[Beowulf] Sidebar: Vista Rant

[Gerry Creager]

Brian Dobbins wrote:
>> Wrongo.  Win2K was never REALLY pushed as a consumer product.  But now
>> try getting a new system over the counter with anything but Vista on it.
>> Sure, if you special order or buy online you can get XP -- probably at
>> full retail.  But seriously, the market is being saturated with Vista
>> systems.
> 
> Just to add two cents here: I know someone who recently purchased a new
> laptop from a store, and of course, Vista was installed.  Not even one day
> into its use, though, a SATA error (from a Windows Update!) caused
> crashes.  They used the recovery capability, but that then led to other
> problems, so they just said to hell with it and bought a copy of XP...
> 
> Then they had to get the drivers for XP, which was -mostly- painless, and
> in the course of doing, came across a report from the manufacturer of the
> system saying that they get countless numbers of people requesting XP CDs
> in exchange for Vista due to problems.  So, yes, do systems come with
> Vista?  Sure.. but a lot of people are exchanging it in frustration, and
> it frustrates customers and manufacturers alike.  It'd be really
> interesting to see statistics of how many people actually use Vista on a
> day to day basis... I don't trust the sales numbers for the above reason!
> 
> On a completely different note, since some people were speaking about
> checkpointing in the Linux kernel (which then led to this thread, I
> believe!), I'd encourage everyone interested in such things to look into
> the Berkeley Labs Checkpoint Restore (BLCR) software.  According to their
> roadmap, they're aiming at having Torque integration complete by SC'07,
> and it already works with several MPI implementations for checkpointing
> parallel jobs.  The link is:
> 
>   http://ftg.lbl.gov/checkpoint/

This is good news and one that will help us a lot.  Now if I can just 
pry AiX of that new IBM cluster of p575's...

> Cheers,
>  - Brian (who actually found Win2K to be quite decent!)

Nope, NT4 was the end of the evolutionary peak.  It's been downhill from 
there.

Gerry
-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University	
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