This is so cool. I didn’t know that you could test LINUX with a live CD. Actually, I didn’t know you could make a live CD. My VCR does, however, go find out what time it is when plugged in. It also irons and does my neighbor’s homework.
So, I’m an Ubuntu testing guy. I didn’t know the day would come so soon.
Ubuntu 7.10 is by far a superior OS to ANYTHING out there right now.
One thing they don’t have working on my Laptop right off of Live CD bootup is sound, but I can get it to work, so that isn’t a problem.
Vista has gone backwards in the sound department, not using hardware acceleration anymore, completely software. That’s how I have read it at least.
If Vista is so great, it should work equally as good as XP.
But instead, I get horrible sound corruption in a few games.
So before John Childs comes boasting about how it’s a problem with a game, well it works on XP, that’s an OS problem to me.
Vista is good for people who don’t play games, much like Linux.
Or people who can’t live with equally as good DX9 graphics, Vs. DX10.
I can.
I run a 2.8ghz Opteron 146.
I can’t watch 1080p video without it lagging or being choppy on anything under 2.6ghz.
I can also tell the difference between 30, 40, 60, 90, and 120 fps.
Wow, my 1987 IBM XT clone is starting to seem really out-of-date. It’s a 4.77 MHz (four point seventy seven megahertz) with a 10 megabyte MFM hard drive. I don’t know… should I upgrade? It runs DOS 6.22, Turbo Pascal 3.3, and Wordstar just fine.
Wow! That’s too old to even have a Turbo button.
Turbo was a bit of a misnomer. It’s purpose was to slow things down so games didn’t go to fast on newer hardware. How does a feature that slows things down get named “Turbo”?
A better name would have been “Impulse”. Push the button and go to impulse speed. Push it again and you go to warp speed. Geeks would have certainly understood that.
Vista has improved audio processing and playback. There are new features like per application volume control and improved audio quality and processing. For media playback purposes the audio system in Vista is much better.
The big change is that the audio drivers are now in user level rather than kernel level. That means the audio drivers don’t get direct access to the hardware like they used to. Creative Labs chose to implement their EAX in a way that required direct access to the hardware. That also meant that bugs in the audio driver could blue screen and crash the OS. Moving the audio drivers to user level makes the OS more stable. So now Creative’s bloated drivers won’t blue screen the OS when they misbehave. I consider that an improvement.
The future for gaming is OpenAL rather than EAX. Creative Labs just has to figure out how to make Alchemy work so they can make some use of their proprietary hardware assisted audio processing.
by the way unisteve, your sig is getting huge.
Just curious,
Has anyone gotten their Airport exreme card to work in Ubuntu?
I’ve looked up, found, and tried tutorials that supposedly fix this problem but they haven’t worked.
Did you just say fanboy-isms?
Does all this make you a Linux Fanboy?
Our very first computer (probably an HP with W95 or something) had a turbo button. We didn’t understand it so we just left it on all the time.
I guess you could say that. I’ve got Linux on both of my computers now, and I only boot to Windows to play certain games, like Flatout 2 and Call of Duty 2. I’m not the preaching type, but I do tell my friends about it. 
UniTyler, I remember what it was like the first time I did something to my computer (C-64). It was fun and felt good.
Glad to read that you upgraded from Win* to Linux! he-he.
I have been playing with “going smaller”, so I have a pc right beside me that has OS/2 Warp4 and FreeBSD (no X) on it.
The box is 200mhz, 32 megs of ram and the hd is 365 megs 
Yes, I have other computers with less (C-64 and Amiga’s), but they don’t dual boot with fully functional os’s.
Well, you have to look at it differently.
Per application volume control.
Every application that has sound that I use, has it’s own volume control built in?
Besides that, Microsoft seems to have made my perfectly up to date (by most peoples idea, not an enthusiasts idea) audio, an EOL product.
