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Microsoft Developing Windows for Low-End Machines
Jeff writes "According to the Washington Post, Microsoft is developing a version of Windows to run on old machines that currently run 95 or 98. It would be very similar to XP, but run faster on the older hardware. The move is to appease businesses and universities that don't want to scrap the old hardware. This is likely aimed at preventing Linux from gaining market share where MS is currently alienating their customers."
They aren't really making a faster version of XP for old machines. They are making old machines into dumb terminals that run things off a central server. It will look like XP in terms of interface, but isn't anything close.
My guess is that this won't work especially well with older apps anyway. That central server would also have be orders of magnitude faster if you want to allow multiple people the ability to run their apps at the same time.
What you might see is a situation in which small offices could either upgrade each machine for $500 and get way better performance, or purchase some high end server for tens of thousands of dollars and still be limited by the junk machines you have around. Also, any PC that old has to be near the end of it's life anyway. Any money you might save by converting these PCs will probably be lost when you have to replace all of the parts over the next year.
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I normally don't respond to AC's but in this case I'll make an exception...
Windows XP requires an absolute minimum of 64 MB RAM with corresponding minimums for CPU speed, graphics cards, hard drives, etc. This is before any applications are added (don't forget, IE is so tightly integrated into the system that it is always there). Windows 95 required an absolute minimum of 4 MB of RAM, etc., and you actually could remove IE if you wanted to (although, the 4 MB requirement assumed IE was still there). That is a 8 fold difference. I was being nice when I said it took 4 times the hardware.
So, I reiterate...exactly what crap am I being forced to run in my XP system that could be removed?
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
The Eiger is a mountain top in Switzerland, and notoriously famous for people dying while trying to climb the northern side. The first successful attempt took place in 1938, but two years early four people died tragically in front of the eyes of witnesses, who were watching the climbing from nearby views, the last one only a few yards away from a rescue team.
I thus don't think it's a good idea to name a project after a mountain top famous for failed and deadly attempts to finally climb it.
>So, I reiterate...exactly what crap am I being forced to run in my XP system that could be removed?
...
Well, if they are going to a terminal services based system, I'd start with:
- Direct-X and all the gaming video stuff
- all the 3-d stuff
- Many performance-related drivers
- APIs related to getting applications to inter-operate
- All generic APIs that aren't used for apps shipped with the OS, including legacy.
- Any of the networking components not directly related to the shipped apps.
I know this is slashdot, but please RTFA.
This isn't about making a custom version of windows that is more optimized so that it can run on old hardware. What they are doing is running the slow applications remotly, probably using citrix like technology (MS has their own version but I can't remember the name).
So what this probably is is a version of windows that cuts out a few OS features that affects performance, and then preconfiguring it so that it will run a pile of applications from a central server.
Of course, this is something that's always been easy to do on unix. Linux sounds better and better with every announcement comming out of Redmond these days...
Failing to learn from history dooms you to repeat it.
The kernel is actually not very fat. At a former employer, we did some experimenting with XP Embedded. It needed around 3-4 Mbyte for itself to run the kernel and boot our application instead of the usual graphic shell.
Now add a low-feature Explorer as in Windows 95 and you might get something that has memory consumption similar to Win98. Of course, you'd have to get rid of all services that are not necessary for a typical desktop. Otherwise, you would be back at a Win2000-like memory hog.
Microsoft will have to compromise here, some applications might not run on the "XP light".
C - the footgun of programming languages
The Eiger is also one peak of 3 mountains in a mountain chaain: Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau, which have an interesting story to them.
The names Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau roughly translate to Ogre, Monk and Young Woman (Or Virgin).
The story as told to me is that The Ogre is attacking the Virgin, but the Monk is standing betweee the Ogre and the Virgin.
Should Microsoft name their product after a monster & rapist?
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
The difference is that you can run a current, maintained Linux distro on old hardware (hint: use a light window manager). But the equivalent Windows version will be obsolete and non-maintained. Security updates are good, yes?
And as far as drivers go, Windows drivers tend to disappear (or become hard to find) after several years, and will probably never be updated. I'd much rather deal with open source drivers, once a driver is written it tends to be included with the Kernel source.
Microsoft's solution is thin clients. Well, I have run a 100MHz machine with 16M of RAM as a Linux X server with a relatively unimpressive desktop as the application machine which does run KDE and it's quite nice.
You can even play quite a few games as it turns out; stuff like LBreakout work fine. The fact is that an X terminal runs a much smaller footprint than the one proposed for Eiger.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Poor clueless Windows user.... http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050 429153115383
It's built-in, cheaper (than buying XP Pro), and SAFER.
There's a Remote Desktop Client for Mac OS X too if you still can't give up your PC.
> (and because terminal services does not control
> the root console of a windows server like VNC
> does)
Erm, yes it does. Click Start, Run and then type "mstsc.exe -console" and it takes over the console. The only thing it doesn't do is allow you to share the console with the person sitting physically in front of the server - to them the console appears locked.