Microsoft Longhorn

Well many of the OS Testers and Developers in Mouthshut are curious about Longhorn launch. Many MSDN users already tried the beta veriosn 4015,4008.So many reviews are already here.So you are still thinking what is longhorn anyway.Microsoft's eating ''Penguin & apple pie?'',what the hell it is.Well it is microsoft's new OS launching in market to beat New Peguin in valley with Old sweet Apple.There are lot of features going to launch with it.Some of few I know are listed below.

1) Fast insatllation 18-20 minutes or so.

2) New boot screens,Taskbar,Sidescreen,Welcome screen.

3) Shell improvements,Search,activesync.

4) WinFS API,Indigo messenging system Many more Blah..Blah.

New user interface codenamed Avalon which uses 3D computer graphics and Direct3D.This interface devided into 3 parts as :-

1.Aero Glass :-Requires more memory,Excellent Graphics,Animation,visual special effects.This is the area most of us will be looking at.

2.Aero:-Requires less memory than AG but fast on operation.

3.Classic Mode:-For those who do not meet requirements of Aero then they will ne automatically migrated to W2k clasic smode.There is lot of development going on with desktop enhancement so until final release nobody's sure about avalon's future.No doubt they are hungery to beat apple on desktop expereince.

Microsoft developed new filesystem named WinFS which is still under developement,better than NTFS but still there are isues with the WINFS.I think you will find system much slower with WINFS,anyone here with same results pls email me.

Command line is still there but not as powerfull as in win9x os ,codename Monad.It is developing in aim to beat Unix command line as Monad uses pipe's and filter philosophy.

After using it you will definitely find it that MS is against Opensource OS's.they are actually stealing some features from them.

Windows XP includes CD-writing feature so Longhorn supports DVD-writing capability.i do find Xp's this free writing software better than nero cause regardless of where your files are you can serach for it and send them to writing wizard. Also Longhorn supports No-excution feature for AMD and Inel processor.Some more nice features such as virtual file structure lets us categarise,organise files in new way.File management is much easier as you can open your files from anywhere in desktop regardless where you save the file.

For testers and devlopers I suggest keep eye on My contacts,Game liabrary,parental control,WinFS etc.

What I fear about Longhorn?

Software cost,application upgrade cost,Old software support,Control Of MS over software etc.

As about 16 ways MS is controlling our OS thru internet if they dont let users use OS alone and forcing users to use OS according to thier way, may be many of us will switch to UNIX,Linux or Apple or maybe BSD.

Media player security issue is also not new to you as when you connect media player to internet to serch for radio station then it collects some information from user.acc.to securityfocus.com Microsoft Media Player (Tells Microsoft the music and videos you like)I m not so against MS software but there products are soon will be as useless as Reliance india mobile.May be instead of beliving on me better try these websites.

https://futurepower.net/microsoft.htm

https://securityfocus.com

https://pivx.com

https://scorpioncity.com/mscrash.shtml

From Windows XP I learned that microsoft is trying to control user's privacy in the name of Piracy.WPA is the wastage of time for non internet users like us,we need to phone them everytime XP asks for activation.It asks every month or so cause I connect my friends hard disk with mine to copy Huge Office excel files instaed of wasting CD.

So my hardware Config Changes which leads to Reactivation.

That's Why they made Volume License Sceme Which Forces Users to buy more copies of Microsoft XP.

well I m serious about MS OS performance and security so I always warn other peoples before any purchase they make with Microsoft.atlast it is your choice to think about their softwares.

for those who wanna know more about longhorn keep eye on;

https://longhornblogs.com

https://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn

https://winsupersite.com

Well longhorn Alphas are buggy need improvements,we will see final product soon in market but longhorn will be much OS better than Xp.Another OS review from me...Keep posting comments.Suggestions.Thank you.

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Microsoft Longhorn.... the next big thing touted by Microsoft as the OS to end all OSes. The hype about this operating system has been so much of late that I was prompted to spend my entire evening on Sunday, installing the alpha release (build # 4053) from the beta CD that Microsoft sent me and applying tweaks that others recommended on message boards.

The hardware specifications on which I installed Longhorn are as follows. The reason I'm giving the specifications is because it is relevant to evaluate the resource management capability of the Operating System

AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (2.2 Ghz)

1G PC3200 (400MHz) DDR Ram (Corsair XMS series)

2x74 Gig Western Digital Raptor 10,000 rpm SATA drive in RAID 0 configuration

Gigabyte 7n400 Pro2 with IDE Bus Mastering, onboard 5.1 Dolby soundcard

Nvidia GeForce FX 5700 Ultra 128 MB DDR RAM

The installation itself was simple. I booted the machine from the CD and the OS install started up with the ''Upgrade from XP'' option disabled. This is to safeguard the stability of the system and keep a backup operating system running in case of a crash. It asked for a new partition to install to, formatted the partition with WinFS (a beta of the new file system to replace NTFS) and asked me very politely to get a ten minute break, because it will take that much time to install.

