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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."
On both, things run perfectly, with all gui features, XGL, aqua effects, etc etc.
(ducks!)
Seriously - 1GB ram (512MB for low end installs) seems like an awful lot to me....
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Is it just me, or is having stringent hardware requirements for the OPERATING SYSTEM kind of ridiculous?
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
I thought helping people get ready for these kinds of events involved saying something along the lines of "I'm sorry" or "There's no easy way to say this ..."
...I thought 640k was good enough for anybody?
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
But the "features" they are announcing have been in Mac OS X for four years. I'm not seeing anything impressive here... just insane memory and disk space requirements.
As computers advance it only makes sense to use the power that is becoming available.
There is a lot people expect their system to do out of the box. Computers are not going to be confined to one room in a house, they are going to be central to a lot of electronics throughout homes soon. It only make sense, most electronic items these days are very close to computers themselves, just specialized. Look at HD-DVD and Blu-Ray machines.
Hell with the attitude you have why would we have ever wanted more than text based graphics? Let alone more than 640k ram?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
How many people will buy Vista-ready PC's but not actually bother to buy it when it comes out? Too many. Non-technical types who make up a good number of Windows users will not bother to upgrade past what they get with their computer at purchase time.
Unless MS bundle coupons for Vista with Windows XP this buying season, they can forget about people making any effort to do buy it and do the upgrade.
Come on people, Vista was not meant to be run on a wristwatch, toaster, calculator, or anything similar. The minimum requirements are on par with what any person who would want Vista in the first place would have. Seriously, if you're using a PII-350, you're just not using it for anything that would require Vista anyways. Am I nutz?
http://religiousfreaks.com/Windows XP to run, and won't install on Windows 2K systems. Hrmmmm. How helpful.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
They want us to buy the hardware in order to run their operating system, when an operating system is supposed to run our hardware. Like people are going to buy hardware just to run the new Windows. That's like buying an airplane because Geico comes out with airplane insurance. I find that appalling
My name is Wootzor von Leetenhaxor
I was hoping they'd make overclocking to 4 GHz a REQUIREMENT just to weed out the, you know, users.
because of MS plans to reward their patient Vista customers with an added software bonus...
A free copy of Duke Nukem Forever with each Vista sale. (Since they should be both released at about the same time.)
"Upgrade your CPU
800 MHz required to install Windows Vista (Your computer currently has 0.00 Hz)"
I get great performance to have such a slow clock speed.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
By the time Vista is released, 1 Gig will seem like nothing. We will have 1 gig chips implanted into our brains just so that we can remember where our flying car was parked.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
How the heck am I supposed to upgrade from GNU/Linux to Vista??
Yeah, they didn't know how to use IF statements. Clearly they should have hired you to do it...
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
Its an upgrade advisor, not a downgrade advisor.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I know I have been trolled, but no, 10.4 runs just fine on 512MB.
iBook G4, 512MB, Firefox, Thunderbird, Safari, Mail.app, terminal all open, all running just fine, quick enough, thank you very much, I have just fed the troll...
When It Counts.
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.
Let's say you're a company. You just bought 500 workstations from Dell last year, they are Pentium IV 2.1 Ghz machines with 512 MB of Ram (plenty for your company). You need to keep up with Microsoft Operating Systems because Microsoft will drop support for the OS version you currently use. Now you have to decide to "upgrade" to the older version of the OS or this new Vista thing. But wait, Vista has more stringent hardware requirements. Now as a manager do you buy more hardware (which has no appreciable value) or do you upgrade to an OS that may drop support in under 5 years or do you switch OS vendors altogether?
It's not as easy a decision as most people think.
crazy dynamite monkey
That is entirely good because you will be running Linux and get a hell of a good box for vanilla prices.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
15 GB Free HD Space! Are you kidding me. My machine at work takes up 8.6 GB! Thats OS + Apps + Data. WTF requires 15 GB! Is Microsoft including Porn to show off Aero!!
