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Preview of Vista On Old Hardware
Grooves writes "According to tests performed by Ars Technica, Windows Vista will need some coddling on old hardware. As a follow-up to their performance review of Vista Beta 2, Ars tested the latest public builds of Vista on hardware spanning from 2001 to a Thinkpad purchased a few months ago. The results show that Vista is extremely RAM hungry, graphical power is less of an issue unless you want eye candy, and hard drive I/O is critical. Also, their experience with 'in-place upgrades' was abysmal, and mirrored my own experiences."
Oh you evil evil Preview button, why didn't I use you?!
> I'm sure you'll find out about the time they release DirectX 10 for Vista only....
How old is your hardware? For the article-imparied, they tried it on a 1.2Ghz Athlon Gateway box that had 512Mb RAM and said "We were extremely impressed with Vista on the five-year-old Gateway".
They did say more RAM is a good idea and recommended 1Gb.
So I guess you will be able tyo run it on your old hardware after all.
That's got some truth to it, obviously, but it's not entirely true.
I have an old celeron 333 laptop, I think it originally ran 95 or 98. I have had linux on it for years, including the latest Debian unstable. KDE was a dog on it, Gnome ran ok. Someone told me they needed a laptop, but they wanted Windows, so I tried to install Windows on it, any version.
Win XP installer would lock up after about 20 minutes of copying files. Win 2k did the same thing. I tried Win 95/98 but there was no place to get the drivers for the hardware, I'm not even sure what brand the laptop is anymore, the label on the bottom has worn off, and in those versions of windows, nothing works right on a laptop without a million extra drivers that don't come with the OS.
I know the hardware wasn't bad because linux worked fine on it.
So anyway, yeah if you want to talk sluggishness of the OS/GUI, windows and linux are not too different on older hardware. Linux, however, it a lot more likely to actually get the OS installed, detect the hardware, and give you a usable system.
I suspect MS probably puts less effort into making sure that quirks in old hardware are taken into account, as seen by the crashing installer of XP and 2K on it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Personally I don't see Vista as a viable upgrade. It's not buying anything for existing hardware that already performs it's required functions.
But there will be people who insist on installing an upgrade on older hardware, then complain about how slow it is. The same has been true with every release of Windows since WFW.
An existing developer box could be recommissioned as a standard desktop, but doing development under Vista will require substantial upgrades. Some tools already require 2GB or more per workstation to do enterprise development -- those requirements will only increase under Vista.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I think you'll find they run under 2k fine, with a little persuasion.
Much like Battlefield 2.
Direct quote from TFA: "We expect that the biggest headache for users will be so-called in-place upgrades. While Vista was reasonable on all the machines where we performed a clean install, it was an absolute mess on the machine upgraded from XP, and this problem has been noted by others." Ok, it said "absolute mess", not "abysmal", seems pretty close to the spirit of the article.
Nobody would click the link if it said anything positive about Microsoft or one of their products. You're right, though. Here is what the article was really saying: "The lesson learned is this: in-place upgrades may be a bad idea. We can't say that it's going to cause problems for certain, because we did upgrade a Compaq X1000 for our initial RC1 tests, and that machine did make it through." "We were extremely impressed with Vista on the five-year-old Gateway." "The Pentium-4 based shuttle represents what an average PC purchased in the last two or so years should feel like, within reason. Its hard drive and I/O system are recent enough to handle the demands of Vista and generally it felt no different than XP for normal use--it certainly was not slower." Equally true summary: They can't say that in-place upgrades will cause problems for certain. They were impressed. On the 2-3 year old computer, it wasn't slower.
RC2 isn't any better. You didn't mention how much memory you have, you pretty much need 1GB to do anything useful. Speed wise, Vista seems to be much better off without Aero running as it seems to be doing quite a bit of stuff outside the GPU that results in a bigger system memory footprint.
I had RC1, then RC2 running on a 3.2Ghz Pentium machine with 512MB. Apps like Adobe Lightroom (Beta 4) and Photoshop CS2 were slow enough to make me give up trying to use them.
My interest in Vista stems mostly from having attended a photographer's summit put on by Microsoft early this year. They were seeking input from pros about the features we'd like to see in Windows and there are actually a few things in Vista that were brought up there, even though the bulk of it was more of a pitch about where they are better than OSX. They still have a long long way to go though.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Yes, utter crap indeed.
I support a small graphics design team that upgraded to OS X 10.2 a few years back. At that time, the fastest machine we had was a Dual 500MHz G4. I know, I know, talk about holding back on hardware upgrades. Like I said, I support, I don't purchase or recommend.