The installation was complete in exactly 15 minutes, including the probing of new hardware devices and driver installation for the same. At the conclusion of the install process, like XP, I was asked to activate the OS by connecting to one of Microsoft's servers. If not activated, it had a 180-day limit and I've heard from users that it does ''self-destruct'' after the evaluation period is complete.

The boot up time from a cold reboot to presentation of the toolbar was approximately 65 seconds which is impressive. (XP normally takes about 135 seconds even with the RAID 0 configuration) It then asks to install the upgrade for the drivers for the hardware from the native device drivers that it installs at the time of OS installation.

The device driver executables have to be downloaded from the hardware vendor sites and they have to be run in XP compatibility mode. This is because the hardware vendors have not yet developed drivers for Longhorn. The device drivers installed perfectly and one of the best parts of the OS was its inherent support for Dolby 5.1 6-channel sound provided by the onboard audio without the need for additional drivers, which XP requires.

Coming to the GUI, Microsoft keeps adding eye-candy to newer versions of their OS and Longhorn has an enhanced interface which gives icons a 3-D effect by layering their images very well. The ''start'' text has been replaced by the MS logo and the logon screen has changed quite a bit. The same options for enhancing performance by disabling the GUI effects in XP ,has been retained in Longhorn.

The memory leak in Explorer is atrocious, because it seems to consume 823k of memory. This was reported to be due to the side tool bar which displays a gigantic analog clock and also quick launch icons. The side toolbar retains the DLL files of the icons in cache even when it is closed. After applying a suggested tweak the memory usage drastically dropped to 234k, which is still high for explorer. Hopefully they will remedy it in the final release, due in 2006.

Driver support is good, and the new filesystem seems to do an automatic defragment when the seek times for files are beyond a threshold limit. The problem with my configuration was that it didn't seem to work too well with the striping on my RAID array. On non-RAID configurations it could work faster, probably because it doesn't need to seek the multiple parts of the file, stored on different disks.It could also be my stripe size set to 64k, but this was an issue most people who tested the OS encountered even with higher stripe sizes. Maybe this aspect will improve too, because eventually systems will move to RAID configurations, limited only to servers and high performance desktops as of now.

When I tried to do a search for a file, the explorer started to exponentially increase its memory usage, finally freezing the whole system until I killed the process. But unlike XP, killing Explorer didn't result in a system freeze, instead recovering to the desktop almost immediately. Maybe MS has decided to reduce the priority of Explorer's thread, an idea plagiarized from Linux developers.

Explorer does show CD/DVD writing as a part of its options, but the use of specialized s/w like Nero is always recommended, because of its support for different file formats and also its efficient utilization of the read-buffer in the CD/DVD writers.

Network drive mapping was a breeze, with the ability to browse network drives almost like they are local drives. But network exploration needs tweaks involving disabling the firewall enabled by default on each network connection.

This is because the network stack is supposed to have been written from scratch.

The same old crappy BlackIce defender has been included as a firewall which takes approximately fifteen minutes to break, even for script kiddies.

Windows Media player has received a face-lift, inherent DivX & ffdShow codec support. This is probably because MS recognized the popularity of media files encoded as DivX files. But I would prefer third-party software specifically tailored for these files, since they don't suffer from WMP's performance loss while decrypting these files.

The interface as a whole doesn't seem to differ too much from XP, and probably shares the same codebase. Control Panel has the same feel as XP, but has again been dolled up to give some very interesting icons. Office XP and Office 2003 installed without a hitch as did most 32-bit applications, including the notorious memory hog, Adobe Photoshop. Performance evaluations from SiSoft Sandra were also very encouraging.

The one package which impressed me the most was Mathematica 5. It took approximately 10 seconds to find the prime factors of a 8-digit number, with an algorithm which is known to take atleast 95 seconds on the fastest desktop running Windows XP. This provides some insight about the advances made to take advantage of the number-crunching ability of the new breed of processors in this OS.

With multi-processor distributed computing systems running this OS, RSA could soon be out of business!

The imminent release of Windows 64-bit OS as a server Operating system, replacing Windows 2003 Server,thereby giving inherent support for AMD's 64-bit Opteron chip as opposed to Intel's Itanium chips, I would expect Longhorn to be tailor-made for the next generation AMD chips. But MS has not released any information regarding any hardware-specific optimizations its going to make in Longhorn.

