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Windows Vista Capable Machines Coming
An anonymous reader writes "PC World's Techlog has a short piece talking about the upcoming emergence of 'Windows Vista Capable' PCs." From the article: "The Vista Capable designation doesn't promise that a PC will provide a great Vista experience, or even that it'll support all Vista features or features...just that it'll be able to run Windows Vista Home Basic in some not-very-well-defined-but-apparently-adequate way. At the moment, there are still new PCs on store shelves that don't meet the Vista Capable guidelines--for instance, low-end systems still sport 256MB of RAM in some cases. Wonder if that means that that A) we'll see some cheap systems that still have XP even after Vista ships; or B) the specs on even the cheapest machines will be beefed up; or C) we'll see machines that have Vista preloaded but which don't qualify as Vista capable?"
I think everyone is reading too far into the whole "vista compatible hardware" racket. It will work on current hardware, it may not work well. So it's in exactly the same boat as every other major software product released in the past 10 years.
I want a Duke Nukem Forever compatible machine.
liqbase
D.) We have a huge hardware and software confusion malfunction junction, Joe Sixpack refuses to buy a computer because it's gotten too confusing for him, and Microsoft blames the lack of sales on Open Source Operating Systems.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
There's nearly a year to go before Vista's release to consumers - so I'm pretty sure that pretty much all low-end machines with Vista will be 'Vista Capable' then (i.e. usually adding an extra 256mb RAM).
I bet for b) and c). I think sellers will want to promote "what is hot", so I don't see them selling XP even if it is better for a given hardware. MS licence allows to sell an older version (up to 2 back versions), but this will be used only for very specific needs. Since I predict there will be apps that won't get together well with Vista, maybe the sellers will sell both systems for a time.
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
Minimum system requirements will not be known until summer 2006 at the earliest. However, these guidelines provide useful estimates:
" 512 megabytes (MB) or more of RAM
A dedicated graphics card with DirectX® 9.0 support
A modern, Intel Pentium- or AMD Athlon-based PC."
Everybody was whining because software companies underestimated the required specs of their software. Now that they provide more realistic specs at the risk of overestimating them, we're taking them litteraly ?
On another side, take also in account that Vista will probably have a lifespan comparable to XP, something like 5-6 years. Every computer will be easily capable of running all the GUI eye-candy in the years following the release. It's a good idea to leave some room for improvement IMHO.
The first time this happened was with regular windows and windows 95... all the machines they put it on were too slow to run it and more than 1 application at a time. That's what they're gonna do for sure. They'll sell you a machine woefully underpowered for the OS, period. No one cares, no one will refund your money, thanks and have a nice day :)
stuff |
Screw M$. We should all stick with a company that doesn't try to move everything to new hardware constantly- like Apple. *comedic failure music*
---Vote None of the Above---
is it like this is going to directly bother any of us (other than in a support role)? i'm pretty sure that most of us tend to build our own machines, and aren't all that interested in getting vista anyway, much less as soon as it's released. as far as i'm concerned, they can continue selling underpowered machines for all i care. it keeps work coming my way, when people phone up saying 'my computer's too slow!'. yeah, it's boring work, but so what? money is money.
http://xkcd.com/313/
Microsoft has to bump up the specs every year because they get most of their new OS sales from new PC hardware. Plain and simple. If Vista didn't require beefed up specs they couldn't spur hardware sales. Everyone knows this, or at least it should be blatantly obvious to everyone.
Having said that though, compared to the launch of Windows XP, there is better hardware at reasonable prices this time around. It would be silly not to recommend having better hardware when it is reasonably priced.
Even still, I know for a fact that a desktop Linux distro runs better on 256MB of RAM than Windows XP does. If Vista is going to bump up requirements to over 512MB simply to get things running out of the box - then Linux has a better performance advantage as a basic desktop PC over Vista IMHO.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
That should be vaporware capable.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
That's spot on.
I know people who have 1.5Ghz processors and 256MB of RAM who complain that Windows XP runs slow on it - and these are "Windows XP ready" machines.
The machine will run fast enough to get the OS working at a barely reasonable pace, but over time the user will get frustrated with the speed of the system enough to want to upgrade.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I have several instances of Windows XP runing in VMWare with only 128 MB of RAM, despite the "minimum" amount of 256 to be compatable.
These numbers are just to give the ideal out of box experience, so people will be happy with their purchase.
With some of the effects turned down I am positive Vista would run fine on these 256 MB machines.
