Vista disables Cool'N'Quiet on some motherboards

AMD's Cool'n'Quiet support is supposed to be natively built into Vista
(no need for drivers). However, they are finding that C'n'Q setups
that were working fine under XP, no longer work under Vista. People
have been waiting for BIOS updates for their motherboards, and some
have found that the BIOS updates don't fix the problem.

Anyways, it was all a bit mysterious, but it looks like a bit of light
is finally being shown on it: it's Microsoft's fault. The Vole has
very quietly dropped support for ACPI 1.0 tables in BIOS, without
letting anyone know. The ACPI tables are queried by the OS to see if a
particular CPU has support for power management or not. So even with a
BIOS update, they may have still kept ACPI 1.0 tables, and Vista
simply and quietly ignores it. ACPI 1.0 was good enough for XP, so I
have no idea why it's not good enough for Vista.

This just goes to highlight why secretive organizations like Microsoft
should not be trusted. They do stupid random things and people have no
way of finding out what's going on. On Linux, this is not likely to
happen because they wouldn't be stupid enough to drop support for ACPI
1.0 tables -- they'd add support for the newer ACPI versions, but
they'd retain older support too. And if somebody dropped support for
something, somebody else could go into the source code and discover
the problem and fix it again.

People in wait state for AMD C'n'Q Vista driver
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38132

* YKhan:

AMD's Cool'n'Quiet support is supposed to be natively built into Vista
(no need for drivers). However, they are finding that C'n'Q setups
that were working fine under XP, no longer work under Vista. People
have been waiting for BIOS updates for their motherboards, and some
have found that the BIOS updates don't fix the problem.

Anyways, it was all a bit mysterious, but it looks like a bit of light
is finally being shown on it: it's Microsoft's fault.

Nope, it's not. It's the fault of the mobo manufacturers that simply
don't fix the crap they are selling...

The Vole has
very quietly dropped support for ACPI 1.0 tables in BIOS, without
letting anyone know. The ACPI tables are queried by the OS to see if a
particular CPU has support for power management or not. So even with a
BIOS update, they may have still kept ACPI 1.0 tables, and Vista
simply and quietly ignores it. ACPI 1.0 was good enough for XP, so I
have no idea why it's not good enough for Vista.

Microsoft has already made clear that Vista would require ACPI
2.0-compliant hardware and BIOS to work properly when they published the
first specifications over a year ago. Every hardware manufacturer that
got surprised by Vista RTM not supporting ACPI 1.0 any more is just an
idiot.

This just goes to highlight why secretive organizations like Microsoft
should not be trusted. They do stupid random things and people have no
way of finding out what's going on. On Linux, this is not likely to
happen because they wouldn't be stupid enough to drop support for ACPI
1.0 tables -- they'd add support for the newer ACPI versions, but
they'd retain older support too. And if somebody dropped support for
something, somebody else could go into the source code and discover
the problem and fix it again.

Yeah, sure. Happy little Linux world. Tell that the people that for
example can't get their notebooks to work with everything under Linux.
For example card readers are still prone to make trouble with Linux. But
in this case of course it's not Linux fault but the hardware
manufacturers who don't provide Linux support. Only when Microsoft is
involved it has to be different of course...

Benjamin

On Mar 9, 2:33 pm, Benjamin Gawert wrote:
The Vole has
very quietly dropped support for ACPI 1.0 tables in BIOS, without
letting anyone know. The ACPI tables are queried by the OS to see if a
particular CPU has support for power management or not. So even with a
BIOS update, they may have still kept ACPI 1.0 tables, and Vista
simply and quietly ignores it. ACPI 1.0 was good enough for XP, so I
have no idea why it's not good enough for Vista.

Microsoft has already made clear that Vista would require ACPI
2.0-compliant hardware and BIOS to work properly when they published the
first specifications over a year ago. Every hardware manufacturer that
got surprised by Vista RTM not supporting ACPI 1.0 any more is just an
idiot.

