Microsoft Vista ?

I admit I am somewhat of a computer geek. I have both OSX and XP machines, although 90% of my

personal and photo related stuff is now done on my Macs. I use XP at my day job about 90% of the

time.<p>

Anyway, I was curious about Vista and any issues that might pop up as far as compatibility with the

current version of Photoshop, Plug-Ins, Bridge, Lightroom, or any other photo editing, processing,

uploading, browsing, viewing, disc burning, website creating, slide-show presenting, etc... software.

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Even if most things should "just work" which I assume will be the case (hopefully), sometimes there can be

little quirks or minor annoyances. Just wondering if anyone is aware of anything yet that might be

applicable to photography. Even though I use a Mac, I know most of my clients and the rest of the world

run MS OS's so I always stay on top of keeping everything friendly for both operating systems.

Everything I've read so far has been some variation of the following:

If you are going to switch to Vista, you should wait until they release Service Pack 1 in the fall of 2007.

Personally I'm not going to switch to Vista until they provide a way to disable the defective DRM that comes with it. As that's likely to never happen, I'll be with XP until Microsoft no longer supports it.

Digital Rights Management. It's what allows content providers to control how you use the content they've sold you.

This is not for the weak at heart but is a good study:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

"Apparently if you buy an upgrade version of Windows Vista for your XP machine, Windows Vista will invalidate your XP key (so you won't be able to set up a dual-boot option nor will you be able to use that version of XP on another machine). Not only that, but if you ever uninstall Vista, you won't be able to fall back on your copy of XP anymore."

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/software/upgrade-to-vista-lose-your-xp-key-232647.php

very scary read this article.

Emmmmmm...one question jumps to mind: WHY BUY VISTA?

<I>one question jumps to mind: WHY BUY VISTA?</i><P>

Wait... don't tell me... 'Cause it looks like a Mac? ;-)

Pure and simple:

I'm using the beta version of Vista and Photoshop CS2 does work, as well as my Epson Printers, (2200 & R800), and my Nikon Super Coolscan 4000.

As far as quirks, anytime a new operating system comes out there's bound to be some. The same goes for other software updates. I will say that it will take some getting used to Vista's new interface; but that's a story for another time:)

Basically I would say hold off until SP1. That is always a good general thumb rule with Microsoft.

On the other side I had a peek through some of the pc forums and there seems to be a general pattern in the threads concerning things not working. A lot of graphic cards and sound card issues, as well as external HDD and such.

It usually takes a while till the software and hardware providers finalize drivers. (dunno why but it does)

Also have been seeing a bunch of trouble concerning audio and video output, in conjunction with HD and music cds.

I did read the report that has been posted on photo.net and yes it does not sound good...I don't think it will be that bad but I do think that things will not go so well, especially when you read MS's response to that paper.

But then MS has said they will support XP till 2014 because there are way to many people and countries that cannot afford to upgrade their pcs to meet the minimum requirements.

Generally I would advise against switch to a new OS the moment it comes out, because there are to many bugs still and not enough support and tech support from other manufacturers.

I entered the Digital Age in the mid-Eighties when I bought a 128K Mac (the kind Seinfeld had in his apartment during the first season of the show).

For $3000 you got a 7" monochrome screen, one 400K floppy drive, no hard drive, and less RAM and ROM than a $30 memory key--and MacWrite and MacPaint were thrown in. After tape-driven Commodores and MS-DOS boxes, we were in heaven.

I eventually progressed to a color Mac II, and loved that also--until the pencil-necked bean-counters in charge made my workplace a PC-only zone. So I switched to PCs, and have put up with the vagaries, instability, and boringness of every Windows OS from '95 on up, along with ever-worsening viruses, Trojan horses, and other security threats.

With Vista, it now looks like the biggest invaders of personal privacy are Microsoft and their corporate allies.

Since Windows XP Pro is the most stable of MS offerings to date, I will take the "if it ain't broke" route and stay with it until the Forces of Darkness at Microsoft become invasive enough, and introduce sufficient software/OS incompatibilities, to force me to change to Vista. Then I will return to Macs.