I believe what Microsoft has done since day one, is bundle as many features into their OS as they possibly can and call it next gen. What happens here is bulk.
Culprits such as:
The new explorer interface in Vista, is EXTREMELY uncustomizable, unlike in XP where I can unlock the toolbars/buttons and move them wherever I like.
I had people argue with me saying how useful that search bar is, and that I should try it, it will get me not using the mouse as much.
Well, I right click my desktop, slide my mouse over a couple menus, and I get a list of my games… why would I want to type in the name of the game to run it? Then I would have an extra window open behind the game… using more precious memory that Vista seems to have eaten up with it’s myriad of features I dislike.
“The big change is that the audio drivers are now in user level rather than kernel level.”
I like stability, and my computer is very stable. I have never had a BSOD in XP except for… overclocking too far (suicide screenshots), which I pretty much shouldn’t be worried about, Vista is going to handle it the same way, do nothing and let the motherboard handle it.
It is kind of a sideways step for them to move the Audio out of the kernel level, lots of pros and lots of cons.
I’ll just stop here before I get too carried away. Vista should have a feature to use Kernel level audio, for “legacy” support.
Share in my Geek frustration
(CAUTION – THREADJACK)
Congrats to Tyler & all, it sounds like lots of fun. But it reminded me of some scanner issues I’ve been having. For us Mac users, things are not always rosy. I have two scanners. The oldest is an Epson Perfection 2450, that probably cost something north of $400 when new. Worked great, can scan negatives with a backlight, and there’s nothing wrong with it. The other scanner is on top of my HP multifunction laser device. This whole piece of hardware probably cost the same as the Epson did, a year or two later. The scanner is not as full-featured, but it works.
However neither of them works on my current iMac. It’s very frustrating to have two scanners, neither of which works. After installing and uninstalling the HP software over and over, from their own web site, and reading all the tech forum stuff I could find on the topic, I finally contacted them for help. Emails were ignored. Finally I called them up and was determined to wait on hold for a long time to get satisfaction. After being put on hold many times and passed to at least one different tech support person, I got my answer:
“Your device is no longer supported.”
"Oh. Really? Uh, that’s nice to know. Now. It would have been even nicer to know when I first started looking on your web site. Instead you don’t mention it at all. Thanks a lot for leaving us users in the cold. BTW, they do offer Mac drivers, of course, that’s what I was downloading. I need to talk to one of their live tech support people to find out that only the printing and copying functions are “supposed” to work this way. No more HP products for me in the near future.
Meanwhile, how about the higher-end Epson scanner? First email to their support department: ignored. Second email (weeks later) returned a nice, detailed set of instructions for removing preferences files (something that might be nice for them to add to their tech support pages). It didn’t work. Same results. Third email: ignored. Finally I plugged the scanner into my aging PowerPC laptop (circa 2003) and got the HP scanner to work acceptably. Acceptably means I got a file. I’d much rather scan directly into Photoshop with either of those pieces of hardware, but so far no dice. Grrr.
No, the solution to non-working drivers should not be to buy a whole new device. The old one doesn’t have anything wrong with it! It’s very low-miles!
Next time I work on it I’ll try running both devices from Windows under Parallels. That might work, but what a hassle!
I knew there’d be a comment somewhere on this thread that I could understand.
And agree with.
The [size=1] tags are your friend.
And lose the
[quote]
block, will you?
Thank you for posting that.
I couldn’t agree more with this.
Same. Thats why Im not going to get Vista for another few months. Maybe not for a couple of years lol. I can make my xp look just like Vista, with the widgets and stuff. Actually, if I wanted to, I could have windows xp look like a mac, and even change the boot screen to a mac boot screen and people would think im on a mac. lol
Anyways, here my geek story.
For the last few years, ive been running a regular ASUS A7V board, with a AMD 700mhz processor which is usually over clocked to 933mhz, and for the last few months, has been moved down to just be around 820 something. It got the job done, photoshop, premiere, games, internet, cubase, and all the stuff I did. I always wanted more. More processor power, more ram, bigger hardrive.
