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Longhorn Preview | |
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| Time: 10:41 EST/15:41 GMT | News Source: PC World | Posted By: Chris Hedlund | ||
The most recent build of Longhorn--Microsoft's next Windows--has some impressive visual touches, including the kinds of translucent objects found now in Apple's OS X, and more powerful ways of finding files. But it doesn't yet exhibit any breakthroughs in productivity, or promised features such as security improvements and smarter connections to handheld devices. | ||
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| #1 By 1845 (67.172.237.116) at 6/23/2005 10:47:15 AM |
| More powerful ways of finding files don't constitute breakthroughs in productivity? |
| #2 By 415 (69.67.200.50) at 6/23/2005 11:25:14 AM |
| In a sense, indexing and searching/filtering is a way to help organize files. However, what Windows (and every other OS) lacks is an easy and powerful way to categorize and describe files and folders. In the same way a file extension (or file icon) shows you the type of a file, the attributes or properties of a file should tell you what the file contains. |
| #3 By 7754 (216.160.8.41) at 6/23/2005 12:55:26 PM |
| In a way, I'm glad that WinFS was put off until they could architect it for distributed environments. Desktop search is nothing new--desktop indexing programs have been around for ages (no, Google was definitely not the first, and Spotlight folks and the media reporters can get off their soapbox about how Apple has beat Microsoft to the punch with desktop search). But all of these have a common flaw so far: they index with no intelligence for distributed systems. I do NOT want Google/MSN desktop search running on each end user's PC, all indexing network file shares. Of course, it doesn't do this by default, but our users are well-trained NOT to save anything on their desktop, so desktop indexing is virtually useless. We use an enterprise document management system that does a much better job tagging data, doing full-text searches, auditing events, etc., and it is very useful... and somewhat expensive. Having this capability built into the OS is a logical step, but for businesses it only starts to make sense when it is designed around how businesses work--not around how home users work. Unfortunately, it seems like most of the tech media outlets dwell on the home user scenario... perhaps because they don't seem to understand the business environments well. |
| #4 By 3653 (63.162.177.143) at 6/23/2005 1:57:37 PM |
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tizzyd - "How many times do you sit and wait on your PC when you choose View > Explorer Bar? I have a 3GHz P4, and it takes 10+ seconds"
I'm running on a 2.8GHz P4, and View > Explorer Bar is instantaneous. "What about hitting the Recent Documents folder?" Tried it. Took Maybe 1 second. |
| #5 By 61 (65.32.175.192) at 6/23/2005 3:23:53 PM |
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Tizzy, on top of what mooresa said, the translucent stuff, and all other eye candy, will be offloaded to the GPU, as opposed to right now where most of the work is done by the CPU. So you will actually get an increase in performance with the translucent stuff.
I have to say, there is something wrong with your system if it takes so long to do such things. It takes a lot of effort to move over something as big as Office to .NET, but it is being done, and all new Windows components are being done in .NET (as well as some old ones). The simple fact is, it takes a lot of time to do this, but they are doing it. I do agree, that it is a PITA to have to sit and wait for the request to time out when you go to a network address that's not there. |
| #6 By 32132 (206.116.136.250) at 6/23/2005 5:47:47 PM |
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#5 "How many times do you sit and wait on your PC when you choose View > Explorer Bar?" None really. Less than a second (Athlon 3200+ / 1GB) "(Registry's cleaned and optimized each day, so no issues there.) " That may be your problem. Registry cleaners usually screw things up, not make them better. |
| #7 By 7754 (216.160.8.41) at 6/23/2005 6:42:59 PM |
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Registry cleaners usually screw things up, not make them better.
Agreed. I think quux made this very clear not long ago in another post (ah, here it is: http://www.activewin.com/awin/comments.asp?ThreadIndex=36178&Group=Last)--most of these "optimize your PC" utilities make things worse or much worse. If your PC is working, I wouldn't touch 'em. Even then, depending on the situation, I'd consider a reinstall rather than some of these utilities, unless I knew why I was using it. A reinstall isn't bad if you've set up your system well, or it can be a pain, of course. What I find, though, is that it often takes less time than tracking down some strange issue. I remember when I was introduced to a policy at a large insurance company that, if it was a certain type of problem, no questions asked, you'd reimage the machine. I thought it was almost ridiculous at the time, but once I realized it took only 15 minutes or so vs. who knows how long to figure out the issue, I thought hey, this is pretty smart. Incidentally, I've seen some goofy print drivers (!) that will cause erratic behavior like this. On one Dell machine I set up at someone's home recently, Windows Explorer would take FOREVER to display the folder list, and sometimes not at all. At first I thought it was something weird going on with the Zip drive not enumerating properly or some other strange issue. Turns out it was the print driver for an MFD, of all things! Nice QC on that one. |
| #8 By 61 (65.32.175.192) at 6/24/2005 10:09:09 AM |
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tizzy: I commented on everything you said before.
WinFS has nothing to do with filesizes, except for the added meta-data, which should be next to nill. Most of the filesize issue comes with the formatting of the document. |
| #9 By 7754 (216.160.8.41) at 6/24/2005 12:47:16 PM |
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tizzyd: never tried Registry Mechanic, though I don't doubt that it has worked well for you. When you do find one that works well, it's like finding buried treasure. When I fix someone's home PC, I usually carry with me a utility called WinsockxpFix.exe, but only for specific circumstances (certain spyware infections); it has helped make nearly unusable machines usable again. But... there aren't many that I've seen help more than hurt.
If I were in your shoes, I'd probably get your machine installed with all the apps, configured the way you want it, then Ghost it (or make a RIS image, if you have a RIS server). At home, I'd buy a cheap 40 GB drive or something like that and keep the image on there. If you keep your files on a separate partition or drive, a reinstall would take minutes. As for the performance concerns, most of those things seemed to be related to 3rd party software. Longhorn may be better in this area in a number of ways, but if 3rd parties write poor software--and they will--you can't really blame that on the OS. You might blame the OS for making it possible, but you can write poor software for any OS. I (and others) haven't experienced those issues you're seeing, so I'd say you'd have to take it up with the ISV. I think all points of your comments have already been addressed. I agree about point 3--there should be a cancel option when timing out on network shares (I would guess there's a registry value you could adjust to lower the timeout as well, but that's not the point, of course). As for wireless, I've had good luck on XP (particularly with SP2), but not the best luck with routers. For home, I just bought one of the Belkin Pre-N routers, and am glad I did--I never have dropped connections anymore and the performance is great, even though I have a standard G card. As for WinFS and file sizes, they really don't have much to do with each other. Word file sizes--yes, they start at over 20K, but an initial minimum file size; beyond that, they increase at a rate similar to any other formatted text file. With the Office 12 XML formats, however, they will be zipped by default. My guess is that one reason they decided to make the format change and split out the file into different components is for taking advantage of WinFS. |
| #10 By 3653 (63.162.177.143) at 6/24/2005 4:19:49 PM |
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tizzd - "I appreicate all the suggestions on issues with my system, but I don't think it's just a sympton of my system. "
I think its at least safe to say your experience is atypical. And that helps narrow the possibilities down. Yes, I would say its something with your system. |
| #11 By 61 (65.32.175.192) at 6/25/2005 1:28:00 PM |
| WinFS is not an entire FS, it runs on top of NTFS, and can be disabled. |
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