To XP or not to XP...

[Fat Bob]

The Apple Airport Express can handle one printer wirelessly, along with music (via iTunes only) and wireless network. Works well with a pc. Suppose it'll work well with your Mac as well.

Supposedly multiple Airport expresses can be installed so you can put music to several sets of speakers. However, I've never tried this.

If you want to have multiple input and output channels on your pc....why haven't you google'd "multichannel sound cards"? Takes 0.23 seconds and gives you 300k+ hits. You can get upto 10 channels input/output

[Burbage]

Of course I have googled it FB. This doesn't change the fact that XP was designed to operate with one stereo output and one stereo input (which is, of course, four channels in total), you can get all these thing to work with third party software and I've had a machine running with five soundcards, but XP is a hinderance rather than a help. I'm not complaining, I'm wondering if vista has made any improvement, which, I believe, is the purpose of this thread. To inform us as to whether we might want to upgrade.

I haven't got airport express. And I need to connect more than one printer, anyway and a couple of external drives. Belkin usb hub thingy looks ideal.

[baloo]

Actually, the purpose of this thread was for me to get some input from people who have used Vista as to whether it's time to upgrade. It certainly wasn't for a Statler like unfounded whinge about a perceived XP networking issue or Waldorf like multi-channel audio moan.

[Jedi]

Vista, trust me.

Would never go back to XP.

[Burbage]

Not whinging, wonder whether vista has made the improvements I would like to see. In XP networking and sound management are unnecessarily complicated, mainly because XP wasn't designed for multimedia and wireless networking. I want to know if these things have been changed at all. What I din't expect was someone to leap to the defence of XP with sme kind of rant about how it's perfectly simple with a 15 step giude on how to do it. I know how to do it, the problem isn't that, and I have various work arounds, which I have no problem dealing with.The problem is that it is far more complicated than it needs to be.

Does Vista make it simpler?? This question has not yet been answered.

[baloo]

I know how to do it, the problem isn't that, and I have various work arounds, which I have no problem dealing with.The problem is that it is far more complicated than it needs to be.

Obviously you don't if you have had to, like you claimed, re-set it up everytime there is some sort of update. I don't know anyone that has had to do it again once it's configured correctly in the first place so I can only assume it's a BDU problem. Considering XP was released in the early part of 2002, that's over 6 years ago, you can't expect everything to be as simple as what newer OS can implement. But hey, if you say it's 500 times more complicated then obviously it is.

[Fat Bob]

Five sound cards? Why would anyone ever need five sound cards? I bet the marketing men at SoundBlaster were laughing themselves to bed when Burbage came along and ....

sorry, can't remember the rest of the quote.....

[Burbage]

I wouldn't wipe my bottom with a soundblaster soundcard. Nasty, noisy, horrible things. The five sound cards were for a recording studio I helped set up. Wasn't for me, but I got it to work. 24/24 channels full duplex managed from one PC or more specifically from one piece of software. Adobe Audition is a superb program.

Still doesn't answer the question Baloo. Is networking, particularly wireless networking, easier in Vista, or has it not changed?

Is management of sound devices easier?

[SunshineAfterRain]

Stop fighting guys!

I said Vista and no one trust me!

[Fat Bob]

I wouldn't wipe my bottom with a soundblaster soundcard. Nasty, noisy, horrible things.

I'd agree. The texture would be bad indeed.

As for whether things are EASIER in Vista, I don't know, as I haven't tried it. I don't find wireless particularly difficult in XP Home edition, and I know it's easy with XP Pro and Win2k.

And I've never tried to put 5 sound cards onto a system. So I have no experience on how easy or difficult it is. how difficult is it with other OS?

[Burbage]

From what I'm reading you are able to by-pass Vista's audio management which might be the next best thing to fixing it. Meaning that the producers of audio software no longer have to worry about conflict with the OS audio management.

HDA is also supposed to offer 8 channels at 32 bit.

But this was from an article written before Vista's release.

As for other OSs, FB, I don't know. Never tried it on a Mac. I got it to work on a PC, but it would be nice if it were easier. If the above is true it probably will be.

[Burbage]

These things are pretty good too:

At last!
Related to per-application control: System event sounds - We're talking about the sounds that are thrown-out when email arrives, mouse-clicks, IM "dings" etc... at full volume, bang-slap in the middle of your best recording-take!
These sounds now have a combined master volume control so you can turn them down separately from application sounds.
At last!.
Additionally, the volume of system sounds can be "tied" to other volume controls, such that, if, for example, you set the volume of system events to be 50% quieter than all open apps, it will stay tied at 50% even when you increase or decrease the volume in your applications... in other words; relative volume control.

[Spike]

Is management of sound devices easier?

In my experience of Vista so far, nothing is 'easier', just looks prettier.

