Windows Vienna Hyper Visor being considered

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

That basically says that Microsoft has announced that they will not change the kernel for Windows 7. Windows 7 continues using Windows Vista's basic technology and it will be a smaller update than the Vista was...

That's correct. And Windows 2008 Server uses the same kernel from Vista as well. This means that, in theory, Vista could be "MinWin'd" too, but it is doubtful that any consumer Windows OS will be offered with MinWin.

Will it still cater for 32bit programs or will it be all 64bit?

Windows 7 will be offered in 32bit and 64bit variations in the consumer market. The server version of Windows 7 might be 64bit only, but its unclear at this point.

As Henri said, 64bit Windows will still run "legacy" 32bit code too.

Here is A blog I found on Windows 7

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

You know, before Vista was named Vista, and was still being called Longhorn, and was more than a year from beta testing, M$ swore up and down that they were going to make the kernel just like the Linux kernel..where everything is modular and mostly independent of each other. After about six months of development, they scrapped the plan, I guess because it worked too well. You know..M$ can't be known for having decent memory management..

All kidding aside, I really do hope Vienna turns out to be more stable and resource-friendly than Vista. I know they want everyone to have 8 cores and 32gb of RAM, but they just have to face the fact that it won't happen. They want people to upgrade their XP machines to this new one, so chances are, we're talking single core (albeit decent P4 CPUs) and 1-2gb of RAM. It's a fact of life. That's what annoyed me the most about Vista is the hardware requirements.

I know most of the requirements were if you wanted to run Aero, which is a handy feature, but not necessary. From what I've heard, turning Aero off frees up a considerable amount of resources. Though personally, I still prefer XGL/Berl. :p Main reason: OpenGL and not DirectX.

I guess all I'm saying is we've heard promises and promising features in an upcoming OS before, and none of them came true in this last go-around, so I won't be holding my breath for new features. Vista had so many features it was supposed to have, and I don't think a single one ended up shipping. Oh, no Aero shipped, that was it.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

You know, before Vista was named Vista, and was still being called Longhorn, and was more than a year from beta testing, M$ swore up and down that they were going to make the kernel just like the Linux kernel..where everything is modular and mostly independent of each other. After about six months of development, they scrapped the plan, I guess because it worked too well. You know..M$ can't be known for having decent memory management..

All kidding aside, I really do hope Vienna turns out to be more stable and resource-friendly than Vista. I know they want everyone to have 8 cores and 32gb of RAM, but they just have to face the fact that it won't happen. They want people to upgrade their XP machines to this new one, so chances are, we're talking single core (albeit decent P4 CPUs) and 1-2gb of RAM. It's a fact of life. That's what annoyed me the most about Vista is the hardware requirements.

I know most of the requirements were if you wanted to run Aero, which is a handy feature, but not necessary. From what I've heard, turning Aero off frees up a considerable amount of resources. Though personally, I still prefer XGL/Berl. :p Main reason: OpenGL and not DirectX.

I guess all I'm saying is we've heard promises and promising features in an upcoming OS before, and none of them came true in this last go-around, so I won't be holding my breath for new features. Vista had so many features it was supposed to have, and I don't think a single one ended up shipping. Oh, no Aero shipped, that was it.

Me, I just turn off Aero and stick to Windows Classic. It frees up memory and makes the GUI snappier, especially on slower machines. For example, disabling Aero on an HP (AMD Turion) laptop removed a several second delay that occurred before and after the appearance of UAC dialogs.

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All kidding aside, I really do hope Vienna turns out to be more stable and resource-friendly than Vista. I know they want everyone to have 8 cores and 32gb of RAM, but they just have to face the fact that it won't happen. They want people to upgrade their XP machines to this new one, so chances are, we're talking single core (albeit decent P4 CPUs) and 1-2gb of RAM. It's a fact of life. That's what annoyed me the most about Vista is the hardware requirements.

I'm going to have to disagree with you here. 1. Vista has been extremely stable since its release. I've been using it for about as long and have had less crashes than when using XP. Most of the rumors about Vista's stability issues come from the fact that ATi and nVidia did not have their butts in gear and their drivers were causing stability problems as well as game performance issues which people complained about.