I assume that Vista has a Win2K mode, that cuts away all the Aero Glass crap and lets me work. Is that was this "Vista-Compatible" certification is? ie. It runs the low quality mode, but not the Toys-R-Us look? In that case, pretty much every machine with 256MB ram and a Pentium 4/ AMD Socket A proc will work
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
So by then we will have seen the fading out of of 256mb machines and gone to 512mb. (Even the cheapest Dell now has that already) Wich is happily the recommended minimum. In fact many Dells already come with 1 gig as do a lot of "cheapo" white brand PC's.
As for CPU. Well thanks to the move to Dual core's in 1 year I think single core machines will be rare. Why go single when a dual costs only 10 bucks extra?
The only real problem may be with the 3D card needed for the new gui. Except that I have been led to believe that it is optional and you can still use the old gui wich does not require a 3D card.
So basically, any halfway decent machine will do but as always you need lots of ram.
So what else is new? This has been true for opensource as well. You are not going to run KDE with all the options on a 486 with 16mb memory.
What I want is a sticker that says wether the hardware is DRM ready. That is the thing I am intrested in for Windows Vista.
Not in the way MS/Intel/etc wants. Just so I know wich products to avoid like the plague.
A nice shiny sticker "Big Brother Ready" so we can let them rot on the shops shelves.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
will they run OS X?
D) we'll see Vista capable machines that don't have Vista preloaded
I see three things resulting from this, and all three are good:
:). With a little luck Xgl or something similar will be a fact within an year or so, when Vista is out. And that thing will allow an ubercool desktop experience on significantly less spectacular video hardware.
1. Old machines that won't run Vista well will be phased out with dramatically lowered prices. So if you're looking for a cheap average computer that runs any OS beside Vista, you'll have a lot of cheap options.
2. Because of the whole Aero interface noise (the toughest part of Vista in terms of system requirements), we're finally going to see mainstream laptop manufacturers putting reasonable videocards in laptops. As it currently stands, it's extremely difficult to find a reasonable laptop with a reasonable (= can play Half-life 2 just fine or better) video card in a sane price range. Right now if you want a good (not even the best) video card, you have to buy a high-end laptop which will cost you a lot, at least in Europe.
3. Behind the ubercool Aero, Vista sounds like XP with a few bugs fixed. Many people with less than high-end computers will be disappointed because they won't be able to run Aero, and will see little reason to upgrade to Vista. Now I finally have a "n00b-obvious" good argument to convinve them to swtich to Linux
This last sentence requires a clarification: Whether Linux's desktop will be able to look better than Vista's will remain to be seen. Probably not at first. I've seen Vista screenshots, and it does look amazingly beautiful, for the most part. The lower requirements, however, are there: Xgl runs beautifully on a 32mb laptop videocard (GF4), while Aero won't, judging from what I've read around the Internet.
I don't plan to run Vista and I really don't see why a slashdoter /. is now
/. my only option? Now go ahead you windrones,
would want to run it. We don't see stories about new latest
AmigaOS, why all this hype about Vista. Is it that
filled with windrones ? Are those stories just trollish click
baits?
That kinds of piss me off, is there a news site for real nerds
out there or is
mod me down into oblivion. You are still windrones.
There's no point worrying about this. After Vista is released, users will form a consensus about what you need to run it and that will form the basis of 1001 tech articles around the net.
In the meantime, the "official" sources all have vested interests and aren't to be trusted. There is, after all, a big difference between the specs on which Vista will work in theory and those on which it will work without giving the user an ulcer, quite aside from being able to turn on every feature.
I'm more interested in knowing how much the Vista versions are going to cost.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
...looking at current prices, the difference between 256mb and 512mb ram is about 14$ retail. By the time Vista is released, this'll be in the 10$ range. Hint: The low-low-end machines are always underpowered. Always have been, always will be. And with that said, I don't know how it compares to Vista yet but Windows 2000 does everything I want it to. I'm considering moving to XP SP3 when it's out (sometime after Vista) just for staying reasonably current, I'd rather go with the stable OS than the latest. The rest of you may be betatesters for Vista, I don't care. I already got all the hardware to run Vista and presumably the Windows version after that (except for the lack of DRM) but I choose not to.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well, with respect, I don't think that anything will ever play Duke Nukem Forever.
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
...we'll see machines that are billed as "Vista-capable" but don't give a very good experience?