Yet, somehow, the beta and RC versions of Vista were all supporting
and working with ACPI 1.0, right up until the end. Why disable such a
fundamental feature in the final version but leave them enabled in the
beta versions? You have all of these beta-testers reporting back to MS
that everything seems to be working fine, and then little do they know
that MS is planning to change at least one other thing without going
through a beta process. What's the point of doing betas, then? These
testers would've likely caught the problem, and Microsoft or the mobo
makers would've issued fixes beforehand.

This just goes to highlight why secretive organizations like Microsoft
should not be trusted. They do stupid random things and people have no
way of finding out what's going on. On Linux, this is not likely to
happen because they wouldn't be stupid enough to drop support for ACPI
1.0 tables -- they'd add support for the newer ACPI versions, but
they'd retain older support too. And if somebody dropped support for
something, somebody else could go into the source code and discover
the problem and fix it again.

Yeah, sure. Happy little Linux world. Tell that the people that for
example can't get their notebooks to work with everything under Linux.

And that is somehow Linux's fault? The hardware vendors that did
provide support for in Linux works without problems.

Yousuf Khan

* YKhan:

Microsoft has already made clear that Vista would require ACPI
2.0-compliant hardware and BIOS to work properly when they published the
first specifications over a year ago. Every hardware manufacturer that
got surprised by Vista RTM not supporting ACPI 1.0 any more is just an
idiot.

Yet, somehow, the beta and RC versions of Vista were all supporting
and working with ACPI 1.0, right up until the end. Why disable such a
fundamental feature in the final version but leave them enabled in the
beta versions?

Because they were *beta* versions? It's quite common that beta versions
contain things that won't be there in the final version. And it's really
not that MS made a secret out of the fact that Vista RTM won't support
ACPI 1.0 any more.

You have all of these beta-testers reporting back to MS
that everything seems to be working fine, and then little do they know
that MS is planning to change at least one other thing without going
through a beta process. What's the point of doing betas, then?

The point is fining bugs and non-working features. Betas are *not* final
code, nor contain they everything that is in the final versions.

If that wouldn't be the case beta versions would be pretty useless...

These
testers would've likely caught the problem, and Microsoft or the mobo
makers would've issued fixes beforehand.

Nope. The manufacturers of these mobos were sitting on their arses for
over a year while the rest of the world was already aware that ACPI 1.0
is a dead horse. Still they didn't fix their crap.

Yeah, sure. Happy little Linux world. Tell that the people that for
example can't get their notebooks to work with everything under Linux.

And that is somehow Linux's fault? The hardware vendors that did
provide support for in Linux works without problems.

There are lots of examples where things don't work (especially with
notebooks) even if Linux has been officially supported by the hardware
manufacturer (and this also happened with big names like HP and
IBM/Lenovo). But yeah, here of course it's the hardware manufacturers
fault. But when mobo makers ignored the fact that Vista RTM doesn't
support ACPI 1.0 any more while it was well known over a year before
public release of Vista then of course it's MS fault.

Benjamin

On Mar 9, 3:27 pm, Benjamin Gawert wrote:
* YKhan:
snip

Nope. The manufacturers of these mobos were sitting on their arses for
over a year while the rest of the world was already aware that ACPI 1.0
is a dead horse. Still they didn't fix their crap.

Yeah, sure. Happy little Linux world. Tell that the people that for
example can't get their notebooks to work with everything under Linux.

And that is somehow Linux's fault? The hardware vendors that did
provide support for in Linux works without problems.

There are lots of examples where things don't work (especially with
notebooks) even if Linux has been officially supported by the hardware
manufacturer (and this also happened with big names like HP and
IBM/Lenovo). But yeah, here of course it's the hardware manufacturers
fault. But when mobo makers ignored the fact that Vista RTM doesn't
support ACPI 1.0 any more while it was well known over a year before
public release of Vista then of course it's MS fault.

Benjamin

This is like a dead horse, beaten to a pulp, like a B movie I seen
which showed a monster truck running over a dead vampire 10+ times. At
the end you see a blood spot with an essence that their might be a
come back.