2. The "fact of life" about RAM you mention is so inaccurate that anyone who has been in the computer industry for the last 20 years should be laughing. Is that like the old comments "Windows 95 just has to realize that people just don't have more than 4MB of RAM and Windows 95 runs like crap on 4MB!" Then what happened? RAM prices came down and people were buying Windows 95 machines with 16 and 32MB of RAM and Windows 95 flew. The same exact thing is happening now. People have anywhere from 512MB to 1GB (sometimes less) in their machines and some can't upgrade beyond 2GB due to motherboard limitations, but a new machine is often cheap enough and all manufacturers have to do is start providing 2GB minimum configurations with Vista to really show how well it works (I'd personally recommend 4GB or more since its so cheap).

I have Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit installed on an old single core Pentium 4 running at 2.53GHz and 1GB of RAM and it ran fine, but I added another GB anyway. It runs great.

I think the problem is that people simply 'hear' bad things about Vista but haven't actually used it to find out for themselves.

I know most of the requirements were if you wanted to run Aero, which is a handy feature, but not necessary. From what I've heard, turning Aero off frees up a considerable amount of resources. Though personally, I still prefer XGL/Berl. :p Main reason: OpenGL and not DirectX.

The same was said about XP's Luna interface.

I guess all I'm saying is we've heard promises and promising features in an upcoming OS before, and none of them came true in this last go-around, so I won't be holding my breath for new features. Vista had so many features it was supposed to have, and I don't think a single one ended up shipping. Oh, no Aero shipped, that was it.

On the contrary, many features did ship, but the biggest ones were too much to tackle and so were left out.

I personally don't care what features didn't ship, as long as it provides more than what I'm currently using, then I'm happy. Vista has provided so much more for my machines than XP ever did, which is why I've upgraded 4 of them to Vista, and I plan on upgrading my MediaPC to Vista too.

Fair enough. Though I will say the one thing that annoys the ever-living crap out of me is how administrative and "advanced" features keep getting relocated and hidden deeper in hoops that require jumping-through with every new Windows OS that comes out. The same capabilities are there in all of the versions, but it gets more cumbersome to get to with every release.

[edit: Mm..I forgot something. What about that big bru-ha-ha about the OEMs that were selling computers and labeling them as "vista capable", but nobody ever said that it was only Home Basic. The hardware wasn't capable of running premium, 64-bit, or most notably, Aero. Can't remember if there was some kind of lawsuit about that or not, I just remember it was a big story.

Oh, and as far as the RAM and memory management scenario, I know I focused on RAM consumption, but the memory management aspect is still important. 4gb of RAM doesn't need a pagefile, but one gets made anyway, and by default, Windows will push a lot of memory pages into the pagefile, regardless of how much physical memory is free. That's just bad management.

I also haven't heard if they fixed the issue in Vista, but since it is something that pertains to crunching, did they finally fix the affinity issue where say..an instance of seti gets started up, does it stay working on one of the cores until it finishes, or does it keep hopping around to different cores, which also needs a lot of L2 transfers as well. Linux is pretty smart about that, but Windows doesn't have a good reputation of it.]

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Fair enough. Though I will say the one thing that annoys the ever-living crap out of me is how administrative and "advanced" features keep getting relocated and hidden deeper in hoops that require jumping-through with every new Windows OS that comes out. The same capabilities are there in all of the versions, but it gets more cumbersome to get to with every release.

OK, I'll agree with you there. I too find it slightly annoying that things keep moving around and I often wonder what kind of testing they've done to warrant any logical defense of "We've moved this here because research has shown it to be more effect here instead of there".

Another complaint about Vista: when using it in a corporate domain with Windows 2003 Servers, if an IT Admin needs to troubleshoot something, the normal method for the IT Admin to change or run things is to use the command line tool RUNAS /[user:password], but in Vista it only lets you use RUNAS to run as the local system administrator account instead of RUNAS a domain administrator.

I think the solution lies within using Windows Server 2008 which has all the appropriate group policy settings for Vista, and a Group Policy can be used to change the behavior of the RUNAS command.

Still annoying though.

[Edit] I don't know if the above issue is only existent in Vista pre-SP1 or if the Admin doesn't know how to use RUNAS under Vista (I also don't know how much the syntax for the command has changed), but it appears that RUNAS under Vista runs just like it should.