Okay, everybody is missing the point. Vista does not have a HD foorprint of 15GB. Really, it doesn't. Nor does it plan to use 1GB of memory for the kernel.
The "system" requirements are set to provide the average user with a pleasant experience (the use of Windows notwithstanding). That means several applications open and multimedia running in the background and/or foreground. Yes, there will be lots of clock cycles and memory for pretty (and useless). This isn't about the minimum requirements for an OS, its about the minimum requirements for the OS and a typical group of applications.
For you Mac fanboys out there - yes, Tiger will install with 3GB of HD free and will run on a G3. I don't know this as fact, but based on what I know Vista will easily fit into 3GB as well with room to spare. It will also run on an 800MHz x86 processor which...wait for it...came out the same year as the G3 was introduced (1999).
I know it's popular to get your panties all bunched up over the evil empire's latest move to try and get you to pimp your little sister for enough money to upgrade, but this really isn't that bad. I mean, this is the same place where we discuss whether it's enough to have dual 512MB video cards to play the latest game on our machines, right? Are we really that worried that we're not going to have 40GB of hard drive and a gig of RAM?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
You will need at least a 1GB NIC also to allow the worms/spam and trojans to be more efficient.
On a side note, does the spinning hourglass speed up (i.e. rotations, not time...) when it decides to bomb out?
Some PC manufacturers skimp badly on RAM, even though it's cheap. Insufficient RAM is one of the few things that will make a modern computer perform badly as a desktop. By saying "Windows Vista requires 1GB RAM", Microsoft is really saying "manufacturers, stop giving users only 256MB!" Obviously Windows itself won't use 1GB of memory, but some applications will, and poor performance makes Microsoft (as well as the PC manufacturer) look bad.
As for the 128MB video card requirement, this is another area where PC manufacturers are overly stingy. Developers shouldn't have to worry about substandard integrated graphics chipsets, they should be able to program to a reasonable lowest common denominator. Microsoft wants to make sure no one is below that common denominator.
Basically, Microsoft is claiming as hardware requirements, not what Windows itself needs, but what they think programmers should be able to take for granted. It's all cheap hardware anyways, and it will only get cheaper in the future, so leaving some old systems unsupported is no big deal in the long run.
My laptop doubles as a toaster and its pretty new. I freakin' better be able to run Vista.
Providing minimum specs that mean "Minimum for reasonable performance" not "Minimum to make it execute." I remember back in the dark days of DOS games were famous for using the second metric. They'd list a minimum and sure, the game would execute on that system, but it wasn't really playable. I much prefer companies to list realistic minimums that will give reasonable performance. Absolute minimums aren't really useful.
Hanging is too good for you. I sentence you to ten years of Windows ME support.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You're actually suggesting that Microsoft would negotiate a deal where you had to pay for things you don't actually need or want, in order to get something you do? Whatever. I'll believe that when I see it.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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.
(hic) I apologise in advance..I have a nice cab sav on the go here..I also apologise for the line length, thanks to /.'s bastard line-length filter
.exe's a bot-netting,
Seven Service Packs a-swimming,
Six Execs a-lying,
Five Unnecessary Things,
Four Calling-home Apps,
Three Zero-Day Exploits,
Two Trusted Computing Platforms
And A promise that was empty
.exe's a bot-netting,
Seven Service Packs a-swimming,
Six Execs a-lying,
Five Unnecessary Things,
Four Calling-home Apps,
Three Zero-Day Exploits,
Two Trusted Computing Platforms
And A promise that was empty
.exe's a bot-netting,
Seven Service Packs a-swimming,
Six Execs a-lying,
Five Unnecessary Things,
Four Calling-home Apps,
Three Zero-Day Exploits,
Two Trusted Computing Platforms
And A promise that was empty
.exe's a bot-netting,
Seven Service Packs a-swimming,
Six Execs a-lying,
Five Unnecessary Things,
Four Calling-home Apps,
Three Zero-Day Exploits,
Two Trusted Computing Platforms
And A promise that was empty
.exe's a bot-netting,
Seven Service Packs a-swimming,
Six Execs a-lying,
Five Unnecessary Things,
Four Calling-home Apps,
Three Zero-Day Exploits,
Two Trusted Computing Platforms
And hardware requirements too steep for me!