Just look at the news, seems a lot of people are upset at how Windows
phones home even if you decline to install the software, not good.
Defending a company who practices marginal ethics is not a very good
position to be in. Yes the motherboard companies are to blame for bad
support, but what exactly does M$ gain from leaving out backwards
compatibility to ACPI 1.0? More DRM control, or some other oddball
effect? Also we are talking about hardware support for cooling and
reduced wattage output which many consider a very good thing to have
support for.

With the new kernel model; ie developers offering to help hardware
companies make software drivers, which in my opinion gets rid of most
excuses if the company is really serious about Open Source. Which does
place the blame on hardware companies, why would I want to buy some
bug ridden non-free Windows only hardware if an Open Source
alternative is around?

Gnu_Raiz

On Mar 9, 4:27 pm, Benjamin Gawert wrote:
* YKhan:

Microsoft has already made clear that Vista would require ACPI
2.0-compliant hardware and BIOS to work properly when they published the
first specifications over a year ago. Every hardware manufacturer that
got surprised by Vista RTM not supporting ACPI 1.0 any more is just an
idiot.

Yet, somehow, the beta and RC versions of Vista were all supporting
and working with ACPI 1.0, right up until the end. Why disable such a
fundamental feature in the final version but leave them enabled in the
beta versions?

Because they were *beta* versions? It's quite common that beta versions
contain things that won't be there in the final version. And it's really
not that MS made a secret out of the fact that Vista RTM won't support
ACPI 1.0 any more.

Yes, things are usually removed from final versions that were in beta
versions. But that usually refers to debugging code, such as
breakpoints, triggers, dumps, etc. It doesn't usually refer to removal
of functionality.

Functionality might be removed if a particular feature is so buggy
that it doesn't work, and there's no time to fix it. For example, MS
quite publically removed their new WinFS filesystem from the feature
list because it didn't work, and they couldn't fix it quickly enough
for release. Removal of that kind of functionality is quite related to
beta-testing and debugging problems. However, this is a first I've
heard of a feature being removed that was working perfectly.

Actually it isn't the first I've heard of Microsoft removing perfectly
working functionality without informing anybody. My brother does tech
support for HP, and he tells me that a program used to help sync iPaq
PDAs to PCs was mysteriously deleted from Vista, which used to be in
XP. So it's now upto HP to come up with a replacement for it. Even big
companies have to put up with Microsoft's arrogance.

The point is fining bugs and non-working features. Betas are *not* final
code, nor contain they everything that is in the final versions.

In this case, the final version contains *less* than what was in the
betas.

These
testers would've likely caught the problem, and Microsoft or the mobo
makers would've issued fixes beforehand.

Nope. The manufacturers of these mobos were sitting on their arses for
over a year while the rest of the world was already aware that ACPI 1.0
is a dead horse. Still they didn't fix their crap.

There are cases where there is not likely going to be any further BIOS
upgrades, such as older P3 or Athlon XP systems. They may have been
part of the original beta test of Vista and they worked fine (even
with Aero, with a sufficiently powerful video card). The people who
beta-tested Vista may have been confident enough in Vista that they
decided to buy the final version, based on their good beta experience.
Little did they know that they were beta testing some other OS.

Yousuf Khan

* YKhan:

Yes, things are usually removed from final versions that were in beta
versions. But that usually refers to debugging code, such as
breakpoints, triggers, dumps, etc. It doesn't usually refer to removal
of functionality.

It does. It happened on Vista, it happened on Windowsxp, it happened on
Windows2000 and on every release before...

Functionality might be removed if a particular feature is so buggy
that it doesn't work, and there's no time to fix it. For example, MS
quite publically removed their new WinFS filesystem from the feature
list because it didn't work, and they couldn't fix it quickly enough
for release. Removal of that kind of functionality is quite related to
beta-testing and debugging problems. However, this is a first I've
heard of a feature being removed that was working perfectly.