,or whether a slot billed as requiring Y MHz will work properly with a new stick marked 1.5Y MHz. After you put it in your machine will start to crash twice a day, and it will take several days of swapping RAM to figure out whether the new RAM was bad, or you needed to buy RAM that was an identical match for the old RAM, or you needed to remove and throw out the old RAM, or whether the empty RAM slot you put the new RAM into is unreliable or has gotten dirty from being left unfilled... and have to start dodging pointed questions from the RAM vendor who keeps asking whether you opened the package while wearing a wrist strap in a clean room, and when your lab last tested your wrist strap.
We don't need benchmarks for speed. We need published, reliable benchmarks to serve as good, real-world guidelines about how much RAM the average user really needs to buy.
System requirements are depressingly unreliable, because it's one place where a company can sweep its underperformance under the rug. It's a soft requirement. Everyone will know whether Vista ships late. Everyone will know whether Vista has the feature they said it would have. But nobody will know whether some round of testing or tightening didn't get done, or whether engineering warned management that the goal for the system requirements can't be met and the requirements need to be bumped up. With the PC vendors pushing for a way to hit low price points for the entry systems...
For me, the timeline has been depressingly similar, over about two decades, in both the PC and the Mac world, whenever a new OS is introduced:
--The stated system RAM requirement is X, the entry-level systems are equipped with X, the midline systems are equipped with 2X. I buy 2X, but all my "I'm-not-a-computer-genius" friends who buy a machine at Best Buy and come to me for advice bought X.
--If you only have X, the system will, in fact, boot and very basic functions like displaying directories in the shell or running trivial programs like Wordpad seem OK. Typical purchased software (Office, Photoshop Elements, etc). seem to run sorta OK, but as soon as you see what they are like on a system with 2X you realize that X was actually underpowered from the word go.
--You can't tell your friends, "no big deal, buy another X RAM chip, it's only $49.95" unless you plan to go with them to buy it and plan to go to their house and install it for them.
--Even if the system works adequately, about eight months after it is released an automatic patch that is billed as "recommended for ALL systems" will, without clear notification, increase the RAM footprint by about 15% of X, which is just enough to push the systems that used to work sorta-kinda-OK into dogs, and the systems with 2X, which really did work OK, into systems that work noticeably slowly. Nothing that you can't fix if you're willing to spend a week or so tuning...
--All the advice articles saying admiringly that the system "loves RAM" and that it will work like a charm if you have 4X in.
--About a year after release, all the add-on software that runs under the OS starts to get point updates, which, unannounced, suddenly require more RAM. If you bought your system with 4X, or have upgraded to 4X, you don't even notice. If you bought even a midline system, you suddenly notice the upgrade has made an application that used to work fine dog-slow.
--About two years into release is your last good opportunity to throw RAM at the problem. If you miss the opportunity, by the time you are in the three to four year period you will find that RAM technology has moved forward, nobody quite remembers what kind of RAM your system needed, or how much you can add
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Vista being so long coming also means that BIOS is still in the Vista plan, which means the hardware will CHANGE AGAIN in about a year to eliminate the old BIOS that's been around for decades.
Don't think I'll upgrade until the dust settles.
What? What? Don't know what *nix you're running, but Linux and BSD distros all come secure. The hard part is setting up your network hardware, but after that, you're safe. This is exactly the sort of thing you're talking about, so you've basically proved yourself wrong.
Actually, I disagree. The interface is not entirely useless, in that they've used it as an opportunity to fix many of the things wrong with the old Windows UI. The outstanding key issue is resolution dependence - with Vista, a 12pt font should finally be a 12pt font, not "whatever 12pt is at 72dpi, in pixels, no matter what your real display res is". And don't suggest setting "large fonts" or worse setting the font res option to your actual display res - as the rest of the UI is all statically laid out, it chokes rather badly.
A 3D UI also makes doing interesting things with window management easier, or in fact practical.
IMO this is an opportunity for MS to do a lot right, and certainly isn't useless.
Honestly, I didn't start using XP until after SP2 came out. I probably won't buy Vista until I get a 64-bit chip. Just because it doesn't run on every existing system the day it hits the shelves doesn't mean a whole lot; certainly two years after it's released people will have had time to upgrade.
I can't imagine what kind of 3D GUI they're going to have that won't work with a less-than-$100 Radeon. I find it difficult to believe they're going to be using vertex shaders and curved surfaces a whole lot; app screens don't take hundreds of megs of video memory (remember when video memory was a luxury?) either. I remember before Win95 came out (they were calling it Windows 4.0) and I had a 386SX/16 w/ 4MB RAM. I had to buy a new computer to upgrade.