[edit: Mm..I forgot something. What about that big bru-ha-ha maybe...six months ago about the OEMs that were selling computers and labeling them as "vista capable", but nobody ever said that it was only Home Basic. The hardware wasn't capable of running premium, 64-bit, or most notably, Aero. Can't remember if there was some kind of lawsuit about that or not, I just remember it was a big story.]

Yeah, even the programmers behind Vista thought it was a horrible idea and were against it to begin with. It was actually the big OEMs that wanted to sell more hardware by claiming Vista compatibility since most everyone knew the OS was going to come out soon. Traditionally a new MS OS has always pushed new system sales.

The entire "vista capable" program was a flop, but I can't really blame MS for that. The hardware makers got greedy and wanted to sell more based upon some stupid logo program. Now people are upset and are rightfully suing.

Oh, and as far as the RAM and memory management scenario, I know I focused on RAM consumption, but the memory management aspect is still important. 4gb of RAM doesn't need a pagefile, but one gets made anyway, and by default, Windows will push a lot of memory pages into the pagefile, regardless of how much physical memory is free. That's just bad management.

Some more misconceptions.

1. Just because you have 4GB of RAM doesn't mean you don't need a pagefile. A pagefile is very important to have because many applications use a pagefile to store information regardless of actual RAM. For some application designers, it is easier to have it stored in a page file that can be accessed just like real RAM than it is to send a request to the OS to read the hard drive and wait for the request to be fulfilled. At least with the page file, the OS knows its address and can retrieve it quicker than a normal HDD access.

2. Windows Vista does not push a lot of pages into the page file. That was common with Windows XP and prior because the idea was to use as little physical RAM as possible just in case the user opened a large application. Windows Vista goes the opposite route and lets apps use whatever RAM they need - and then Windows Vista uses the rest for SuperFetch cache (one of my favorite features of Vista). SuperFetch uses all available RAM to cache frequently used programs (not just read-ahead sectors on the hard drive) and allow faster operation through use of this cache (using an advanced algorithm that checks what programs the user uses frequently and how much RAM is available to use as cache). Any time a user wants to open a large application, the RAM request by the application is checked, and that much free RAM is released from cache to immediately give to the application. Once the large application is exited, the RAM is returned to the cache pool and used for SuperFetch again, and if this large application has multiple parts to it (DLLs, EXEs, etc), those are tracked and if used frequently, will be included in the SuperFetch cache algorithm to launch the application faster than before. This is why Vista performs better and better with the more RAM you throw at it. Personally, I see the return on investment from RAM as a valuable thing which is why I love SuperFetch so much.

I also haven't heard if they fixed the issue in Vista, but since it is something that pertains to crunching, did they finally fix the affinity issue where say..an instance of seti gets started up, does it stay working on one of the cores until it finishes, or does it keep hopping around to different cores, which also needs a lot of L2 transfers as well. Linux is pretty smart about that, but Windows doesn't have a good reputation of it.

Interesting that you mention that. I believe it was Josef Segur whom had posted info showing tests done that prove that processor affinity makes no difference for most apps and that Window's own ability to shuffle around threads or processes to a different CPU seems to work quite well. If I remember correctly, the tests involved turning on CPU affinity and turning off CPU affinity within BOINC and no real performance was gained using CPU affinity.

I've never bought into the hype that Linux had better multithreading capabilities than Windows because of processor affinity. Using processor affinity seems to tie up a single CPU/core for a specific task, and if that processor is CPU 0 (considered the "main" CPU in a system used to do most common tasks), performance can degrade because the CPU is tied up with that single task.

*bump* so you can see the answers to the added info you edited into your post.

Learn something new every day.

The affinity thing was more along the lines of efficiency. I know caches and just general processing is much faster these days than they used to be, so it makes a smaller difference, but it still just seems like a flaw to keep shuffling one task around to different cores. It's kind of like building something in a shop and you keep taking the time to move it to a different workbench for really no reason at all. All the workbenches have the same capabilities, so why waste your time moving to another one?

I am glad to hear they addressed memory management in vista as an improvement over previous versions. I still just turn the pagefile off though. It seems useless to me since I haven't gone over 60% usage on the ~3.3gb that shows up in XP, and if software developers purposely code their applications to use the pagefile, that just seems like bad practice in general. I get the idea of trying to keep physical memory free, but there should be a point in the decision-making process that sees how much you actually have available and decide to leave pages in physical or not.

