...so I got to play with the microsoft surface because a nearby college (Ohio State University, where I'm taking some summer class) is considering buying tons of them for the unions, and wants to test a unit. It was pretty wicked! Though it did BSOD, and having too many apps at once running made it painfully slow, the Surface was generally fun to use! Apparently the specs on its computer suck though, and they had to turn wifi off so I couldn't do nifty stuuf in the music app with my zune :/

Anyways, here are some pics! http://www.flickr.com/photos/10703755@N04/sets/72157621598031108/

*EDIT*
btw, the pics are blurry because my phone sucks... the surface actually has a pretty sharp screen.

[img]http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3436/3729325541_c270db5501.jpg?v=0[/img]

Nice one, rthprog, thanks for sharing your Surface experience with us. I must say how amusing I find it that it BSODed on the one visit you made to see it, leading me to think it's as horribly unstable as all the rest of the non-Windows-7 Microsoft programs I have used. Still, it's a cool concept, and I hope other companies run with the idea as well.

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

If XP and Vista are unstable for you, your hardware is unstable. XP and Vista are rock solid on stable hardware with decent drivers, and Vista is still pretty solid with shady drivers.

Vista isn't "rock stable" on anything.

Of the four Vista machines I deal with, only one of them has encountered a BSOD - and that was due to a faulty video card. The Windows NT series (at least 2000 and later) will only keel over on hardware or driver issues.

Both XP and Vista (64-bit for each) give me consistent BSODs, nearly hourly, running two graphics cards on my system. Windows 7 has been much, much better, although it still crashes once a week or so from driver issues.

Which video cards are you using? I'll make a note not to ever buy one. (I know NV had notoriously terrible drivers, but never bothered to check if they got around to fixing them).

One is an NVidia 9800 GTX, and the other is an ATI Radeon 1390. I imagine that it's probably not helpful to driver stability that they're different manufacturers and different models, but I'd hope by now someone would be able to make them behave for more than a week at a time.

i agree with kllr. i have gotten one BSOD on vista and tht was just because i tried running crysis on my laptop tht had integrated graphics with like 128mb integrated...

BLAST FROM THE PAST IT'S MEXI!!!!



I have had Vista crash on me countless times as well; Windows 7 is *so* much more stable (has only crashed on me once since RC 1 came out).

i guess i'm lucky then cuz vista never crashed on me when i downgraded from ultimate to business (x64)

3 different OS installs and you still get crashes? Know what you should do that would solve that? FIX YOUR HARDWARE. Seriously, what the hell man? Did you just shrug off hourly BSODs as a Windows probably? I promise you, it isn't. Not at all. You have busted hardware.

Also, Vista doesn't let you use two different graphics drivers at the same time (neither did the Win 7 beta - not sure about RC). That would explain why it crashes all the time. Using an nvidia driver to power an ATI card tends to not work so well, neither does using the stock Vista driver. Not sure which you were doing, but both are seriously stupid.



Yes, yes it is.

have to concur with kllrnohj on this, Vista has given me no troubles since they have done a lot of their updates. Granted, I had gotten another hdd for my laptop and threw XP on there for a while, but now it gives me little trouble and is a touch faster than it used to be.

Definitely have to have problems with your hardware, probably RAM. I used to get BSOD until I replaced my RAM chips and then it went away.

[quote="Kllrnohj"] False, false, and false. I can't use ATI or NVidia's display managers, but XP 64-bit, Vista Ultimate 64-bit, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit RC1 have all let me install the NVidia drivers for both monitors on the NVidia card (it sees it as two devices) and the ATI drivers for the ATI card (also two devices).

No, it is impossible to use two graphics drivers at the same time in Vista with the WDDM. It is a limitation of the changed display driver model. You may have installed them just fine, but that doesn't mean anything.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/multimonVista.mspx#EOB



The only way it would work is if you force loaded XPDM drivers (aka, used XP drivers in Vista), in which case you again deserved all the crashes for using the WRONG DRIVERS.

So again, FIX YOUR HARDWARE