stumbled across this

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut [...] a_cost.txt

can i have peoples thoughts please!

A lot of hysteria combined with a lot of out of date information.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/sear [...] ring=vista

£135 for OEM copy of Vista Ultimate on pre-order.

and im pretty sure everyone knows u aint gunna run vista on a low-end PC anyway.

Are you not at all aprehensive about vista. Any concerns?

i mean wasnt it supposed to be a completely new OS built from the ground up featuring a radical new file system (winFS), new security, pc to pc sync, scripting shell, new visuals etc when all that remains is basically a version of XP with aero and DX10, effectively XP SP3. and even then not everybody can run aero

Thats still way too expensive
as an example
compare that to the £139 of a family upgrade (5 users) to Mac OS X leopard

So what is the story regarding playback of purchased HD DVD and blue ray movies via 32 bit vista now?

Would you like overpriced Apple Brand fries with that?

If you work out how much you're paying for the Apple logo on your Mac you might find it works out at about the same price................

I am talking about os upgrades here so the hardware is irrelevant
i know where you are coming from though

in any case you can get a mac mini for £399 (albeit without monitor) but still comparable to a dell at that price range

Specifications
* 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo
* 512MB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x256MB
* 60GB Serial ATA drive
* Mac OS X

also you can upgrade the mac os again next time and the time after that at the same low upgrade cost

Yes but a good deal of people just buy another PC when they want a new OS. By the time a new OS comes around most people find their PC's to be a bit slow. So you're still getting overpriced iFries with your OS

Yes, you are correct that the majority of people will buy a new machine, in most cases its more cost effective, however you are still missing the point.

there are some people around who after having bought a dell pc a year ago will walk in to dixons and buy vista at that incredible upgrade price and then find out their system isnt really good enough. Thats when it becomes expensive

now lets apply that situation to me, i have a family of 5

suppose i walk in to apple store and bought 5 mac minis @£399 each total £1995
6 months later i want to upgrade all machines to OSX leopard ~£139 approx
total cost for hardware and latest OS for all 5 = £2134

now instead do the same to 5 dells @ £399 each total £1995
when vista comes out i want to upgrade all machines to ultimate

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/show [...] =SW-046-MS

above lists the upgrade as £235 * 5 = £1175
total cost of hardware and to upgrade all 5 dells to vista = £3170

thats over £1000 difference. i could buy another couple of pcs or mac minis for that.

You're assuming people who have just gone out and bought Dell's care about having the latest and greatest OS. You also miss the point that if a PC has been purchased in the last couple of years that the odds are that it WILL run Vista well.

The funny thing is Apple releases a "new OS" far more often than Microsoft so you end up paying less than you would to upgrade an MS OS but you do it 2 or 3 times more often than you would with an MS OS. False economy?

With those Mac Mini's do you get monitors? I'm somewhat confused. Again with the false economy

the reason i went for the ultimate was because its the version with all the features just as os x has all features enabled.

Actually most of the dells bought in the past year are equipped with intel graphics, i know i use one at work as does everybody else i know. i dont think its good enough to run aero. now if someone did buy an upgrade they would be miffed to find that one of the main selling points of the OS wouldnt work well!!.
that wasnt actually my point but that it just costs so much for the upgrade surely you must concede that one. woulnt it be nice if ms sold a family upgrade licence for that same £235??

i didnt mean upgrade every 6 months i used it as an example and picked a key upgrade path in the near future for both systems. nobody in their right mind would upgrade as often as apple releases updates, i would say every 2-3 years is sufficient. and then that still is loads cheaper than shown in my previous example.

no you dont get monitors with the minis but i was comparing them to dells also without monitors so it was relative.

why dont you have a look at apple shop and see for yourself

Aero runs just fine on Intel Integrated Graphics Chipsets alot of the stuff you see about Vista using huge amounts of resources are either outdated information mainly from Beta 2 or people who have nothing better in their lives to do than to spread rumours.

As for this article i believe most of the information is out of date and were ideas Microsoft and partners were tossing around to get greater support from the Music and Video industries.

I can say for certain that each model of device does not need a seperate driver with a hardware coded return because all current drives are mainly packages for multiple products.

The other problem with most of this article is that it makes the assumption that Vista has a unified DRM system and it doesn't the DRM on Vista is still differentiated and currently Vista makes no determination between Hi-Def Content and other content and i have yet to come across any degradation for having an unencrypted signal chain (VGA) when playing DRM'ed Content.

I have used Vista throughout Beta 2, RC1, RC2 and RTM and yet to come across any forms of the protection mentioned in this article i do not claim it doesn't exist I merely state that baased on my experience none of this has been implemented.

Do you have a HD drive or Blue Ray drive?

Gutman's article is not outdated if anything he is spot on about the DRM measures.