ACPI 1.0 working perfectly? Yeah, right. It works so perfectly that AMD
and MS had to provide kernel patches for several CPUs with power
management like Athlon64/Opteron or Pentium-M/Core just to have
powermanagement working correctly. ACPI 1.0 is very old (probably around
a decade now), and just lacks functionality for modern hardware...

Actually it isn't the first I've heard of Microsoft removing perfectly
working functionality without informing anybody.

That's simply not true. Every developer who was part of MSDN should know
for over a year now that ACPI 1.0 is a dead end on Vista.

My brother does tech
support for HP, and he tells me that a program used to help sync iPaq
PDAs to PCs was mysteriously deleted from Vista, which used to be in
XP. So it's now upto HP to come up with a replacement for it. Even big
companies have to put up with Microsoft's arrogance.

What for? It would be enough for your brother just to stay current on
the facts. The program you mention is called Mobile Device Center and is
the replacement for ActiveSync in Vista. Yes, it has been removed from
the final version. Now you have to download it separately:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/devicecenter.mspx

Nope. The manufacturers of these mobos were sitting on their arses for
over a year while the rest of the world was already aware that ACPI 1.0
is a dead horse. Still they didn't fix their crap.

There are cases where there is not likely going to be any further BIOS
upgrades, such as older P3 or Athlon XP systems.

Which are probably the best systems for running Vista ;-)

They may have been
part of the original beta test of Vista and they worked fine (even
with Aero, with a sufficiently powerful video card). The people who
beta-tested Vista may have been confident enough in Vista that they
decided to buy the final version, based on their good beta experience.
Little did they know that they were beta testing some other OS.

Then these peoples should have used their brains. Someone who tests a
beta version and believes the final product will work exactly the same
is a moron.

Benjamin

Usually MS goes to great length to make buggy platforms work with the OS.
Since beginning, there were some workarounds to work with buggy PCI chipsets
and bridges, ACPI bioses, etc. Now they seemed to decide that enough is
enough and dropped those kludges.

"YKhan" wrote in message
ups.com...

Functionality might be removed if a particular feature is so buggy
that it doesn't work, and there's no time to fix it. For example, MS
quite publically removed their new WinFS filesystem from the feature
list because it didn't work, and they couldn't fix it quickly enough
for release. Removal of that kind of functionality is quite related to
beta-testing and debugging problems. However, this is a first I've
heard of a feature being removed that was working perfectly.

On 9 Mar 2007 12:24:46 -0800, "YKhan" wrote:

Yet, somehow, the beta and RC versions of Vista were all supporting
and working with ACPI 1.0, right up until the end. Why disable such a
fundamental feature in the final version but leave them enabled in the
beta versions? You have all of these beta-testers reporting back to MS
that everything seems to be working fine, and then little do they know
that MS is planning to change at least one other thing without going
through a beta process. What's the point of doing betas, then? These
testers would've likely caught the problem, and Microsoft or the mobo
makers would've issued fixes beforehand.

Remember how it was with XP? The original release was more like 1st
Beta in its quality; SP1 looked like release candidate; and only SP2
became more or less production strength soft. It's not only MS doing
this - most software made by most companies out there, including the
stuff written by yours truly (gotta admit this), go through these
stages, some of it never even comes to production quality - Lotus
Notes, to name just one. If you want to name more - look at any
flavor of Linux, why the hell the end users have to edit the source
code in attempt (often futile) to make things work? MS is not the
worst offender out there. As for the poor Vista owners - well, they
paid (or piratedLOL/) for the privilege to work for MS as beta
testers ;-))))))
I am not even thinking of installing Vista before SP1 is out, unless I
_need_ it for my next project.

NNN

wrote:

If you want to name more - look at any
flavor of Linux, why the hell the end users have to edit the source
code in attempt (often futile) to make things work?

When was the last time you looked at linux? The last time I recall
having to edit source code to make something work could have been 4-5
years ago! Things have moved on a LOT since then.

Some of the stories about certain 'features' in Vista should scare the
hell out of anyone thinking about using it. It looks like Vista is just
one huge bloated piece of spyware that will never make it onto my desktop!