[Burbage]

On the other hand:

Content protection features in Windows Vista are preventing customers from playing high-quality video and audio and harming system performance, even as Microsoft neglects security programs that could protect users, computer researcher Peter Gutmann argued at the USENIX Security Symposium in Boston Wednesday.

"If there was any threat modeling at all, it was really badly done," Gutmann, from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, said while giving a talk on Vista content protection. "Once the enemy is the user and not the attacker, standard security thinking falls apart."

Vista requires premium content like high-definition movies to be degraded in quality when sent to high-quality outputs, so users are seeing status codes that say "graphics OPM resolution too high." Gutmann calls this "probably the most bizarre status code ever."

While Microsoft's intent is to protect commercial content, home movies are increasingly being shot in high definition, Gutmann said. Many users are finding they can't play any content if it's considered "premium."

"This is not commercial HD content being blocked, this is the users' own content," Gutmann said. "The more premium content you have, the more output is disabled."

This was written 08/2007. Any changes?

[Burbage]

I response to the latter someone wrote this:

Well, I don't know what to tell ya guys, I like Vista, and I believe it's head & shoulders above XP in the following ways:

- Improved interface. XP looks like it was made for kids now.

- User accounts are actually usable now, instead of making everyone an administrator (like in XP), you can actually manage user rights in Vista.

- Much MUCH more stable than Vista. Graphics errors no longer cause the system to crash.

- Performance and reliability monitoring.

- Much improved networking and wireless capabilities.

- Better memory management by far.

Those are the major points. There's so much that's been improved in Vista that it's hard to quantify them all.

Oh, and let's not forget DirectX 10, which will never be available in XP, and by the end of the year will be required to play a lot of games that you won't want to miss.

You guys all whine too much. You'll ALL be using Vista sooner or later, just like when you were whining about XP at the end of 2001, then lookie here, 5 years later you're all using XP. We hear the same whining and crying every time MS makes a major OS revision.

[baloo]

Still doesn't answer the question Baloo. Is networking, particularly wireless networking, easier in Vista, or has it not changed?

No idea. I don't run Vista hence why I started this thread. And in all my discussions with people and research, networking was never something I cared about because I never had a problem with it under XP.

[Jedi]

Just do it baloo. You'll have to eventually. Sure there might be issues a long the way, but in the end it will be worth it.

The only outstanding issue i have with vista is my skyephone - but for that I blame linksys for not bothering to develop a decent vista driver.

Other than that, vista kills XP in so many ways. Application startup is amazingly fast in vista.

[baloo]

I was close Jedi and if Skylet in STC had it in stock yesterday I would have bought it. But in the end I rebuilt with XP last night.

[Burbage]

Still doesn't answer the question Baloo. Is networking, particularly wireless networking, easier in Vista, or has it not changed?

No idea. I don't run Vista hence why I started this thread. And in all my discussions with people and research, networking was never something I cared about because I never had a problem with it under XP.

So you don't know. Anyone else know? From that one post above it says "improved networking and wireless capabilities". Anyone agree?

[baloo]

No idea. I don't run Vista hence why I started this thread. And in all my discussions with people and research, networking was never something I cared about because I never had a problem with it under XP.

So you don't know.

Whatever gave you the idea that I have any knowledge of vista's networking features ? or do just expect to throw a question out and have everyone do your research for you ?

[Burbage]

No. I'm asking in case anyone does know. I already knew you didn't since you haven't used vista.

[Jedi]

I was close Jedi and if Skylet in STC had it in stock yesterday I would have bought it. But in the end I rebuilt with XP last night.

That's a weak excuse if you ask me.

[baloo]

It is, but I was already eyeing a new CPU, a 2Gb RAM upgrade etc to go with my purchase. In the end prefered not to have to justify my purchases to the wife.

Gutless really.

[Jedi]

Totally gutless!

You'd be better off buying a new PC than upgrading old hardware, depending of course how old it is.

[Bender]

Here's my reply. I'm sure you'll find it useful. I'd never used wireless networking on a PC until I got my new laptop a year ago, which came with inbuilt wireless and Vista preinstalled. I found it to be a great improvement over what I had before.

But seriously, my impression is that the networking, wireless or wired, is a whole lot smarter and more intuitive than it was in XP. It basically sets itself up, and if it doesn't get things right straight away it's easy to change things to get it to do what I want. I've never been tempted to downgrade it to XP and the only thing stopping us from upgrading the older computers to Vista is that they're mostly old (8 years in one case and 11 in another) and slow, and they do all we want them to do as they are.

We have a dedicated machine running Win2k and Cubase for music production. It's staying on 2k because we've found it better than XP for music work (lower latency), and some of the old stuff that's in/attached to it has not had Vista drivers released. It's got a Terratec soundcard in it and is controlling a heap of hardware synths and modules through Steinberg Midex8 MIDI interfaces. Agree with what was said about Soundblasters earlier, they're not up to music production standards.