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Switching Back to Windows from Mac OS X

Time: 19:47 EST/00:47 GMT | News Source: *Linked Within Post* | Posted By: Andre Da Costa

I have been using Mac OS X as my primary OS for almost a year now, but last night I switched back. What spurred it is that my Mac OS X partition crashed and it wouldn�t boot back into the OS - I used rescue tools and drive scanners but it appears that the partition just disappeared. I booted into a much smaller NTFS partition and put the Vista install disk in. I hadn�t used Vista much since its release, but I figure I try it out (plus I wanted to try out the new Visual Studio in a separate partition). I have been running Vista for a little less than 24 hours and I can�t believe I didn�t switch back sooner, the main difference is that the interface is much much smoother and neater and despite popular belief performance is actually fantastic.

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#1 By 3653 (68.52.143.149) at 5/7/2007 9:49:34 PM

makes you wonder how many of those new macpros are simply vista machines...

#2 By 7754 (216.160.8.41) at 5/7/2007 10:01:05 PM

It's funny to read all the comments from the Mac users, more or less calling him a liar. They might as well have put their fingers in their ears and shouted "la la la la la la I can't hear you la la la la...."

#3 By 23275 (24.179.4.158) at 5/7/2007 11:09:32 PM

"Stuff" like <Vista> this sells itself.

I spent the morning working with a man that I respect just about more than any other IT pro in the business. He's as old as I am and he started back before there was a day - much less a phrase to describe it. He's never lost his enthusiasm for computers and his mind has never narrowed. He came over specifically to explore Windows Vista and find out for himself if there was anything to all the negative stories he'd been reading. Being the Principal of the old school, he hadn't even considered learning about Vista until he'd seen some approval for Vista SP1.

As I said, the man's never lost his enthusiasm and a couple of days ago he bought a Vista based machine for his home. He rang me up last Friday and asked if we could meet sometime this week to learn more about it. This morning was open for a few hours after 10:30 and we spent the next three hours exploring Vista from about every perspective one might. Deployment, management, policies, rights management, UI, features and of course, security. It was a lot of fun and the man was totally immersed in the new OS - folder redirection, DFS, and far smarter roaming profiles really caught his attention and held it. By the time the session was over, he'd ordered three systems and an ad-hoc familiarization period and user migration were set up for two more users - very seasoned partners in their firm. That session was even better and the users, who are very skilled Excel and Access users, were blown away by Vista.

Observations about how smooth it is and how easy it is to find not just files, but the programs and tools to manipulate and share them were most common. The smooth part was driven by Vista's background I/O manager, which allows users of especially large Office documents to keep working - vice waiting on processes to complete [I can't stress how much of a difference this makes in the real world where an Excel document often exceeds 50 megs by a wide margin].

Deal is, we didn't have to do squat - no selling, just sharing... as I implied, Vista sells itself. The only requirement is that a person actually has to use it first.

#4 By 2960 (24.254.95.224) at 5/8/2007 7:28:06 AM

Funny thing is, as much as I like Vista, I'm really close to going back to XP.

It's about the hardware. I want a properly working video card. I want a properly working racing wheel. My Creative X-Fi Elite Pro cost me almost $400, and I want ALL of it to work properly.

I just want everything to work...

I'm not saying it's Microsoft's fault (well, some of it is. Only an idiot could have made the decision to drop DirectSound).

Haven't decided yet. Trying to give it as much time as possible.

TL

#5 By 3 (86.1.34.106) at 5/8/2007 9:13:05 AM

While I understand the frustration with the DirectSound thing - Creative did know about this over a year in advance. For me and this will surprise everyone, I actually love using Vista and touch wood I haven't had many problems at all....once I got rid of the Creative hardware that is.

#6 By 23275 (24.179.4.158) at 5/8/2007 10:19:37 AM

<I truly wish that our industry press would learn to read, and come to value facts and the truth - do they not realize that the traffic and ad supported world they are creating is going to destroy us.>

1999.

The year Creative itself signaled the inevitable end of EAX - OpenAL was launched at the Game Developers Conference in 1999. Initially it was a joint collaboration between Creative Labs and Loki Entertainment.