On the whole, I was not very disappointed with the alpha release of Windows Longhorn and it is particularly good even for an alpha release. I hope that MS will clean up the code and tighten it before it releases the commercial version. The final version is expected to be released in three flavors : Workstation, Server and Media Center, an offshoot from RH Linux install options.

Until then desktop users have to be satisfied with Windows XP with Service Pack 2 releasing this year.

For more information, there are a plethora of sites dealing with Longhorn and its associated tweaks. The CD can be requested from MS if you have beta-tested their previous products or the ISO can be d/l off IRC and the different sites offering to trade ISO's for posts.

A helpful site for Guides and Tweaks wrt Longhorn is https://microbeta.net. I am unable to provide screenshots of my installation,each screencap being one meg in size, but the sites dealing with Longhorn do a very good job of it.

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Recently I read a review on Windows Longhorn by : Vishal (https://mouthshut.com/readreview/41209.html).

He has done a commendable job but I want to write a more comprehensive review on Longhorn ( as Operating Systems is one

of my favorite field of interest ). So here I am with a review on Windows Longhorn.

Is Windows Longhorn just a visually pleasant upgrade of Win XP ? (Like WinXp for 2000 ?)

Definitely NO !!! Longhorn was first announced in JULY 2001 as a minor Windows upgrade which would precede Blackcomb.

As time rolled by,it became clear that Longhorn would be a much larger project. Infact ,

LongHorn is not just a new Operating System (Big Misconception !!) from Microsoft, Longhorn is the codename for a major

wave of technology and platform software from Microsoft. This generation of software will include new versions

of Windows Operating System, Windows Server, Famous .NET, and Omnipresent Microsoft Office. Like Windows XP,

Windows Longhorn will ship with Home Edition,

Professional Edition, Tablet PC Edition, Media Center Edition, 64-bit, and other versions.

NOTE : Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows CE and Windows NT are 32-bit operating systems and recently (23 Sept 2003) Microsoft Corp. announced the beta availability of a native 64-bit version of its Windows XP operating system designed to support 64-Bit Extended Systems.

What is so Special about this ''Longhorn'' ??

1. The first important to learn about Longhorn is its FILE SYSTEM. ( File System is the way a user of application may access files.Its an important part of operating system). With growing need of larger Hard Disk Spaces , file systems are continuously changing.

FAT systems were never designed to cope with several hundred MB of data on disks of 200 GB.

Windows Longhorn will feature a new database file system known as Windows Future Storage (WinFS). WinFS will be built on top of the NTFS file system-WinFS is not a replacement for NTFS, as NTFS is required for WinFS to work. WinFS, a technology which Microsoft has wanted to implement in Windows for over a decade, will allow users to more efficiently locate and work with information regardless of format or location.

NOTE : Many people think that WinFS is a totally new FILE SYSTEM. Think of WinFS as pulling together relational database technology, XML database technology, and file streaming that a file system has. Its actually based on NTFS.

2. Are there new visual styles in Windows Longhorn?

Yes !!

* Windows XP includes a ''Luna'' visual style which is available in three colors: Blue, Silver, and Olive Green.

Longhorn's Visual style is called ''Aero'' and is based on a new .NET-based API called ''Avalon.'' (Revealed in Aug 2003)

* The Longhorn Start Menu and task bar will be enhanced with a new Sidebar component that can optionally appear locked to one side of the desktop.

* All system folders (My Documents, My Pictures, etc.) feature a search pane, folder comments, file information and filters

* Visual effects of Longhorn are out of the World. Examples of visual effects that will be enabled in Windows Longhorn include:

Windows tumbling onto the screen.

Put in simple words Longhorn is definitely going to give an enhanced desktop experience that includes advanced 3D graphics capabilities and driver functionality.

(NOTE : for the screen shots please visit https://winsupersite.com/reviews/longhorn_alpha.asp)

3. Security ( Major concern for Microsoft Corp. )

Security has always been a major Microsoft concern whether its 2000 or XP. With Longhorn they want to shut mouth of

all their competitors. They are using a new Technology called as ''Palladium''.

Salient Features of Palladium :

* Doesn't interfere with the normal operation of the PC

* Require special hardware ( which will be made by Intel and AMD)

* Protect user from privacy invasion, outside hacking, spam etc. ( A major user concern )

Longhorn will include new anti-virus (AV) APIs that will help developers more easily integrate their wares into the base OS

4. Superb Multimedia Support :

* Longhorn makes the screen more photorealistic and deep by using 3d video hardware. In Longhorn, hardware acceleration will be added to the base OS, through a Direct3D-based rendering system.

DVD BURNINGLonghorn will expand on Windows XP's support for DVD-RAM and offer shell-based DVD burning capabilities similar to XP's CD burning features. It will also include DVD movie making capabilities. It will have support for DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW.

