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.