"On the Windows platform, Creative Labs provides three different OpenAL playback devices. Firstly, there is a native device that ships with soundcards such as the Sound Blaster Audigy� and Sound Blaster X-Fi� series of cards. The native device communicates directly with the drivers of the soundcard and offers the best performance, quality and feature set of all the OpenAL devices. Secondly, there is a device known as Generic Hardware which uses DirectSound 3D hardware buffers to enable hardware acceleration of OpenAL on soundcards that don't have their own native devices. Finally, there is a Generic Software device that uses a built-in software mixer to output a single audio stream to a DirectSound Buffer." - Source,
Creative Labs

Any stated lack of EAX support under OpenAL and Vista is pure B.S. - "The Window's implementations of OpenAL support Creative's EAX technology. In fact EAX, versions 2, 3, 4 and 5 are all supported! The Generic Software mixer includes a high-quality reverb algorithm too, so you can be guaranteed to always have reverb! - Creative provides Alchemy as the solution extending support for legacy games using DirectSound/EAX under Windows Vista.

The future is OpenAL, Creative, Nvidia, Apple and countless others, including Microsoft, have supported the development community's move to it from what was considered a closed and proprietary charter [DirectSound] for over three years now. The move from EAX to OpenAL has not been a secret and certainly was not driven by Microsoft, or Windows Vista - on the contrary, OpenAL support in Windows Vista represents Microsoft's willingness to work in support of a larger community of developers. - if there is a dark side, it is that OpenAL is used on the Xbox 360 and in the context of games, too much effort has moved to the console and gaming on PC was hurt by a shift in emphasis. That's one take, but the reality is that the more dev tools that are cross platform by design, the more likely we will see rich titles on the PC - most simply, Games for Windows is real, will take time, but ultimately provide for a better gaming experience on the PC and in the interim, there are solutions that players of legacy games may use. Please review, http://developer.creative.com/articles/article.asp?cat=1&sbcat=31&top=38&aid=147

Cont...

#7 By 23275 (24.179.4.158) at 5/8/2007 10:19:58 AM

For those that still need or want EAX support in Vista, please go here, http://preview.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.aspx

Where hardware supported acceleration under Vista and all other platforms was headed was and is no secret. Any builder, developer and game studio knew all of these things more than three years ago and final specifications and tools are more than a year old. [spec dates, are 4/26/2006 - a month before Vista BETA 2 shipped for devs to work with].

I want people to abandon the corrosive rhetoric that makes it easy to blame all things on Microsoft and Windows Vista - based upon an industry press where fortunes are made by ensuring that we are all kept numb and dumb. Microsoft is as much a part of our ecosystem as any one of us, and subject to the same rules. If we want to blame someone, blame ourselves first and recognize that many game studios had difficult choices to make - use what they knew [EAX] and allow games to play out while them moved with the entire industry over to OpenAL. Some titles are affected, but that is mitigated by software like Creative's Alchemy. Where it is not fully mitigated, users will have to accept this and take comfort in the release of new titles and a more open and consistent development environment that promises new titles and a better gaming and entertainment experience than ever.

So when you hear some guy repeat what some industry hack has said - things like, "Yeah, but Microsoft dropped hardware audio support in Vista... or the lack of hardware audio support in Vista is all about Microsoft's DRM..." please consider copying and pasting this post to his forehead.

#8 By 37047 (216.191.227.68) at 5/8/2007 11:15:43 AM

#7: Keep one thing in mind. Newer games may support OpenAL, and work well with Vista, but the bigger issue arises when people want to play their favourite games which may be older and use DirectSound for the interface. With no compatibility mechanism in place, those older games lose the ability to have sound under Vista. Some people will obviously complain about this, and this becomes another black mark against Microsoft and Vista, whether deserved or not. The average teenage game player will see this as their games not working under Vista, not an issue of Microsoft dropping an older audio API that a lot of game makers used extensively for years. This is exactly the kind of thing that will keep people from upgrading to Vista. After all, the game companies aren't going to spend much time and effort to issue patches for all those old games just so that they will work under OpenAL.