Another point: I'm seeing a lot of people who seem to think that Vista is XP with a 3D GUI; that's not so!
Vista moves a lot of OS software out of kernel space (where it will crash the whole machine if it dies) and into user space. For instance, the networking and driver interfaces. This is good for security, but helps a lot with stability too. In theory, you won't have to reboot if you install a driver, as I understand it.
I use Gentoo and XP. XP is a LOT more stable than Win2k and NT4 were; Vista will be that much better.
I'm not crazy about the way MS designs software (Windows in particular), but they're rewriting a lot of code that has been with Win32 since NT4 (and even Win95 and older). That doesn't mean it will work; but it's a far cry from being XP with a new GUI. Also, Windows XP isn't 64-bit (unless you get the 64-bit version with less-than-Linux driver support - basically XP recompiled to support 64-bit), whereas Vista will probably do some things that 32-bit windows couldn't do, if you have a 64-bit chip.
Personally, I think this marks the beginning of the end for Microsoft - at least from the point of view of regular OS releases. I've been a Windows user right since 3.x days (fortunately Linux is now my prime OS) but each time I've upgraded to a new MS OS, I have seen less and less reason to do that upgrade in the first place - I've only used XP for the past year now (used Windows 2000 before) and only really used XP because it came on a new PC I bought and I discovered I could ditch the terrible Windows XP UI for the classic Windows 2000 one. But I can't say i've noticed much difference with using it - I found Windows 2000 pretty stable for general desktop use and XP is no different.
From the perspective of Joe Average, I don't see he has any reason to upgrade to Vista. The PC games market is quite clearly slowing down as games producers focus more on consoles and it's not going to be for around 2 years after Vista is released that we'll see "Vista only" games. You only need to look at the rise in Internet gaming to see that the future of PC games is a subscription model where gamers will be paying once for a game that will be something they will play possibly for several years - as opposed to buying a new game every few weeks or so. And if there's only a small Vista user base, games and apps producers will continue to support XP.
I'm sure that businesses will upgrade slowly (because of the licensing lock-in MS has with them) but those of us in IT have all seen the adoption of new OSes by businesses slow down also. Because Vista will end up breaking a lot of existing apps, the business migration is bound to be very slow.
I'm sure MS know all of this - which is why the marketing around Vista seems to be a lot more now than for any other OS they've released. But I really do think that this time, they're going to have real trouble getting this on the same number of desktops as they did with XP.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I use W2K, XP, and OS X. OS X has some pretty graphics effects -- the translucency and all -- and OS X has its advocates, but I don't see it doing anything that makes me dissatisfied with my XP screen displays. Aero is supposed to be ultra-cool, but I will believe it when I see it that it applications can have new features under it.
Just as we are at the point where an 800 MHz Celeron will be adequate for most people besides gamers, I am thinking that we are at the point that XP, OS X are adequate for user displays. Is there some "killer app" that has some functionality that requires in some way what Aero has to offer?
Easy. 256MB configurations will quickly go the way of the Dodo bird. Retail competes on sticker price for the cheapest thing on the shelf. Some morons come along and buy that cheapest thing, the less moronic allow themselves to be "up sold" into something less incapacitated, while the super moronic hang around to get "up sold" to the highest margin piece of crap displayed on the shelves for exactly that purpose (anyone here like to part with $2k? I've got some *really* **awesome** 24 gauge zipcord looking for a good home).
Just imagine when you go across with the street with your 256MB price check and the oversexed 22 year old slick working there starts giving you the hairy eyeball about "Vista compatible".
Haven't you ever heard the retail lingo "oh, those guys, we get a lot of people in here after dealing with those guys"? That's the sound of retailers driving their own (who don't fall in line) into extinction.