If a good enough deal comes along, I'll make the switch back to Macs sooner. Let's see . . . is there enough room on this desk for a 23" Apple Cinema Display . . . ?

I was just playing with a Vista machine at Costco a while ago. The OS use 820MB of ram when Idle. I couldn't believe it. I was able to get the (Dual Core) CPU usage to 70% just clicking through some 130mb jpegs from the sample images.

From what I could tell, it was just a beautification of XP, but reliant on about 3x the memory. The sidebar ate up 40MB alone.

I was incredulous when I saw the CPU hovering at 30% load even before I launched any application. Not sure why or how this happens on vista but I don't like it. I've seen this on the two vista machines I played with last week.

Also remember vista checks your system 30 times a second to make sure you haven't been doing anything microsoft doesn't like.

Unlike XP where you activate the system with microsoft ONCE, vista activation checks happen periodically every few weeks, and the system can call microsoft if it thinks anything is amiss, so be very afraid when you're tweaking your system.

What about the tilt bits? These are a recipe for disaster.

The day I can no longer use XP/2K due to device incompatibilities or software, I switch to Linux.

I use a PC at home because that's what I use at my day job, and it has kept things simple and consistent for me all along. It works.

For me, the compelling event to make me consider Vista seriously would be one requiring a complete overhaul of my now nearly 18 month old system. I foresee such an event coming in fall of this year in the form of Canon's next 1 series body (which hopefully is not significantly bigger than 5D, otherwise I'm not buying) requiring manipulation of huge files. By fall, I hope Vista has stabilized enough to have most major kinks worked out and most applications I use running on it without any hiccups - most notably the upcoming PS CS3.

By itself, the release of Vista does not appear to be a compelling event for me to swap my PC for the latest and greatest.

After reading Peter Gutmann article it's clear the Vista DRM was written by the NSA for "benefit" of M$ and cotails, or the other way around, it does not matter witch way, as in the end all of them want to benefit from this "enhancement"

At least nobody can say: They made me upgrade.

Okay, I am in the tech business, so try to keep my fingers in.... I had Beta versions of Vista from the beginning of the program, and currently have Vista RTM x32(official Release To Manufacturing) installed in a multi-boot environment with XP Pro x64 and Fedora 6 on a Dual Core AMD x64 4800+ system. Most applications I am using, ie Elements 5, NX, etc work fine. My Nero 6 would not work, and I had to upgrade (more $$). Some applications that require specialised drivers, ie PrintFIX PLUS, do not work. Especially bad are the x64 versions of Windows (XP and Vista) for driver issues. Unfortunately, there are too too many drivers missing still, even for XP. I originally installed the x64 versions of Vista, but had to switch over to the 32 bit version due to drivers issues.

Unless you have an overwhelming need to switch to Vista, or want to be first on your block, be aware you could have issues running some hardware and software. This will take several months before manufacturers catch up to resolve, if they ever do. As example, I had an Epson Stylus Photo 750 on another machine running Windows XP Pro. Originally the Epson 750 drivers were written for Win98 and Windows 2000. When I upgraded to XP I discovered that Epson would not write an XP driver for this printer. The next model up (760) did get an XP driver. The Windows XP driver worked but for photographs it was unuseable. Additionally, the ink monitor would not work. Nonetheless, I managed to get it working for printing photos by patching together a Windows 2000 driver. With Vista, I cannot even install the Windows 2000 drivers. While Vista recognises and loads a driver of it's own it performs identically to the Windows XP driver... for general printing it's okay, for photo's not so good. I trashed the printer when the ink ran out.....

Also, be forewarned that Vista needs a very good video card and at minimum 2gb of memory. I originally ran the Beta's and RTM versions on an AMD 1.4GHz CPU, with 1gb memory, and an ASUS X300SE video card. Not blazing fast but it ran reasonably well. Memory was constantly at 80-90% even when idle and every time you did something the system was swapping it's brains out. An upgrade to 2gb memory solved this. The X300SE is absolute minimum for Vista if you want to run the Aero interface. Vista in summary if a slicked up version of XP.....not that much different underneath, but a spiffy GUI. As an acquaintance of mine used to say..... they put lipstick on the pig.

Ken