Vista Business or Ultimate

cousin_borat

Hows it going,

I'm about to buy a HP dv9000t notebook. However I need to decide between versions of Windows. Above all else I do not want to sacrafice any performance since I'll be using it mainly for work ie running a test Oracle Database, Weblogic, couple of APPS servers. All of which are resource intensive.

Would like to get the additional multimedia bells and whistles with Vista ultimate since the HP has a very nice screen and the notebook has a HDMI connection.

However if its going to impede performance then I'll just go with the Business version.

(Theres definately a difference since Vista Business recommends 1GB Ram and Ultimate reccomends 2GM).

Hopefully somebody will have used or seen benchmarks for both

Thanks!!!

8T8

There is no difference in performance it is the same operating system just modular so bits can be removed in terms of features.

Ultimate is the kitchen sink version that takes all the features into one version and you if you want MCE + the features in the business version than you will need to get the Ultimate package.

1GB is recommend for use with Vista & it works fine with that but 2GB is the optimal amount for all versions of it so I would go with 2GB when buying the notebook or get a third party RAM upgrade.

You may not even need the Ultimate version take a look at the features table, the Home Premium version may do most of what you need.

mick.fr

I would go for an Ultimate version, OEM does not even cost 170 euros.
2GB very recommend as well, I have got 1GB at home, playing Ut 2004, working fine, but reaching 1GB dangerously :-)

If you have a laptop, you should take the TPM chip to get the benefit of being able to effectively encrypt your hard drive. Feature which is not available in business (Surprisingly in my opinion).
Just in case somebody stole your laptop (risk is high) he will not be able to read your data (Ah cool).

Capt'n Midnight

mick.fr wrote:

I would go for an Ultimate version, OEM does not even cost 170 euros.
2GB very recommend as well, I have got 1GB at home, playing Ut 2004, working fine, but reaching 1GB dangerously :-)

You do know VISTA has a different caching pattern to previous versions of window and more or less makes use of all available memory all of the time XP is different in that if you have tons of RAM it speeds up a lot if you turn off the swap file.

RAM is something you can get later, and cheaper, than when you buy the laptop. Just watch out for the number of slots it has.

If you have a laptop, you should take the TPM chip to get the benefit of being able to effectively encrypt your hard drive.

If you have a laptop you can simply use the BIOS to password the hard drive. This has been available for ages, allows other OS's to read the space, and if the drive dies or you forget the password the data is still recoverable if you are prepared to spend several hundred and have the guys in white suits do it.

General Discussions of TPM would be better on security http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module
it has many benefits but the downside is it could take DRM to a new level.

I'm not 110% sure of this but if you aren't running something it should not slow down the PC much. Even if loaded in the background and idle I don't imagine any of the multimedia stuff would load the system down much. While running multimedia the extra ram won't hurt but VISTA seems better at caching. Also USB keys are cheaper than RAM. Turning off Aero is always an option as is extra ram - is the laptop dual core ?

zilog_jones

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

If you have a laptop you can simply use the BIOS to password the hard drive.

BIOS passwords can be easily bypassed by resetting the BIOS (I found some program before for doing this with laptop BIOSes but can't remember what it was ). Hard disk passwords seem to be more complicated to break, but there seems to be a lot of people on the interweb who can crack them as well.

mick.fr

zilog_jones wrote:

...Hard disk passwords seem to be more complicated to break, but there seems to be a lot of people on the interweb who can crack them as well.

As far as I know there is no chip to store password on hard drives.
When you want to read the data stored on a laptop protected by a Bios password, you simply take off the disk and add it in a USB cradle, plug it to your PC and Voila!
TPM chip value added is that the data is crypted, so even if you can physically plug the disk in a PC, you can not read anything.

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

You do know VISTA has a different caching pattern to previous versions of window and more or less makes use of all available memory all of the time XP is different in that if you have tons of RAM it speeds up a lot if you turn off the swap file.

I do not know where you have seen that, different caching pattern I am not aware yet but I am sure you are right, but my laptop has 4GB of RAM (3.5GB available) and I am always using a max of 1.2 GB (Between 1 and 1.2GB) of my RAM every time, even with Office 2007 running etc...

Capt'n Midnight

mick.fr wrote:

As far as I know there is no chip to store password on hard drives.
When you want to read the data stored on a laptop protected by a Bios password, you simply take off the disk and add it in a USB cradle, plug it to your PC and Voila!

The password is stored on the hard drive. The drive electronics compare this to the one send down the data cable by the user. This means swapping the controller board on the drive won't get you in.

If you have an ATA drive greater than 20GB chances are it supports this
http://www.rockbox.org/lock.html

The disk lock is a built-in security feature in the disk. It is part of the ATA specification, and thus not specific to any brand or device.

A disk always has two passwords: A User password and a Master password. Most disks support a Master Password Revision Code, which can tell you if the Master password has been changed, or it it still the factory default. The revision code is word 92 in the IDENTIFY response. A value of 0xFFFE means the Master password is unchanged.

A disk can be locked in two modes: High security mode or Maximum security mode. Bit 8 in word 128 of the IDENTIFY response tell you which mode your disk is in: 0 = High, 1 = Maximum.

In High security mode, you can unlock the disk with either the user or master password, using the "SECURITY UNLOCK DEVICE" ATA command. There is an attempt limit, normally set to 5, after which you must power cycle or hard-reset the disk before you can attempt again.

In Maximum security mode, you cannot unlock the disk! The only way to get the disk back to a usable state is to issue the SECURITY ERASE PREPARE command, immediately followed by SECURITY ERASE UNIT. The SECURITY ERASE UNIT command requires the Master password and will completely erase all data on the disk. The operation is rather slow, expect half an hour or more for big disks. (Word 89 in the IDENTIFY response indicates how long the operation will take.)

mick.fr

Alright cool I was not aware.
Looks like a cheap alternative to the TPM :-)
Thanks for the info

cousin_borat

That's very interesting about the way Vista uses Cache. I'm going to do some benchmarks between running BEA APPS server between my current 2000 system and vista.