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Microsoft Releases Vista Hardware Requirements
Digital Inspiration writes "CNet reports that Microsoft has kicked off a 'Get Ready' campaign aimed at helping customers prepare for Windows Vista. The site also includes an Upgrade Advisor tool to help people determine just how Vista-ready an existing PC is." From the article: "The marketing programs and upgrade tool are designed to ease some of the uncertainty around Vista well ahead of the back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons, the two biggest PC selling times of the year. Vista had long been expected to arrive by the 2006 holidays, but Microsoft said in March that it would not arrive on store shelves until January."
i am pretty sure that various "windows system restore" features are set to use like at least 10% of the HD, even in XP. i don't know if we are counting the trashcan or not, but that's another 10%. what are the requirements of XP in terms of free HD space, anyway?
Jesus said to his disciples: "If you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one" - Luke 22:36
Windows XP requires: So 1.5GB HDD space to 15GB is a huge increase. What's interesting is the HDD requirements increased 10 fold, the memory increased by a multipule of 8, but the CPU only tripled. Weird.
This is probably quite basement-level for usability. Microsoft has a history of lowballing the requirements for their operating systems.
:P
For example: Windows NT4 Workstation had as its low-end system requirements a Pentium with 16MB of RAM. Windows 2000 Professional (In my opinion the high-water mark for Windows) had as its low-end system requirements a Pentium 133MHz with 64MB of RAM and 2GB of HD space. XP Pro has as its low-end system requirements a Pentium 233MHz, 64MB RAM, a CD-ROM drive, 1.5GB of free HD space (that can't be right considering W2K's requirements) and a video card with 800 x 600 pixel resolution.
Now think about it a little. NT4 on an 80MHz Pentium with 16MB RAM? XP Pro on a 233MHz Pentium with 64MB RAM? I don't have to imagine W2KPro on a P133MHz with 64MB of RAM: during study for certification I installed 2K on a machine with exactly those specs, and it CRAWLED.
Believe me, you are going to need a hellified system to run Vista at this rate. Double the "Premium Ready" specs and you will have the specs you will need to actually run Vista.
Oh yeah, and I run Panther on a 300MHz iBook with 544MB RAM and a 30GB hard drive. No those weren't the original specs. No, it isn't Tiger, even though there is a way of tricking Tiger to run on a machine without built-in firewire. And you know what? Panther is a happy camper on that machine. Go figure.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I recently used a G5 with 8GB of RAM, and even with a lot of things running it consistently had 6GB free. Mind you, I was more impressed by the dual 30" screens than the RAM...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I grow tired of people making this reference because it's just not true.
Now, it also stands to reason you may think this is fanboi speak which it is not. I changed to kde after starting with xfce and I see very little performance difference.
I've done two 3.x+1 upgrades of KDE just wishing the old dog would die so I have an excuse to replace it. Surprisingly each version is noticeably faster than the last.
Mind you the usual suspects are quite slow to start, OOO, GIMP regardless of the DE but once everything is up, it goes well.
FYI: I'm running it on a pII 233 256mb just fine. I think your P90 reference is too harsh.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Bull. I'm running 10.4 on a 512Mb eMac and usually have (at least) Firefox, iTunes and Photoshop running, often with Azureus busy as well, and while there's an occasional bit of HDD chug when switching between apps there's no way it can be described as running like, as you say, 'complete ass'. Unless you're running it on a 400Mhz iMac or something.
But yes, I'll agree with you that Apple's attitude towards installed RAM has always been parsimonious in the extreme.
You must think in Russian.
iMac (Bondi Blue) shipped August 15, 1998.
I'm currently testing software under Vista Beta 2 at MS.
:D So I really have no idea what it takes to score 5 out of 5, but the "recommended" specs will likely get you a 2/5 which does not provide an enjoyable user experience as far as I'm concerned.
I can say that 1GB is not enough. We have some Pentium 4 3.4GHz machines with 1GB of RAM and Radeon x600 graphics and they score 2 out of 5 on the system properties rating system. We have some identical machines with 2GB of RAM, and they score 3/5. I suspect that a 5/5 would involve a high-end $400+ video card and 4GB of RAM, but even though I work for one of the most powerful corporations in the world, they've refused to buy me such a machine for testing.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Transparency, finally. This has already been compared above. Welcome to the late 90s, Mr. Gates.
Windows 2000 & XP have full transparency support, and it's hardware accelerated if your GPU supports the feature (NVIDIA and ATI GPUs do)
a program menu with a search feature, old hat for KDE
Windows 95 had a search item in the Start Menu, years before KDE even existed.
a more integrated browser
Explorer has supported HTTP since 1997 (IE4's Active Desktop). Windows 98 and later support WebDAV and FTP in the browser. SMB/CIFS has been supported since Windows 95.
15 GB for the OS, 25 GB for Office
Vista is approx. 6.8GB on my system. Office 2003 is ~2-3GB. That's less than 10GB total.
Stop spreading bullshit FUD.
Dual-boot to what, Windows 98? Linux doesn't give a damn what your other partitions look like. Just create your partitions before installing anything, make sure to allocate your /boot partition as Primary #1, and put NT next. Actually, if you use grub to change active flag and such, and maybe even hide partitions, you can put your NT partition anywhere on the disk after the /boot.
On top of that, you can use captive-ntfs to get very good results dealing with NTFS filesystems so you can still read and write your data files to your windows partition. Or, if you just need to read them, the included driver is acceptable.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, it's easy.
When Vista comes out, MS won't automatically drop support for XP. If history serves, XP will be supported for at least 6 to 8 more years.
Now, if you work for a company that needs 500 desktops (I do), you know you don't buy them. You get a leasing deal from Dell, that includes them taking your machines every 2-3 years and exchanging them with the new models. In this case, within 2-3 years you'll have new Vista-capable computers at no extra cost (yes, you'll pay for them, but in monthly lease payments that were budgeted well ahead of schedule) and, depending on your leasing agreement, they'll probably come with Vista already installed.
So, really, nothing to see here.
not really, I saw a digg article way back when where I saw a windows box running at 4 MHz (yes, that's right 4 MEGAHERTZ. The one that is slower than the lisa).
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
Linux HW reqs
Mac 10.4 HW reqs
Solaris 10 HW reqs
In the linux article, the guy got it (don't now distro or version) running on a 33mhz machine, but with no gui.
The mac requires a g3 or up, and 256 MB ram and 3GB HDD space, 4GB with XCode
Solaris requires 120MHz cpu and 256 MB ram (or 512 for PXE), 2GB HDD space
My name is Wootzor von Leetenhaxor
I think there might be a market for maybe 5 Vista premium enabled computers.
Oh You POS