A few days ago, I get another computer. AMD Duron. A small one around 750mhz. Same ASUS board as the other computer, but this one is a tad faster. It also had a 30gig drive in there, so doubled the size from my other hardrive, which I have my OS and some programs on it. I clone the 15gig to the 30gig.
This computer was awful though, at least at first. Took a lot of BIOS settings and shorting out the cmos so I could get it to boot. Had lots of fun with the Duron chip. Its very OC-able. I think I got it up to 50% more than the regular 750. 133mhz FBS, clock multiplier goes down, frequencies go up. Works very well.
But, before I finish moving and building this one up, I hear my dad say he is bringing in another computer. Compaq board, intel 1.7ghz processor. I like it, but the board is giving me issues. Which didnt surprise me. All compaq boards have gave me troubles with being able to just plug stuff in and have it detected.
First, it reads my OS drive fine the first time. It restarts, then gives me the NTLDR is missing. So basically the compaq board couldnt detect the boot sector and wouldnt load my drive, therefore, not loading the computer.
I try about 5 ways of fixing the drive so compaq could read it correctly, but none of it worked. So, luckily, I cloned/backuped my programs to another drive. (I currently have 7 hardrives laying in my room. So many gigs! Argh! lol)
I go to put in my windows boot disk, start the comp with cd-rom support, run D:\setup, and ta-da, windows starts to load, reformats, and then installs on the drive. Too bad the floppy disk dies on me. It served me well for the last 5 years.
Well, time to use a cd boot disk, and surprisingly, window xp, me, and 98se do not boot from their disks. Sucketh. The only bootable disks I have are Nortons (no help there) and original windows 98, with no serial number. Eish. I was able to get my hands onto another 98 cd with serial number from my neighbors though. No hacks or keygen, but everything original.
So now I finally can run from the disk, format it, and install 98. Now the compaq can read the boot sector. Install to xp. Plugged in my other two hard drives, and got my programs running, and now im happily on the new intel computer. Im gonna OC the processor to 2ghz soon.
With the AMD duron comp that is just sitting here, I am hooking in a 120gig drive into it. Putting xp on it, and Cubase, oh, and a nice sound card, and taking it to the band room, and we will use that for recording.
The other computer, will be built up again and donated to a school for underprivileged/orphans. They will like it.
Everyone knows Word Perfect is better. 
Oh yeah, it’s fun. I’ve been a full-time Linux user for a few months now, so I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with it. My only beef is that video editing just isn’t quite there… 
[quote=“GILD”]
I knew there’d be a comment somewhere on this thread that I could understand.
And agree with.
The [size=1] tags are your friend.
And lose the
A large sig is a sign of virility.
In XP the volume control in individual applications controls the global volume. It changes the volume for everything.
Here’s an example of using per application volume control in Vista.
Open up YouTube in a browser and start playing a video.
Now open the windows volume mixer (right-click on the speaker icon and select volume mixer)
You’ll see the open applications that are using sound listed in the volume mixer
From there you can easily mute the Windows System Sounds so you don’t get Windows beeps and sounds while playing the YouTube video. So no more “bings” caused by an arriving email while watching YouTube or a DVD.
That’s neat stuff and makes Vista more media player friendly than XP.
Your gamer sound card is not an EOL product. Creative has drivers now that use their Alchemy solution to make use of the EAX hardware on the sound card.
The problem now comes from games that explicitly check for hardware audio processing (acceleration) to do their audio effects processing rather than allowing software to do it. The Alchemy solution means that those games don’t see the EAX hardware like they are expecting which causes them to fall back to lesser sound options with lesser effects. That’s poor programming on the part of the games. They made assumptions they shouldn’t have. There is nothing Creative can do about that. See if those games offer a patch for Vista support and complain to the game makers who have broken games.