Looks photoshopped, I mean, what's an "Athlon(tm) FX-25" when it's at home?

 

LOL at using a USB memory disk "for speed".

I call BS, but good for a laugh

Edit: Actually, it's almost certainly real since ET and ZD are reputable, but still, some parts are kinda silly.

 

I can't believe people actually believe this is fake?

This stuff is real people.

USB sticks are faster than hard drives and Vista supports a special caching facility called SuperFetch.

God knows what happened with the "FX-25", but the OS is still Beta.

 

Let's see who the first tard with their hyper-overclocked CPU which cost 2 grand to cool and decides to make a USB stick array is.

 

The vast majority of it doesn't look remotely fake. Anyone actually know for sure rather than just some odd hunch about the speed of USB drivers and so on? The "FX-25" thing is equally likely to be a Micrsoft typo as a bad photoshop. Probably more likely.

 

Oh geez enough with the "fake" stuff...

All of those screenshots can be seen on Winsupersite and other sources. They are all from the February CTP build. _None_ of them are fake (not even the one with the Athlon FX typo).

As for the USB sticks... a few sources:
http://www.everythingusb.com/windows_vista.html
http://www.techweb.com/wire/software/170703612
http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=20100

As you can see from the publishing dates on those articles, this is nothing new.

 

Do you know how the performance ratings are balanced?

It seems a bit odd IMHO for an Athlon FX (top end) to get 4 whereas 1GB of ram (pretty common) gets 5.9

 

More weight is given to graphics card type, its size of memory and the system memory. Because the more memory and graphics memory you have, the more textures (i.e. open programs) can be stored without paging them to disk.

The processor has relatively little weight because it will make little difference to the overall performance of Windows.

 

So it sounds like we have a bit of excess Vista-bashing here!

Being written as an "FX-25" could actually mean anything, really, though, it might just be a low end Athlon 64 being detected oddly.

 

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q="athlon+fx-25"

Seems it is a known fault with some motherboard BIOS's anyway. ExtremeTech must have a dodgy motherboard BIOS.

 

Yeah - that's a good point

I remember when I started work and their PCs had 2.8GHz P4s but only 128MB of ram - they ran like an absolute dog!

Upgraded them to 384MB each and it made a huge difference!

 

Methinks it's real now after looking through it. But some parts are silly.."performance rating"? Since when does Average Joe actually care? :/

 

Would be nice if the auto defrag was smart enough only to defrag when needed. Not like u cant do that with sheduling in xp anyway. Do like the idea of a fancy 3d desktop tho.

 

It's not just about hardware. It takes into account things like how many auto-startup programs you've got. If you look at the top of the screenshot you'll see it can display a list of programs and drivers that are causing Windows to startup slowly.

I think the hardware side of it is kind of pointless... but other than that, an average joe may see that their performance rating has gradually reduced over time which will prompt them to uninstall old junk, tidy up their auto-start programs and generally teach them to be more concious about how their system is performing and ways to keep it performing well.

 

That part could be nifty...hopefully it'll work well.

I'm gonna take a break from being sceptical and say one thing I do like is the appearance of WMP in those shots. Now excuse me while I go and lie down

 

I'm getting bored of these comments now.

 

Overall, Vista does look pretty neat and has lots of new features, though nothing Earth-shattering for advanced home users who have no need for "media management", "let's make it really easy to change stuff", and so on. At least, that's what I've seen so far.

Business side of things I couldn't comment on.

The appearance...looks nice. It's growing on me

Methinks Vista-bashing is common because:

> It's late
> It's MS
> None of the bashers have used it