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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 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.
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.
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
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.)
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??
Neat! Can you overclock that, multiplier-style? You could try to get it all the way up to 0.00Hz!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Its an upgrade advisor, not a downgrade advisor.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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?
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.
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
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.
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.