Any store continuing to sell 256MB configurations in the Vista epoch is going to be portrayed by every slick-haired commissioned sales droid within a five mile radius as the fat kid with the black hairs growing out of his pimple.
what will happen is that the specs of the lowest end pcs will be beefed up ( not by a lot ) and also sp1 for vista will probably fix some of the memory overhead that everybody is talking about. I really don't know where you guys get your information from since there has yet to come out an RC for Vista. Beta build might very well still have debuging stuff enabled and that will most definitely eat up huge chunks of memory. Anyway, those of you that remember the pre XP days will also recall that 128mb ram was standard on lowend PC at that time and now it's 256 and up. So going up to 512 is a no brainer. Also sata drives are pretty much standard on any level for the IBM compatible PC. I also seem to reacall that Intel promiced a Vista compatible onboard video solution by the time Vista comes out and I'm sure that others will follow the trend. ( and I am talkign about a gpu that can handle Aero ) Yes the price of the really lowend PCs might go up a little but I really doubt that most people would even feel the difference. After all OEMs are capable of getting MUCH better deals than any consumer can.
...as soon as the big box vendors just say to hell with it and pick one major Linux distro and start offering it on a joe homeowner/small business desktop. Dell is on the record saying he would do it, (we just had this article a week or so ago), IF the "community" would just indicate a clear cut winner in the distro wars and make sure all the major software for it was easy and worked as advertised with no console hoop jumping. He just doesn't want to be forced to even try to "support" 698 flavors of linux, and I don't blame him one bit..or byte. And if Dell starts doing that, it will have an *amazing* effect on the hardware peripheral vendors, no more redheaded stepchild action for the linux drivers. All the "community" has to do is give an indication of working as a community, not a squabbling chaotic mess.
My guess, and it isn't a stretch, is that ubuntu will get the nod. I am not a fan of ubuntu, but it has enough oomph behind it to make sure it works if Dell actually gave them a contract to be an OEM vendor for them. Redhat gave up on the joe homeowner market, they don't even want your money for even a limited support model,so they are out, they just don't care and don't want it. Suse is a possibility and the serious dark horse in the race, partly because they have some cash and skull sweat to throw at it. Mandriva is collapsing, they are out, gone. You don't even see 1% of the fanboy posts like they used to have two years ago. Linspire or Xandros might get it, but I doubt it, too expensive, limited enthusiast communities, and ubuntu grabbed mindshare with the free cd giveaways and instant organized infrastructure. what will need to change though is the upgrade every few months deal, people DO NOT want to do that. incremental upgrades of this or that app, but NOT this geek fixation on upgrading. People want to settle in and just use what they have for several years, not several *months* or even *weeks*.
Now what WOULD be interesting is if Dell shipped XP or Vista installed, but included the Knoppix DVD, especially if it had been marginally tweaked to be just a tad less obscure and had more docs with it that came up on first boot. That might be an interesting transition model.
with Vista installed (in 2010 when Vista is ready). If it runs slow install Linspire or other Linux distro and don't worry about anything.
I lost my sig...
And the Intel 950 IGA is supposed to have Shader 3.0 support (Pixel Shader 2.0, Vertex Shader 3.0). Unfortunately, the shader support is software based, so while you will be able to turn on Aero Glass, it won't run very fast.
That said, if your graphics card isn't up to running Aero Glass, Vista will just turn it off, it won't refuse to run. There is a TON of FUD about this issue, lots of people claiming Vista won't run unless you have a High End, 256MB Graphics card, which is patently false. Vista will run fine, it'll just downgrade the fancy graphics to something your graphic card is able to display.
The latest Slackware distro is guaranteed to run on a 486 with 4MB of RAM. :-D
No matter how you look at this, it's a mix of a lot of different factors.
/anyway/.
Functionally, 'Vista-approved' machines probably means that Vista will have all the drivers to make this fully functional -- in other words, that some goon at MS actually tested this configuration (or one very similar to it) and made sure that it would all work.
As far as to what 'level' it will work, I was under the impression that the 'basic' version wouldn't even have Aero. Even if Grandma goes to WalMart and buys a machine that is 'Vista-approved' but not beefy enough to handle that 3d goodness, either she'll be getting Basic or (hopefully) the OS will be smart enough to offer recommendations for appropriate levels of eye candy. The point is that Grandma isn't going to care either way if she doesn't have swishy dialog boxes and shiny translucent things - as long as her email opens (no matter whether it takes one second or ten), she's happy.
Mid-range computer users are going to be smart enough to ask and to look for a machine that will _run_ Aero if they want that, and the power folks are going to go out and build a machine that will surpass these requirements
So in essence, this is more hype over nothing.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
You know... a lot of us don't actually want it to be used by the majority of people. Oh, it would be nice, but the major appeal of Linux around here is that it caters to the nerdy minority a lot more than Windows does. It fills a niche, and a lot of us are happy with it doing just that.