Regardless, OS X has always had a very fluid GUI on older hardware. We even had some old G3's at the time that we used for various tasks (just don't let them go to sleep.. they'll sleep forever). These ran OS X just fine, also. Even subsequent releases of 10.3 and 10.4 continued to run rather smoothly in terms of GUI interactivity on older hardware.
Waiting for apps to load, that's another story. But very much expected, considering we were using dated hardware.
In fact, after we finally purchased some new G5's, I was a bit disappointed, because the GUI performed almost identically. App performance went through the roof, in contrast.
Most things in Vista are not really worth it with a couple of exceptions.
r ary/gpol/a8366c42-6373-48cd-9d11-2510580e4817.mspx ?mfr=true for more.
1) Security. Vista has improved security, and Micro$oft will not update XP to the same level as Vista to ensure that people have a reason to switch. IMHO that's what happened with the upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP.
2) Group Profiles. If you are a M$ shop you will be using Group Profiles to control XP. Vista has new setting you can play with including the Power Settings, blocking Device Installations (including USB drives) and a vastly improved "Network Location Awareness" which takes into account VPN clients. See http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/lib
If you don't use GPO's, or you really care don't about the security improvements, then I don't think it's worth upgrading.
No, I'm not an M$ fanboy... I just make my money supporting their mess-ups!
And why would any IT department even consider downgrading [sic] to Vista from XP?
Security?
UAC
User Account Control is a new feature affecting administrator accounts - they run with limited priviliges, just as a normal user account does. When a program/user wants to do tasks that actually require admin powers, you have to explicitly allow it by clicking "continue" on a message box that pops up.
Do message boxes get annoying? Depends. Weigh the extra effort of one extra keystroke when you change screen resolutions or install a program against viruses having to ask you permission to rape your computer.
Address Space Layout Randomization
ASLR means that system libraries and DLLs are loaded into random locations in memory at boot time. (Some Linux distros have had this for a while.) This means that even if a zero-day exploit compromises your machine and the attacker can run code on your machine, he won't be able to build the locations of kernel functions into his hack.
"Protected Mode"
New features in the Vista kernel let each process run in its own specialized, super-limited user account. Ninja-ing an svchost process won't do much, since each kernel service lacks the ability to access any more than it has to.
Internet Explorer 7 uses these features to run in something called "protected mode." Iexplore.exe runs under its own super-limited user account, has all disk I/O redirected to some crazy folder ("c:" from IE7 redirects to something like "c:\program files\internet explorer\temp\c") that's locked down tigher than tight.
Although XP has Internet Explorer 7, the XP kernel lacks the ability to manage proccesses in this way. It's not possible to use "protected mode" under XP because XP's kernel is too primitive.
Stability?
Windows Driver Model
The new Windows Driver Model means that drivers not digitally signed and approved by Microsoft will not be allowed to run in kernelspace, meaning crappy drivers - the cause of most Windows bluescreens since the dawn of time - simply won't be allowed to run, let alone crash the system.
The flip side of this is that a new part of the Vista kernel means almost all drivers will not run in kernelspace. The new interface lets 99% of drivers be run in userspace, which doesn't require an expensive Microsoft signature and cannot crash the computer.
About the only drivers that inhabit kernel space are video drviers, which means that we could potentially be seeing less frequent driver releases from nVidia and ATI, but oh well. The Vista kernel will also restart your video driver when it crashes - even with beta drivers, the only time I've seen a blue screen in Vista was when DivX raped my install of Windows Media Player 11.
Windows Update
Yeah, we've had it for quite a while, now - but it's integrated with Windows now, meaning no silly webside + ActiveX control install. You no longer have to use IE for anything.
Shininess? (Though this one's been done to death.)
Granted, there's no one "killer app" for Vista - but that doesn't mean it's not worth using over XP. I haven't been able to make it crash (after removing DivX), and that's running the beta nVidia driver, Steam games (HalfLife 2, CounterStrike: Source, Might & Magic: Dark Messiah), software development on Visual Studio 2005, running the Office 2007 beta, and schoolwork on TASM (legacy DOS programs still seem to run just fine without tweaking under Vista, just that they're not allowed to run full-screen for whatever reason.
Is it RAM and disk heavy? Sure, but so was Windows 95 back in the day, and memory and disk space are cheap. I used to dual-boot Vista over XP, but Vista's my primary OS now - sacrificing a few FPS in HL2 is worth the stabilitiy, although the only antivirus offering compatible with Vista as of now if from TrendMicro.
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