[Beowulf] Sidebar: Vista Rant

[Chris Samuel]

On Wed, 18 Jul 2007, Robert G. Brown wrote:

> I don't believe that Vista's slowness has anything to do with hardware
> memory footprint.

Probably this, from page 14 of "Output Content Protection and Windows Vista" 
at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/stream/output_protect.mspx :

> In addition to an initiated request, the vendor-supplied driver is required
> to poll the state of the hardware outputs at least once every 30
> milliseconds if a user-accessible bus is present.  

So *at least* 30 times a second your machine is waking up to check nothing has 
happened - per driver.  At the risk of blatant self-promotion, you can find 
more juicy titbits here:

http://www.csamuel.org/2006/12/29/microsoft-details-on-vista-protections/

My favourite is about DVI monitors:

> As a result, a regular DVI monitor will either get slightly fuzzy or go
> black, with a polite message explaining that it doesn’t meet security
> requirements.  

cheers,
Chris
-- 
Christopher Samuel - (03) 9925 4751 - Systems Manager
 The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing
 P.O. Box 201, Carlton South, VIC 3053, Australia
VPAC is a not-for-profit Registered Research Agency
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