On the first day of beta, MS sent to me A promise that was empty
On the second day of beta, MS sent to me Two Trusted Computing Platforms And A promise that was empty
On the third day of beta, MS sent to me Three Zero-Day Exploits,
Two Trusted Computing Platforms And A promise that was empty
On the fourth day of beta, MS sent to me Four Calling-home Apps, Three Zero-Day Exploits, Two Trusted Computing Platforms And A promise that was empty
On the fifth day of beta, MS sent to me Five Unnecessary Things, Four Calling-home Apps, Three Zero-Day Exploits, Two Trusted Computing Platforms And A promise that was empty
On the sixth day of beta, MS sent to me Six Execs a-lying, Five Unnecessary Things, Four Calling-home Apps, Three Zero-Day Exploits, Two Trusted Computing Platforms And A promise that was empty
On the seventh day of beta, MS sent to me Seven Service Packs a-swimming, Six Execs a-lying, Five Unnecessary Things, Four Calling-home Apps, Three Zero-Day Exploits, Two Trusted Computing Platforms And A promise that was empty
On the eighth day of beta, MS sent to me Eight
On the ninth day of beta, MS sent to me Nine Lawyers dancing, Eight
On the tenth day of beta, MS sent to me Ten Shills a-leaping, Nine Lawyers dancing, Eight
On the eleventh day of beta, MS sent to me Eleven programmers pissed-off, Ten Shills a-leaping, Nine Lawyers dancing, Eight
On the twelfth day of beta, MS sent to me Twelve DRM devices, Eleven programmers pissed-off, Ten Shills a-leaping, Nine Lawyers dancing, Eight
I am going to burn in karma hell for that prob..
Am I the only one who noticed that? "... Adequate graphics memory. 64 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor less than 1,310,720 pixels 128 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions from 1,310,720 to 2,304,000 pixels 256 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions higher than 2,304,000 pixels Meets graphics memory bandwidth requirements, as assessed by Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor running on Windows XP ..."
I guess Microsoft will start asking users to count their pixels one by one.. but what for the bandwith requirements?
Is they don't want people bitching. They want to give you some realistic requirements. If you follow their guide, you'll get pretty good performance including when you are running apps.
Remember the Windows 95 fiasco? MS claimed it required 4MB of RAM. Ok, that's not a lie, Windows 95 will execute on a system with 4MB of RAM... It's just nothing else will. The OS would use all the RAM, and you'd be paging continually, it was too slow to be usable. You needed 8MB of RAM to have a Windows 95 system that could usuably load apps.
These requirements are much more realistic ones. They aren't the requirements to execute Vista, they are the requirements to execute Vista, and things on top of it, which is of course the point to having an OS. Consumers who listen to the guildelines will likely not be disappointed.
Why are you acting surprised? Vista will run on much less stellar machines. These requirements are there becase:
1) Microsoft wants people to have a reason to upgrade, so that OEMs are happy, and will stick to Windows rather than start selling cheap machines with a free OS preinstalled - the single pillar that will singlehandedly ensure that Bill's Empire will not fall anytime soon.
2) To ensure that people will have acceptable performance even after they install hundreds of bloated applications, firewalls, virus scanners, adware scanners, Bonzi Buddy screensavers, free wallpaper switchers, device drivers thinking their hardware is the most important component in the system, Viruses, Infections, Spyware, Trojans, Adware, and last but not least least, Microsoft Office.
That said, I still make some money fixing XP machines that are mainframes compared to what you were supposed to have back when Windows Xtra Profit came out, so nothing is new.
What the heck is a "beowulf cluster"?
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.
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.
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