Building New HTPC -- Vista or WinXP

[Djc208]

Originally Posted by Shield

Right - I ran Vista for a while and went back to XP - it's less worse. HDCP support should be part of the driver set and dependent on the hardware of your video card (i.e. 8x00 series from Nvidia).

HDCP is hardware/software issue. The graphics card and the TV/Monitor has to have an HDCP key to transmit/receive HDCP protected content. On top of that there has to be a protected software path for the data between the playback software and the graphics card. Vista has this, XP does not.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device...t_protect.mspx

Right now it's a moot point as none of the movie studios have activated the flag that would implement this protection, and if they did you could still play back the media but the software/hardware is required to just downgrade the media to DVD quality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDCP

[davephan]

Microsoft Vista licenses allow the customer to switch back to XP for free (it seems to be an admission of Vista's failure on Microsoft's part). Maybe after service pack 1 or 2 Vista will be a viable operating system. Vista seems to be getting the bad reputation, similar to another failed Microsoft operating system, Windows ME and the Windows "Bob" overlay.

Some people can get Vista to work with SageTV, so it must be possible under some conditions. But is it might not be worth the trouble with an unproven operating system. I'm staying with XP Pro until the bugs are worked out with Vista, or Microsoft drops Vista and replaces it with an operating system that functions properly.


Dave

[Ender]

Originally Posted by Shield

Right - I ran Vista for a while and went back to XP - it's less worse. HDCP support should be part of the driver set and dependent on the hardware of your video card (i.e. 8x00 series from Nvidia).

I as well have tried Vista upon every new release of Catalyst drivers, but alas Vista results in choppy playback of all video, and I oft get an atikmdag error.

XP runs flawlessly, but I want to free up that license for my parents desktop that I am building.

One of these days I will find the right combination of drivers for my 2600 Po AGP

[Djc208]

Originally Posted by davephan

I'm staying with XP Pro until the bugs are worked out with Vista, or Microsoft drops Vista and replaces it with an operating system that functions properly.

Don't think you'll see that happen, but XP had a lot of issues too at first. I don't plan on considering Vista until at least the first SP comes out. There's some neat stuff in Vista, it just needs some polish.

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by Shield

8< snip >8 I ran Vista for a while and went back to XP - it's less worse

I can see the marketing campaign from M$ now......

"Windows XP the less worse OS in our stable of more worse OS's"

[Polypro]

I feel like the PR rep in the new Mac ad I'm lovin' Vista.

P

[QuasiInsomniac]

I won't go into the finer details, but go do a Slashdot search on Vista. XP is the way to go here, and someone mentioned correctly, it is the "lesser" evil.

Vista is heavier on the system resources, and still has MANY bugs. SP1 for it, will not be the silver bullet like Vista-lovers think.

Microsoft has already stated that Windows 2008 is in development and knowing them, it will be pushed back to 2009 or 2010, but that's only 2.5 to 3 years away. And that's well before the EOL of 2014.

I have no less than 10 licenses of Vista Business and guess what? None are installed. There is a reason. XP Pro can still be found for cheap, or you can always look back at all your old OEM computers sitting around collecting dust and find you do in fact have an XP license sticker on one of them somewhere already.

Oh yeah, and two of my more favorite Vista screw-ups, HD content with copyright protection doesn't output over 540p. Yeah, that's right, go see for yourself. And the other one, the 15% internet performance hit when playing media files. Their response to that "oh, well, we figured more users would be using gigabit connections and wouldn't notice the performance hit". Are you kidding me? That's like Sony's rootkit saying "Users dont even know the rootkit is there, why would they be concerned?".

[PGPfan]

Originally Posted by QuasiInsomniac

And the other one, the 15% internet performance hit when playing media files. Their response to that "oh, well, we figured more users would be using gigabit connections and wouldn't notice the performance hit". Are you kidding me? That's like Sony's rootkit saying "Users dont even know the rootkit is there, why would they be concerned?".

Actually that's not even close to their response. The whole problem with the network performance hit when playing media files has nothing to do with 'more users using gigabit connections...'. It is a problem with the rewritten audio stack (which does offer improved features and performance over XP, but obviously isn't perfect yet) and it took them a while to reproduce the bug inhouse. I used to work at MS in testing, and some of these bugs are quite difficult to reproduce and if you can't reproduce it regularly and systematically for a developer when the machine is on a debugger, it's going to be luck that will fix it.

As is posted HERE you can see that they have infact been able to reproduce this and are infact working on a solution. This will likely take longer than any of us would like, however.

-PGPfan

[Kimper]

Well SageTV in Vista now sometimes randomly loses settings.. This is so weird. Gonna start fresh post to see if anyone else has had this happen..

[davephan]

XP may be twice as fast has Vista according to Devil Mountain Software, a system performance tools software company. XP under service pack 3 was measured to be 10% faster than XP with service pack 2.

Here are a couple of links to the stories:


http://www.zoliblog.com/2007/11/24/w...fast-as-vista/

http://www.informationweek.com/softw...leID=204203975


Dave