made in house without having to install a third party decoder on Vista Enterprise. We don't need the whole media center, and have no interest in it, but Windows Media Player ships with ALL versions, and it could include a decoder, damn it. A minor thing, but one that's come up.

Over all, it's not worth upgrading an existing machine running XP, but for a new machine, Vista should not be any problem.