This is, in fact, one of the biggest problems with proprietary APIs. You are always at the mercy of the API owner, and you never know when it will change in a way that breaks your product, or simply goes away with no recourse to you.

Remember, a lot of reviewers and other tech reporters don't know as much about the underlying issues with OS upgrades, driver issues, etc., and see the OS in the same light as the average user would. This occasionally means that the pundit will see things the way the average user sees them, not the way you or I would, and those "the problem is obviously in the XXX subsystem" moments just can't occur to them.

As well, a pundit who tries Vista and likes it is less likely to do a 3000 word article indicating that he doesn't see what all the fuss is about. He'll just use it, and maybe make a casual reference to how much he likes it. That won't get much notice in the blogosphere or mainline media. Not nearly sensational enough. Positive articles don't get the attention or the page hits that many pundits are after. You can't sell the ads if you don't have the traffic.

#9 By 23275 (24.179.4.158) at 5/8/2007 12:04:09 PM

#8, Interesting points, but Creative's Alchemy installer writes the needed files to affected games for the user - they simply have to download and install it and it inserts the files into the the games' directories for the user and does not harm a thing. Again, see, http://preview.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.aspx Users do not have to, but they may, add the files as needed manually - but only if they wish to go that route.

The press held out - as does Cereative's and OpenAL Org's own sites, that, "Since Microsoft decided to remove....." EAX, HAL support that.... <all is doom> Yes, Microsoft made a decision, but THE EXACT SAME decision that everyone else did and both Creative and Microsoft did provide an effective solution to extend support for legacy games. This, while technically accurate, is really poor behavior - even OpenAL seems to dodge any hits by using that phrase - as if the entire matter were driven by a Microsoft decision alone, thus causing all else.

The facts are that the entire development community started using OpenAL - Microsoft simply supported that decision and the idea of cross platform compatibility and then it provided API's to make good on that support.

As for previously proprietary API's - one does have to ask, "Just what existed BEFORE the proprietary API? - who provided it and how good was it?" Ask also, how many ideas from the original proprietary API were then used to inspire OpenAL - after all, Microsoft's original API worked well enough to unify that part of the industry - certainly well enough for people to bitch about their move to an open API. If nothing else, the proprietary API's proved that the industry could be unified around a common set of dev tools - and that is a theme Microsoft clearly made a reality. Kind of like, "there is the truth and then there is the GD'd truth."
DirectSound and OpenAL are only one example of this. Consistently, Microsoft is dinged for one proprietary technology after another - as if anything else unifying or any good existed before it.... only after legions of people have benefitted from a lot of work, billions of dollars in private investment and a working model, do they roll out the "open standards" banners and the press fires up its mills. Then when Microsoft says, Okay, and supports the open standard, they get dinged again. It's insane.

#10 By 2960 (24.254.95.224) at 5/8/2007 12:09:44 PM

#5,

That's just it. I shouldn't HAVE to get rid of my Hardware, much less a $400 Audio Card.

And while I do blame Creative to a point, Microsoft pulled the rug completely out from under every sound card maker out there. They are all having the same issues.

Yanking DirectSound screwed an ENTIRE industry in one fell swoop.

Don't get me started on nVidia :)

TL

#11 By 37047 (216.191.227.68) at 5/8/2007 12:33:11 PM

#9: By the looks of the ALchemy site, this is not an issue I'll likely have to deal with for a while, at least, if ever. When I get a new Vista Ultimate with Aero Glass capable machine, I'll want to get a new sound card anyway, so I will deal with it then. Hopefully by then, ALchemy will be out of beta, and more games will be supported. Not that this is a big issue for me, as I don't play a lot of games anyway.

It should be noted that not all games are supported. Here is a list of the games currently supported in ALchemy:

http://preview.creativelabs.com/alchemy/Lists/Games/AllItems.aspx

Here are the games that currently support OpenAL:

http://www.openal.org/titles.html

#12 By 37047 (216.191.227.68) at 5/8/2007 2:25:16 PM

Here is what a former Microsoft employee and current entrepreneur has to say about compatibility issues. This is focused on Office 2007, but it applies to many things.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/04/25.html

#13 By 4240821 (213.139.195.162) at 10/27/2023 3:58:25 AM