seems they are selling vista at newegg now.
so i guess we only have a couple more years before we need to upgrade! ;D
wondering which version is right for music an video?
the gui looks interestingly graphics heavy at least!
here you can read about different Vista version.
in my opinion, Basic should be (much more than) enough for 99% of users, the rest is pure multimedia garbage.
I use XP Home. Sometimes I feel the need for Professional Edition because it lets you make share permission operations much moe easily, but that’s all.
As long as I can avoid it, Vista will not reach my PC 
I am a proud XP-Home-User
Same here, I’ll avoid it as long as it gets and stick with XP Pro.
Read:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
Sensationalist at times, yes But things like:
, Vista requires that any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal quality that passes through it if premium content is present. This is done through a ?constrictor? that downgrades the signal to a much lower-quality one, then up- scales it again back to the original spec, but with a significant loss in quality. So if you’re using an expensive new LCD display fed from a high- quality DVI signal on your video card and there’s protected content present, the picture you’re going to see will be, as the spec puts it, ?slightly fuzzy?, a bit like a 10-year-old CRT monitor that you picked up for $2 at a yard sale [Note G].
The same deliberate degrading of playback quality applies to audio, with the audio being downgraded to sound (from the spec) ?fuzzy with less detail? [Note H].
Windows’ anti-piracy component, WGA (or in Vista’s case its successor Software Protection Platform, SPP), is tied to system hardware components. Windows allows you to make a small number of system hardware changes after which you need to renew your Windows license (the exact details of what you can and can’t get away with changing has been the subject of much debate). If a particular piece of hardware is deactivated (even just temporarily while waiting for an updated driver to work around a content leak) and you swap in a different video card or sound card to avoid the problem, you risk triggering Windows’ anti-piracy measures, landing you in even more hot water. If you’re forced to swap out a major system component like a motherboard, you’ve instantly failed WGA validation. Revocation of any kind of motherboard- integrated device (practically every motherboard has some form of onboard audio, and all of the cheaper ones have integrated video) would appear to have a serious negative interaction with Windows’ anti-piracy measures.
And tons more… Ouch.
I’m specifically looking for a computer without Vista. I hear its going to eat more RAM, and I rather my RAM go to something else, then have some fancy GUI tricks eat it up. Plus I am already seeing some good discounts on machines pre-installed with XP. If I can get 100 off, I’ll take it.
Plus even though I don’t (rarely) engage in any shinnanigans, I think the anti-piracy stuff is going to get in my way.
Let Vista run its course and I’ll buy a computer with it in two years.
I was running Vista RC1 for a while on my PC. (Specs are listed on the signature)
It’s nice and nifty looking, but even turning all the Aqua stuff off, the graphics eat WAY more CPU than XP.
Example: the CPU usage of the Audio thread within Renoise shows it’s using between 10%-15%, but opening the Task manager reveals that overall CPU usage is about 70%. It’s really just the graph thread eating up all the ressources.
Sounds about right…
In order to prevent tampering with in-system communications, all communication flows have to be encrypted and/or authenticated. For example content sent to video devices has to be encrypted with AES-128.
In order to prevent active attacks, device drivers are required to poll the underlying hardware every 30ms for digital outputs and every 150 ms for analog ones to ensure that everything appears kosher. This means that even with nothing else happening in the system, a mass of assorted drivers has to wake up thirty times a second just to ensure that… nothing continues to happen
An indication of the level of complexity added to the software can be seen by looking at a block diagram of Vista’s Media Interoperability Gateway (MIG). Of the eleven components that make up the MIG, only two (the audio and video decoders) are actually used to render content. The remaining nine are used to apply content-protection measures.
ConnerBw: That’s… … that’s… can’t find the right words. Gross?
Have not read it all yet, but AFAICS it means… I can’t even really think of what it actually means.
I think, especially musucians use “their” OS as long as possible. Just think about all those people still using Win 98 in 2006. They changed to XP when Renoise 1.8 was impossible to run on Win 98 anymore.
Let’s just hope Renoise will be XP-stuff as long as possible.
I’ve read several report now why Vista could be bad for audio work. At the same time, Linux audio seems to really get rolling now… Let’s see what happenes…
I would have made the change to linux 100 years ago but as Linux is really weird with terratec-soundcards and there is no VST and renoise in linux I simply cannot change
What will happen? Nothing. I mean, do serious musicians want to get rid of basically most of their hardware since the drivers are only available for Mac and Windows PCs? Nope. They won’t even consider community drivers which don’t fully exploit their equipment potential (and if they are available at all for Linux).
Plus, many of us have invested in software. Renoise is just one piece but keep in mind also the other stuff: audio editors, sequencers, VST(i)s…
Last not least, Linux still isn’t a zero-administration operating system (like MacOS X for instance is). You have to know much about it or else even a stupid, little issue can put you down.
All this sums up to a chain of responsibility that basically means that if you’re lucky and chose your software carefully, you can switch from Windows to Mac. But not Linux.
I use Linux daily. It runs all my servers, all my company’s servers, it’s a great development environment. But it’s not going to work for musicians. Sorry.
oh man… for some reason.
thinking about Vista just began to make me feel backwards, bloated, constipated and overly Vindictive!
i wonder when they will try and disable Solitaire! 
looks like in the future a lot of us may be investing time into learning how to roll our own low latency kernels… 
at least there are projects like ReactOS
F8ck Vista! i want RENOiSE(OS)
yeah, Linux is not for audio, really… I know some people who were composers and got fed up with Windows, so they switched to Linux. None of them has kept on making music anymore… they all went mad with the opensource philosophy, and then rejected everything (Renoise included) which was not free-opensource-GPL-whatever.
In the end, either they have switched to closed-source-and-costy MacOS, which is kind of ridicolous, or they are still waiting for someone to code some interesting and usable audio application on Linux
has any of you tried that vista transformation pack?
if so, any conflicts, bugs? I’m thinking about giving it a try.
yeah, it just makes XP looks pretty. I’ll give it a go. As I have an image of my hard drive, if that thing screws XP up, I reload the image file.
Yes!
BTW, this thing sucks. screwing up XP system files just to have a side bar that copies a Mac or Linux, and a back theme, is not worth it .
XP gets slugish and it’s buggy. 
