Took a look at this as i'm seeing this alots and it's driving me little crazy

 <-- REVERSE
 <-- BOLD
 <-- COLOUR
 <-- I don't know what that is :S

There's few more I think but it's kinda weird seeing those symbols on Vista?
Any chance of a fix or something?

I'd prefer the old sytle (those little square symbol)

Any fix or what I need to do? - Go back to XP or what?

Thanks in advance

What you see is usually related to your codepages that are installed. I have those for my characters and I don't mind them. But if I install a codepage for Japanese (Eastern Asian, I think it's called), then I start getting "L" shaped things that rotate depending on which control code is used. The problem with that is that a Ctrl-O character looks like a space and is a problem when trying to write a script with that code.

you also get this in XP if you install asian language support...

it's very annoying when coding indeed ;-]
also when trying to use a little colour/underline/bold from commandline...

Heh. I mentioned the asian codepage issue. That's the one that used to annoy me. I finally just chose to remove it.

I have the same problem , has anyone found a fix yet?

Just uninstall codepages that you're not using, such as the Asian one. I don't know where they have those in Vista as I refuse to use that thing.

I only have uk installed , it has something to do with how vista uses several languages to make up another

lol nice description

What can I say? XP works great. I can leave it running 24/7 without a reboot for months and it doesn't give me any problems (I've done it). I constantly install/uninstall games and have no problems there. I don't see any need to upgrade to an OS that really doesn't offer anything to me that I care about. I read over the feature list and it's a pretty weak feature list, if you ask me. Since I know everything works perfectly with XP and all my drivers work in XP, I will stick with it. I know that if I change to Vista, *something* won't work and it is likely to be something that will never be compatible with Vista and I don't feel like dealing with that annoyance.

I've tried Vista (business and ultimate), and I totally agree with you. I didn't see any new features that I found to be worth changing from XP. In fact, I found that just doing some tasks which were simple and straight-forward in XP, are a total nuissance in Vista. For example: in XP, to change your static IP, you go to start > network connections > connection #1. To do the same thing in Vista, add about 5 more steps, including giving permission 2-3 times.

-genius_at_work

its more an os made for retards and people who droll on fancy looks

Nice description, raZOR. I will say that it is probably very useful for developers thanks to that linux-style scripting thing they put in. At least, it was supposed to be. I never really figured out what the use of that was for a regular user.

I was going to try it out in one of the betas or RCs or whatever it was called by installing it on a blank drive I have sitting here (no space in my computer for it right now). It froze before it even had a chance to start installing. It could have just been a bad download, but that was enough to make me choose not to bother.

its all about DX 10... nothing more.
atleast from my point of view.

3D flip windows, "live" thumbs and "faster" search
is not good enough reason for me to buy new expencive hardware
just to run that "thing"

Yeah, I agree. And just the cost of Vista itself is huge for so little difference.

Additionally there are a lot of 3rd party manufacturers that don't have Vista compatable drivers for their hardware...including some very recent hardware, such as PCI-X (PCI-Express).

(Just a side note.. PCI-Extended (PCI-X) and PCI-Express (PCI-E) are two different things. Wiki )

-genius_at_work

Noted...I'll make sure I use the proper terms in future.

Here is a *VERY* insteresting read about Vista. Noting all of this, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that I will ever install Vista on my computer. If support for XP diminishes enough to make it difficult to stick with that OS, then I'll just move over to Linux.

thanks for the link

Np. I found it very interesting. Especially noting how much Vista will degrade your hardware's life expectancy through constant accesses (pings), and how it disables your own devices if it doesn't think they are secure enough for protected content, and how it restarts your GPU every so often (I forget the time frame) to prevent any chance of hacking, which creates additional load on the computer and I can imagine what will happen while playing a graphics intensive game.

That's assuming it lets you play games, since they might open up security holes and be hacked, so they might get disabled by the overzealous protection of the OS. Personally, I hate how Microsoft is trying to treat the PC as nothing more than an entertainment system. It defeats what the computer was originally made for, which is to make complicated tasks easier, such as business-related software. By making an OS that does nothing more than handle mostly entertainment, Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot. This is why I've stuck with 2K even though I would avoid Windows if I could get away from it (once WINE for *nix gets good enough, in other words).

Not literally in response to the original topic, but just thought I'd say that I use a *nix OS on one system, and (with the exception of mIRC, which requires the usage of WINE), all of the other programs that I use are *nix based.

The *nix version that I use is called Xandros

Yes, you can use *nix if you don't play a lot of games. But if you play a lot of games, you're stuck right now as Wine/Cedega, although good, just can't handle most games yet.

I'm not aware of Vista disabling games for security issues. Some games might not work unpatched on Vista for security reasons, but it's not because Vista disables them, it's because in previous versions of Windows games were given practically free reign over some aspects of hardware access which was a major security issue. MS have actually done the right thing in preventing this in Vista to increase security and they're still getting ragged on with FUD saying they've "disabled games"? Typical. Vista is no lesss capable of handling business-related software than previous Windows OSes.