I suggest you read some of the footnotes but you have to be an electronics engineer to understand most of it.

For example, ATI has backed up everything Gutman has written in his piece about the challenges of DRM and Trusted Computing.

I suggest you go over to the Creative Vista forum and read about the driver issues they are dealing with. Do not believe me read Creative's own article discussing the challenges they face with the new driver models:
Audio in Windows Vista
http://forums.creative.com/creativ [...] ge.id=1694

I have a creative sound card and not only does it cause BSOD repeatedly, the audio is pcm only and sounds terrible. Of course I am using Beta drivers but Creative has not released any drivers that are stable yet.

According to what I have read, the only people that are getting decent sound are the ones using audio chipsets embedded in the motherboards.

My NVIDIA graphics drivers are also terrible, they may be unified but they definitely not ready for prime time. The DVD support on my NVIDIA 7 series card is grainy and it is not stable. Vista ver 97.46

What concerns me most is that in the EULA you authorize MS to scan your hardisk with impunity and it calls home to report on your computing activities.

Alright I'll start off forst with an apology I read that article about a month ago and was responding off memory. I must have missed the part where it takes "Premimum Content" to be HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Content again my sincere apologies

And fairly quickly skiming over what is written at the creative site you linked it seems to be stating that the code handling audio within Vista has changed and the drivers need to be re-written, I did not see a single DRM mention. No one expected Vista to be XP with a coat of paint and no matter how much it looks like that the underlying mechanics of the system have changed and drivers need to be re-written to reflect that and unfortunately that takes time and effort and i'm sure Creative will have better drivers in the future

Creative is notorious for bad drivers... long before Vista. If you look deeper, you'll see a lot of people having issues with their cards in XP as well. (Noise distortion, etc.) I finally pulled out my Audigy 2 and went with onboard because the wife kept complaining about the sound issues. I tried absolutely every suggestion there was... all to no avail.

I'd suggest that Creative stop blaming everyone else for their driver issues. It's easy to point the nasty finger at MS because they are a big, fat target. However, Creative's driver issues go back a lot farther than Vista... so they need to take a good look at themselves.

Thanks for re reading the article.

They will not talk about DRM because MS has a NDA and they will loose any cooperation from MS and get sued. There is a statement in the EULA that states no one is allowed to review VISTA without permission from MS, specifically benchmarking.

If you want to know what they were talking about at Creative but only hinted at is the AACS, Advanced Access Content System, "copyguard" that has been implemented and forced them to rewrite every single driver to conform to VISTA.

If you want to learn about what they are doing to us in VISTA, I suggest going to Leo LaPorte’s website and listen to the most recent shows on VISTA.

This week he is supposed to have Gutman on to talk about the encryption and spying capabilites of VISTA on the consumer.
http://www.grc.com/SecurityNow.htm

Listen to the Digital Rights Management DRM show for a backgrounder. Show 74 will be much better as they will have Peter Gutman on to discuss what VISTA is going to do your computer hardware and security.

I quite frankly was stunned by what they had found out. MS has crossed the line in VISTA IMHO.

Zoron

I will agree with your comments about Creative’s past history as I started out with the AWE32 and know about their buggy drivers.

But to say it what is happening in VISTA is Creative’s problem is being too simplistic. MS is forcing hardware manufacturers to conform to the new AACS system or be forced out of the business of making hardware for any MS based OS.

Just for the record, MS did not finalize the audio specifications until November leaving manufacturers little time to write drivers. I read this on the MS website by the Audio Engineer head at MS in Redmond. They continually revised the driver specification right up until RTM

ATI has repeatedly commented on these strong arm tactics. MS is trying to increase their Monopoly control over the computer industry using DRM as a business model. Vista requires a Hardware Functionality Scan HFS which is going to turn a lot of computer hardware into paper weights because they cannot comply with the new standard for HFS. Just go to the Video Card and Audio sites and see all the hardware that is not going to be supported in VISTA.

Gutman talks about tilt bits in his article and I have personally had VISTA crash numerous times because to this wonderful new feature that MS has implemented and my hardware is supposed to be VISTA compliant.

For us consumers it means higher prices and we are being forced to buy hardware that will be compromised by design to comply to AACS standards that MS is going to try and force down our throats.

Do you not see a problem with MS telling everyone which kind of hardware we can buy that will work in the new OS?

Do you see any warning labels about this in all the hype that MS using to promote VISTA? This is much worse than the Intel fiasco that tried to ID all of our CPU chips.

I used to think that people that commented on MS being a monopoly were nuts however with VISTA I am joining the MS is a evil monopoly group. One company has no right to dictate what we do with our computers right down to what we can purchase that will run on it.

I have not even started talking about the new spying they are doing while you are connected to the internet… that is for another discussion.

I have to agree with you, except the real reason for getting Vista is for the kernel upgrade.