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A Quick Look at Longhorn Build 4053

Posted by timothy on from the look-away-look-away-look-away dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Even though the next generation Windows product is not due until late 2005 or even 2006, here is a look at what Microsoft has in store for it's future operating system. 'Without a vast amount of tweaking, this build is a resource hog. At idle, with no applications running, the commit charge is at a whopping 483 MB!! Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources.'"

11 of 758 comments (clear)

  1. Resources by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Are you so sure it wouldn't, Microsoft was never one for making a small package, and Longhorn is meant to be run on machines of 2006, where there is much more RAM in the the system.

    1. Re:Resources by Vaystrem · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I beta tested Windows 98 (dangerous to admit that here) and would just like to point out that the beta version ran better and used less memory than the final did because the Final had more features than the beta did, and I'm sure for other reasons as well.

      So the submitter's comment that "Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources" isn't necessarily true.

  2. vacaum by Vlion · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I see Longhorn ain't going to play nice with even XP-class machines. Oh well, not like I wanted my rights digitally managed anyway.

    --
    /b
    |f(x)dx = F(b) - F(a)
    /a
  3. Re:OS "improvements" by pvt_medic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ah but bill gates doens see it that way. He believes the future of computers is in the software. Pack it full of "features".

    Here read up on what he said at MIT on computers.

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    30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
    Score:5, Troll
  4. Longhorn schedule by shawkin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sources working at the Redmond campus say that it is common knowledge on campus that Longhorn will not ship until mid 2007. With current technical problems mounting, the same sources say that 2008 is starting to look likely, if not optimistic.

    Those who have to use the current build say that it is not stable at all. Apparently, there are new failure modes in the DRM and file systems that are "very difficult to analyze and very non-intuitive to troubleshoot or even understand." The failure modes are reported to totally freeze the computer, prevent rebooting and resist reformatting.

    If true, the words "difficult and non-intuitive" are not encouraging, particularly when used by very experienced users at Microsoft .

  5. Windows 98 by SimonInOz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Last Friday, I had to fire up an old, tired PC running Windows 98. Gosh, a real dinosaur - 166Mhz, 256Mb RAM, MS Office.
    It was weird. It booted quickly, and the whole thing felt snappy. Menus actually popped up on screen immediately. Explorer did things, instead of hanging about "thinking" all the time.

    Windows XP doesn't feel like that, even with my brand new 3Ghz, 1Gb RAM machine.
    Why is this so? Why are the menus so slow - and what have they done to Windows Explorer to make it so snail-like?

    --
    "Cats like plain crisps"
    1. Re:Windows 98 by pvt_medic · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Who really needs all that power. While I know I am talking to a group that loves more power and can find ways to use ever bit of their processor. The average computer user uses their computer for Word Processing, Excel, E-Mail, and internet. Do you need 3ghz and a gig of ram. No. that windows 98 machine will work wonders, and honestly is probably more efficient than having something with a bunch of bells and whistles.

      I was asked to help out with a friend of mines company when they purchased a bunch of new computers. He was going to use them for word and e-mail and that was about it. He brought this list of a couple computers he was thinking of purchasing each about $1000, I was like here we can go buy 3 computers at that price that are a little older and you are set. He now running 5 machines with 98 all networked and with a networked printer for what he was planning on spending for 2 new computers. And they work great.

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      30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
      Score:5, Troll
  6. Hello? by cperciva · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's called debug code. Just look at FreeBSD:

    fafnir# ls -l /boot/kernel/kernel
    -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5940286 Feb 26 00:52 /boot/kernel/kernel
    fafnir# ls -l /usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC/kernel.debug
    -rwxr-x r-x 1 root wheel 30170033 Mar 7 21:31 /usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC/kernel.debug

    Enabling debugging options makes the FreeBSD kernel five times as large; if anything, I'd expect Microsoft to have even more debugging code in their pre-release builds.

    --
    Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
  7. Re:Apple by RoundSparrow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I would say that Microsoft has a lot larger userbase... so they draw their release schedule out.

    Upgrading 1,000,000 customers vs. 80,000,000 - your support and documentation has to be that much better.

    Believe it or not, I think Windows 2000 / Windows XP is as stable as linux / Freebsd. I didn't say better, I didn't say more secure... but I think the stablish issue is mute. considering how much more crappy hardware and hardware drivers windows supports - of course more people are going ot have crashes. But on the 10,000 combinations of _good hardware and drivers_ it works fine.

    Remember kids, only takes one driver to lockup the PCI bus (IRQ / DMA / etc). I've seen bad USB drivers bring down Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/windows XP - all latest versions with patches.

  8. .NET by owlstead · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am not surprised. They probably used .NET to build it all. That means a few things:

    - they are now using components (with .NET style SOAP XML messaging)
    - they use bounds checking all over
    - more meta information on objects is stored
    - libraries are probably more extensive - makes reuse better
    - more things are service-driven, so more is in memory all the time

    This all comes down to more memory use. Look at Java. It's fast enough nowadays, but it still uses a lot of memory resources. You get more runtime functionality (reflection etc) in return. .NET does essentially the same, but it will have the same drawbacks as Java - slower execution and larger memory footprint.

    This is a good thing though, it's a one time performance penalty returning huge benefits. It won't favour small/old machines though.

    The future is runtime.

  9. Re:Apple by Dr.+Shim · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have to agree with RoundSparrow. I own an HP Pavilion 420n. It crashed on me like nothing has ever before. It was a shit machine... A 2GHz shit machine. I bought a nice, new, large case with 3 fans and a 320 V power-supply. Never crashed on me again. I run Windows XP.

    I've come to the conclusion it's crappy hardware that renders, otherwise good PCs, into something a wee better than cardboard boxes.

    --
    People discover the meaning of life between getting piss drunk and the following hangover.