Anyway, didn't mean to offend anyone if I did. I guess I have a track record for being misinformed or misreading articles and then stating my opinion afterward.

A few of my friends were in the anti-Vista camp for a long time, and they got ahold of legitimate keys for ultimate and have said it's not actually that horrible once you get SP1, disable UAC, and turn off Aero, and some other asthetic tweaking. I just don't have that kind of money to spend right now. I've got a license for business 32-bit that I haven't used because I have no need for it.

Depending on what this Windows 7 costs and does, I might consider that after SP1 for that one. Seeing as MS dropped the life cycle from the standard 10 years down to 5 for Vista, it seems they're going to try to phase it out faster than they're trying to phase XP out. Just my opinion.

[edit: wow, I just checked out the upgrade adviser and it told me my 8800GT isn't supported in Vista, but it says I can run Aero with no problems. That seems like a conflict.]

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

I am glad to hear they addressed memory management in vista as an improvement over previous versions. I still just turn the pagefile off though. It seems useless to me since I haven't gone over 60% usage on the ~3.3gb that shows up in XP, and if software developers purposely code their applications to use the pagefile, that just seems like bad practice in general. I get the idea of trying to keep physical memory free, but there should be a point in the decision-making process that sees how much you actually have available and decide to leave pages in physical or not.

A paging file isn't just for "spill over" if you run out of RAM. The paging file has so many more uses that it generally makes no sense to turn it off. One such reason to leave it enabled is for the Windows crash dump/memory dump. The page file is used to store kernel information or a full memory dump temporarily until the next reboot, in which the information is used to create the actual dump information used to diagnose crash information.

Anyway, didn't mean to offend anyone if I did. I guess I have a track record for being misinformed or misreading articles and then stating my opinion afterward.

No offense taken. Sometimes my crude posting style can give the wrong impression. However, as a techy I find myself at an uphill battle being one of the few who actually like Vista over previous versions of Windows and sometimes dispelling some of the frequent misconceptions can be daunting and repetitive. One would think I should just stop fighting so hard for Vista. Its not like I have any personal investment in seeing it do well in the marketplace. Its not like I own MS stock either. I just hate to see false information flying around, and I especially hate it when its a product I use and feel it gets a bad rap that is undeserved.

A few of my friends were in the anti-Vista camp for a long time, and they got ahold of legitimate keys for ultimate and have said it's not actually that horrible once you get SP1, disable UAC, and turn off Aero, and some other asthetic tweaking.

The problem is that once you turn of UAC, you effectively make Vista no more secure than XP. Most of the security in Vista is due to UAC's protection of the Operating System and its important settings. I found it annoying at first too, and I initially had it turned off, but when it saved me from a DNS attack that affected XP users without notifying them of the problem whereas Vista's UAC prompts you before any changes can take place, I now leave UAC on and deal with the prompts (which are getting less and less as application developers start writing their code properly - i.e. not requiring Admin access for everything their software does).

Depending on what this Windows 7 costs and does, I might consider that after SP1 for that one. Seeing as MS dropped the life cycle from the standard 10 years down to 5 for Vista, it seems they're going to try to phase it out faster than they're trying to phase XP out. Just my opinion.

Actually, XP had only 5 years as well. You'll note that XP Gold, XP SP1 and XP SP2 are all in "extended" support now and are officially no longer supported in the mainstream. The difference in support options is that when a product is in mainstream support, it will receive bug fixes and other enhancements, but extended support provides severe bug fixes only. XP SP3 will enter extended support in 2012 - five years after it came out in 2007. Vista will be the same as well, entering extended support in 2012 while Vista SP1 will continue in mainstream until 2013.

Also something to note - Windows 7 will be based upon the same code base as Windows Vista and will have the same system requirements, so anyone complaining about Vista being a resource hog will find themselves in the same situation with Windows 7 (though I'm sure people will accept it more as I'm also sure that hardware manufacturers will finally offer systems beefy enough to handle it properly).

[edit: wow, I just checked out the upgrade adviser and it told me my 8800GT isn't supported in Vista, but it says I can run Aero with no problems. That seems like a conflict.]