* Windows Movie Maker 2 - Windows Movie Maker (WMM) is being rearchitected from the ground up to support a much wider range of features, including multiple audio and video tracks, multiple video transition types, and other features

* A My TV application that appears to derive from Windows XP Media Center Edition's personal video recorder capabilities.

* Windows Media Player is embedded transparently into the entire OS .

* Creates photo albums and digital photo slide shows without opening a separate app

NOTE : Many people think that LONGHORN is going to use a completely new graphics engine. But the truth is that LONGHORN

will feature GDI+ 2.0 ( Graphics device Interface) a successor to the GDI + 1.0 pioneered by Windows XP.

5. Lightning Fast Installation

Microsoft has included new Set Up routines for Lightning fast installation for its new OS.

They Claim these routines can set up the OS in about 15 minutes (WinXP roughly takes 45-60 mins. )

Installation uses the new, graphical Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE).

6. Any Improvement in Stability ?

Yes !!!

* WinFS file system is very robust and stable.

* Previous version of windows allowed users to use non-signed drivers thereby enhancing compatibility at the cost of stability.But in Longhorn, users hoping to take advantage of the system's exciting new capabilities will only be able to use signed drivers. (Though it may look like a serious shortcoming for compatibilty but it improves stability a lot )

* To achieve this enhanced desktop experience, a new Windows Longhorn Display Driver model has been designed to radically advance functionality, stability, and reliability.

7. Current Status of Windows Longhorn and when is it releasing ?

Current Status : Longhorn Alpha Preview 3: Build 4015

Release ??

Longhorn Beta 1: Expected early 2004

Longhorn Beta 2: Expected late 2004

Longhorn final release: Expected 2005

(We need to wait a lot to see Final Release of Longhorn in action .......)

8. Can I see Longhorn in action ??

Sure ....

For Screenshots visit : (https://winsupersite.com/reviews/longhorn_alpha.asp)

For Videos Vist : https://extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1154262,00.asp ( A MUST see ..)

I Hope you enjoyed this review.

Please rate and comment it.

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Next Step: Microsoft Longhorn:

Touted as the next upgrade to the Windows XP client operating system, Longhorn has been in the pipes for quite some time now. Longhorn’s development was first confirmed by Windows product manager Tom Laemmel in July 2001. It’s been a long time since then and initially expected to be just a minor upgrade to Windows XP with a late 2002 release, Microsoft has decided to do a complete overhaul of the existing operating system adding features like a 3-D enabled user interface, a SQL Server 2003 database based file system and a security architecture called Palladium. The final version is now expected to ship by late 2004 or early 2005 and the beta version by November 2003.

Now you must be wondering what’s with the funny name? Unknown to many people Windows XP was earlier code-named ‘Whistler’ and the next version of Windows server is code-named ‘Blackcomb’. Both of these are skiing areas in British Columbia near Microsoft’s headquarters, ‘Longhorn’ is a bar saloon between these two peaks. Get it Einstein?

Let’s take a detailed look at the new and improved features offered by Microsoft in Longhorn:

• Longhorn’s change in user-interface would include a Start Menu and Taskbar enhanced with a sidebar component which can optionally be locked to one side of the desktop. The taskbar would be an XML component providing access to local and remote resources. The interface would also utilize new age 3D video hardware for special effects, colourful and transparent screen icons, making the screen look more realistic and providing depth.

• An area where one can expect major change is in the file system that stores data in the system. Christened Windows Future storage (Win FS), it would be based on SQL Server 2003 database. This file system would create abstract physical file locations from the users and allow sorting & searching of complex data. In lay man’s terms, you will be able to search files by typing ‘show me the pictures I took last month’ or ‘show me the pictures from Diwali’, etc.

• Security and Privacy are the areas Microsoft seems to be eyeing keenly. ‘Palladium’ is a secure run-time environment being developed jointly by Microsoft, Intel and AMD. Enabled using special hardware security chips and microprocessor’s Palladium would be able to protect the end user from Privacy Invasion, Hacking, Spam and other electronic crimes.

• Other improvements would include enhanced media capabilities like an animated media player, recording DVD’s straight from a digital camcorder, support for DVD-R/RW, a new setup routine installing the OS under 20 minutes and permission to third party software developers to add integrated virus support.

While Windows XP was only a cosmetic upgrade to Windows 2000, Longhorn seems to show a lot of promise. Will Longhorn be compelling enough to get users to upgrade? Will Longhorn deliver the goods and live up to its claim & fame? Only time will tell.

-Vishal Pipraiya

P.S: For screenshots of Longhorn visit sites:

https://activewin.com/screenshots/longhorn

https://activewin.com/screenshots/longhorn2

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