The Null Device

Windows Vista audio woes

EPIC FAIL The Guardian reports that users of Windows Vista are experiencing severe audio performance problems, with choppy, glitchy audio from applications, which is annoying home users and driving professional musicians to old copies of XP or else the Apple store. The Graun article gives the reasons a cursory examination, essentially writing them off as growing pains of a shift to a new, improved driver model, though somehow managing to miss the elephant in the room, i.e., that at any time when there is the possibility that a Windows Vista machine might come into contact with copyrighted audio or video content, a draconian DRM regime kicks in, diverting a large proportion of the machine's resources into ensuring that you, the user, cannot do anything with the content that you're not explicitly permitted to.

There are 4 comments on "Windows Vista audio woes":

Posted by: Peter http://www.frogworth.com/blog/ Fri Feb 1 13:54:21 2008

I've been using Vista for

Posted by: Peter http://www.frogworth.com/blog/ Fri Feb 1 13:58:18 2008

MEEP. Sorry. I've been using Vista for a couple of months now with no problems whatsoever. I removed User Account Controls immediately, don't bother with Windows Media Player (foobar2000 is far better than any music player for Mac or Linux), use Firefox and Thunderbird, and actually much prefer using Vista to XP.

Mind you, if it wasn't foobar2000 and IrfanView, and I guess Media Player Classic (which is much nicer than VLC), I would be using Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 100% of the time. But despite anyone wants to tell you because of DRM and whatnot, Vista is actually a much nicer OS than the various previous Windows versions. Remember how most Mac users stuck wtih OS9 for ages because of driver incompatibilities, plugin woes and whatnot?

Posted by: datakid Sat Feb 2 01:21:51 2008

I think the killer, as tech support for the tech illiterate, is the number of minimum spec machines being bought by the unknowing from Harvey Norman with Vista. They HATE it - but it mostly because they just bought a laptop with only 512MB RAM and a cheap-arse, 2yo technology processor. You can have all the spaceships in the world, but if you run them on coal, you don't go far.

Posted by: Peter http://www.frogworth.com/blog/ Sun Feb 3 05:07:17 2008

Yes, that IS stupid. I mean, you can't run OSX Leopard on a crappy old machine, but at least Apple won't sell you a crappy old machine with it install on it!