Ha! That's what you get for buying nVidia! :-P I always buy ATi - even when nVidia was kicking their butt. ;-)

Are you sure it isn't a driver issue that its referring to? The Upgrade Advisor will usually check for drivers that are compatible with Vista too, and many drivers need to be updated or reinstalled after Vista (to load the appropriate OS specific drivers).

A paging file isn't just for "spill over" if you run out of RAM. The paging file has so many more uses that it generally makes no sense to turn it off. One such reason to leave it enabled is for the Windows crash dump/memory dump. The page file is used to store kernel information or a full memory dump temporarily until the next reboot, in which the information is used to create the actual dump information used to diagnose crash information.

Ah, well that's just it. I don't care about kernel dumps..I actually turned that off, and I don't care about what caused a crash. I just hit the reset button and continue on my way.

Are you sure it isn't a driver issue that its referring to? The Upgrade Advisor will usually check for drivers that are compatible with Vista too, and many drivers need to be updated or reinstalled after Vista (to load the appropriate OS specific drivers).

Yeah, my HD Audio needs updated drivers, but the advisor told me my hardware was not supported. One of my friends that I referred to already has the identical card and it works just fine for him with the same drivers I'm using. So I think it's a glitch.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Here is the Offical site for
windows vienna

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My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions.

I will say though after what all has unfolded above (with what I've previously stated my opinion about), I think most of the negativity that gets stirred up about new OSes is the frustration of being lost and confused since for some reason, MS doesn't keep things generally the same. People in general don't like change. The smaller the change, the less friction there will be, but MS has been doing drastic changes with every major release (9x to XP, XP to Vista, very likely Vista to Vienna too).

I guess I've kind of come to terms with it though. I mean, I was still using 2000 on all of my rigs until about two months ago. Finally decided I should probably move up one step.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

I will say though after what all has unfolded above (with what I've previously stated my opinion about), I think most of the negativity that gets stirred up about new OSes is the frustration of being lost and confused since for some reason, MS doesn't keep things generally the same. People in general don't like change. The smaller the change, the less friction there will be, but MS has been doing drastic changes with every major release (9x to XP, XP to Vista, very likely Vista to Vienna too).

I guess I've kind of come to terms with it though. I mean, I was still using 2000 on all of my rigs until about two months ago. Finally decided I should probably move up one step.

I think you're right about that. But as you stated, every major release changes things, and with every release people have similar complaints. With the move from 98 to XP we saw:

"It slower than 98 on gaming"
"The UI is unnecessarily slow"
"The UI is ugly"
"My Win98 apps won't work with XP"
"XP is a CPU resource hog"
"There's no compelling reason to upgrade to XP"
"XP requires a ton more RAM than 98 to perform about the same (RAM hog)"
"They moved everything around and now I can't find anything! I hate XP!"


Now replace "98" with "XP" and "XP" with "Vista" and you see how the complaints are relatively the same. Yes, people hate change, but change can be a good thing. Having the same thing can get people stuck in a rut. I don't mind a few changes here and there myself, but in general I think the changes should truly make sense and not just changed for the sake of being different.

Personally, I've always liked change. I loved moving to Windows 95 from Windows 3.1. I loved Windows 98, 2000, XP and now Vista after each one was released. I guess I'm a little more open to the "newness" than most people, and I always research all the under-the-hood type stuff to see what else has changed other than the UI.

Yeah, I didn't really know what Linux was until about 18 months ago. I was at a local tech college and a classmate had openSuSE10.0 running on his laptop and was talking about all the things it can do, so I figured I'd give it a whirl.

Pretty rough start, but Google was very handy in a situation like that. Now I'm very proficient with it. I've got a farm of Linux boxes set up, I do a lot of shell scripting, pretty much everything is CLI and terminals (don't like using the GUI too much).

The thing I like the most about Linux is that if you don't like where something is in the GUI, you can move it. It takes a little work and know-how, but everything can be relocated and isn't trapped in encrypted registry keys and cryptic DLLs. It's all pretty much plain-text. I know why MS doesn't do that though.. closed source and to keep people from bricking their system. Completely understandable.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Person on the video with camcorder

in this one, you can almost see who is filming this little movie, just wait for the screen on the person's monitor to go blue, then it will go dark for a second

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the truth is out there