Find the FUD

As many of you know, I'm a regular over at Shacknews. That said, there's been a lot of FUD lately surrounding Vista going on over in the posts.

Let's take this post for example.

The last post in the thread as of this writing is #612, so let's find some FUD, shall we?

1. Aero/WDM framerate is horrible (#55). It isn't that it's terrible, it's that it doesn't need to update the screen anymore than it currently is.

You can verify this yourself if you have FRAPS installed. It's easiest to reproduce this if you don't have anything animating on your desktop. To reproduce this, launch FRAPS, then launch any D3D application, then exit back to the desktop with the framerate monitor enabled. Notice that if you do nothing (don't move the mouse, don't update any windows, etc.), your displayed framerate drops to nothing. However, if you do a lot (move windows rapidly, have a banner ad on a page, etc.), the framerate increases to match.

Vista is only updating what it needs to. In other words, Aero/WDM is acting intelligently.

2. Vista 32-bit only supports 2Gb of memory (#545). This one is partially true. Vista 32-bit processes can only support up to 2Gb of memory (that is, each process has its own individual 2Gb address space), but Vista 32-bit can support more than 2Gb of memory. I've got 3Gb now, and Windows Vista is detecting and using it. That said, I'm guilty of a little FUD here. I thought Vista maxed out at 4Gb, but further reading makes it look the home versions max between 8Gb and 16Gb, while Business and Ultimate can support whatever the motherboard supports.

3. Vista uses a lot more memory than previous versions of Windows (#425). Another partial truth. Vista does use more memory, but only for SuperFetch. If actual physical memory is needed by a process, Windows reclaims it from SuperFetch. If you compare actual task memory used between Windows Vista with Aero and Windows XP, you'll see that Vista is using a bit more memory by default (it seems to be about 105Mb for me), but since 70Mb of that is for WDM, I'm not that worried.

I'm sure the thread has kept going...can you find more FUD?

I don't mean to pick on the Shack. I just want to remind people that Vista is a completely different OS than Windows XP. It's the equivalent of opening the hood of your car, yanking out the plug-3 engine and swapping it out for a 4-cylinder hybrid motor.