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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."
To summarize,
"The new version of windows requires more RAM than the last version, and despite MS promises to the contrary, never do an upgrade"
It would be news if this *wasn't* true for a new version of Windows.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
What I'd like to know is what in the hell is going on with the Aero theme that it is so absurdly demanding on the hardware.
I guess I don't understand the intricacies of what's going on because I see no reason whatsoever for a GUI to be more damanding than any contemporary PC game. The only excuse I see is sloppy and inefficient programming. It really leaves me with the impression that one of the big goals of Vista is to promote hardware sales.
The inverse problem is true in linux. Its hard to run new hardware on it, but support for ancient hardware is an install disk away. Many of the new motherboards have sata to pata bridges on them. There are only a few vendors who make them, but the linux community stopped at one since everyone can just buy systems with that part. This is not the way to gain market share. Eventually there will be enough pressure and hard work from a few dedicated programmers to make boards like the intel DP965LT work properly in linux.
This problem is also true with other operating systems. Microsoft only cares about new hardware now. They know people won't upgrade to vista in waves. Everyone on slashdot should be happy as we've all said windows is bloated! Removing legacy support makes debugging, security and other aspects easier for microsoft. Now if they would just clean up their api...
Just remember, customers asked for this.
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