Also... I hate to say it, but doing a Google search usually IS the best way to get a Linux box configured. I have Linux on my laptop (it's a Dell, so I had to go through multiple distros to even get something sorta working -- eventually settled on FC4), and when I was setting up the few things that didn't work perfectly out of the box, I just did a couple of really quick Google searches, copied/pasted a few lines from somebody else's config file, and installed some packages containing the necessary drivers.. and then everything worked perfectly. Maybe it's still more than you would want to do to get a computer up and running, but meh, it made me feel smart and let me learn a bit more about my computer than I would have by mindlessly clicking through a Windows install, and I just happen to like that kind of thing.
I still use Windows, though, and I may end up getting Vista when it comes out -- my Windows box is my gaming box, so the system requirements shouldn't be a problem, and MS will likely force my hand when games start coming out that only run in Vista. I just hope that we'll see some decent backwards compatibility -- there are already too many really awesome old games that I can't play, and sometimes even emulators aren't enough.
Wasn't an OS meant to MANAGE resources, not to CONSUME them?
Users buy what they want & I do too.
I personally think the Gates-Ballmer team has taken on so much in attempting to own the whole ball game, that they can't deliver on reasonably fast quality upgrades with speed, and are becoming the sluggish giant that some other notable corporations have become.
By biting off too much, Microsoft can't even get out a decent OS upgrade once a year or once every other year. They are quite simply dead in the water for the better part of 5 years. The sooner they break the OS division off as a separate corporation, the sooner everyone will be better off.
Apple took a long term strategy 8 years back or so, and has simply taken the lead in usability and quality and speed of updates.
Think about it?
1: It hard to be compatable with a wider variety of less capable machines and still provide the best performance on the latest+greatest hardware. It's also very expensive to maintain multiple, incompatible versions (e.g. 32- and 64-bit versions).
2: How many people with older machines are going to pop out another $200-$300 to run Vista slowly on their existing h/w, have to load it and activate it themselves, and break compatability with existing programs -- when for $600 you'll be able to have a faster machine with enough memory, a bigger harddrive, 64-bit processor, AND Vista preloaded?
3: Why is Microsoft worried if you can't run Vista on less capable machines? I don't think they are. You're still going to uh...buy XP from them anyway. They get you coming or going.
Intel finally loves Microsoft again because, for the first time in years, people are going to really have to buy new hardware, mostly with Intel processors and chip-sets, to run the newest killer application.
I doubt that a 32-bit Vista will survive long, given that it ever see the light of day anyway. And if it does, it will be crippled compared to a 64-bit version. I expect most 64-bit processors probably meet the minimum Vista requirement, and those are the people who will be running it.
Will 32-bit systems even still be being sold at the time of this latest slip to January 2007? Will even single core processors be common in new machines?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yeh... I can see it. Millions of PC's out there. Just like SUV's, each requiring yet more and more power.
Oil seems to be headed for $70 / barrel.
We burn Oil to get Electricity.
We use electricity not only to run the computer, but now have to use even more to get the heat out of the offices.
Global warming seems to be a proven fact, even though its exact causes are still under much debate.
But I can tell you it takes much more energy to COOL an office than to WARM it.
This summer may be a real looloo on the power grid, if last winter's unusual warmth is any indication of future thermal trends.
I am wondering if all this extra power, just to animate thingies on a screen, is really worth it. For some, yes - I can see gamers appreciating the extra speed on realtime play, but for most business use, acting as terminal mode to fill forms?
I think now would be a good time to invest in energy stocks and energy-sector mutual funds. We have millions of fuel-guzzling SUV's in our motor fleet, and upcoming office complexes full of power-guzzling computers with even more power-guzzling air conditioning units coming online.
And we have no way of domestically producing the energy to run it all.
On top of that, many the people selling us energy don't like us.
Not only that, we live in a society where executives, sports stars, and movie idols are worth far more than technical people and engineers. As long as the Saudis keep our gas tanks full, who cares?
Its not a scenario I am comfortable with.
I understand air conditioning units need about two watts of power for each watt of heat released in an office building.... meaning if you put a 100 watt light bulb in a box, the air conditioner power needed to keep the temperature stable in that box will draw about 200 watts steady-state, making total power draw about 300 watts to run the 100 watt bulb.
( I am not confident of the above ratio I mentioned... I would appreciate it if another slashdotter who is more skilled in HVAC has more accurate info. )
For one computer, or one SUV, its not a big thing... but for millions of 'em?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]