I don't play a lot of games, and most of the games that I do play have *nix versions. The few that don't run well enough for me using WINE.

The protection of the video path is a requirement to allow support of content protected formats.
If you do not like that, take it up with the source not the messenger. Microsoft did not steer Hollywood into protected video paths. Chances are XP will not support HD from most vendors due to licensing requirements of a secure video path which XP does not give.
Note also the website linked
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
Has loads of bull on it and thats me just reading the first section.
SPDIF is not the highest audio connections, it only has a data rate of 1.2gbits which is not enough for most hd multichannel audio. In that SACD and DVD-A simply do not fit on spdif and have never worked on it from any player ever. The choice to send a limited LPCM signal down spdif is upto the player and Vista does not stop that. Also SACD has NEVER supported PC, it lacks any physical drive to read it and no software has been licensed decoders. Considering the "facts" on that website are just utterly wrong I wouldn't lay much trust in the guy having a clue about what he is saying. However I will continue to read it some other day to see if the guy has a single valid or correct point.

As a note, the article does mention that SACD is not supported on the PC and that it was an example.

I know, but why bring the point up when all "hardware" based players have ALWAYS functioned exactly like that even when capable of playing sacd in the first place?!
Also he claims hdmi is required for hdcp and that dvi-d is not capable. When infact dvi-d carries a 1:1 identicle format to hdmi video, it is very much hdcp capable. This is just a pinout difference not functionally different(hdmi just offers audio pins aswell but drops the analogue pins).

His dot points on most the technology have precisely zero to do with Vista and were invented and set in stone long before Vista had any say over them. Vista is merely following the rules set so it is capable of playback which XP in most cases is NOT!!

Plus the fact his entire writeups is about "probably" and "likely" meaning they are his own mislead reading of specs he has/had neither tested nor actually researched correctly.

It also states nvidia and ati can no longer offer universal drivers under Vista. I think this is a point that will sing home for most users that this website is a worthless link.

Honestly the more I read of that website the more I laugh as the guy understands almost nothing about the technology he is rattling on about.

bits has it exactly correct.

I've been on Windows Vista for over a year now. Through the entire beta process as well as right on through to the final operating system.

The REAL problems have very little to do with the problems that people like this guy spout on about.

Let's focus on the REAL problems with moving to Vista.

-Video Overlay support is gone. This has massive ramifications for hardware-assisted rendering such as Nvidia HD or DVD content playback. Nvidia has claimed that a modified version of this support will come in future driver revisions, but as of right now it does not exist. This means your CPU is being chugged into doing all of the processing work. Which isn't TOO bad these days considering your CPU should be powerful at this point in time.

-DirectSound 3D hardware acceleration is gone. This means that Creative's hardware engine for directsound no longer works like it did in XP. All sound now passes through the CPU, which once again for those of us who would prefer the CPU to do other tasks (and of course got something like an Audigy for the sole purpose of offloading audio from the CPU), this is a problem. Creative is working on support, however. They're releasing a new standard called OpenAL which bypasses the internal audio system of Vista and will output directly to the hardware. So right now any software that supports OpenAL will in fact output directly to the hardware bypassing this internal Windows system, but there's just not that much software that supports it yet.

Not really related to Vista specifically but something brought about by this generation of computers.

-Dual core support across the board is still severely lacking. Vista of course can handle many cores thrown at it but lots of software simply doesn't use it yet. Which can be a curse or a blessing depending on what you're doing.

-64 bit support is still kind of problematic. FRAPS' FPS1 codec chops all of its videos up at the 4GB size and then continues onto the next since the codec is only a 32-bit codec. The problem is then if you wanted to edit this video, you would have to use 32-bit software to do it. Virtual Dub x64, for example, will not recognize the fraps 32-bit codec and will not open the video. One must use virtual dub 32 in order to edit it.

I've been using Vista for sometime now. I like the sidebar. I like the large icons. I like many things about it. Indeed use Vista for six months and come back to XP. Hmmm... maybe Vista not so bad after all, hmmm?



Ugh... please. You think audio processing actually takes up huge amounts of overhead? The stupid Creative drivers probably use more overhead than anything. Go look at the hardware requirements for the SB X-FI pro! Hmmm... 1GHz processor, 256MB of RAM. Huh? Isn't the SOUND HARDWARE supposed to be doing the work?

Really, in the end it doesn't matter what sound card you have. You don't really need one anymore either... since you can just use USB.

In theory, however, in my case I haven't found a USB alternative, since I have my sound go from my sound card to my stereo system.

Although, if you know of an alternative that I haven't come across, I'm more than happy to give it a look.

Apologies for the off topic post (in regards to the original topic)

USB ofcourse is completely handled by the cpu and adds its own load.