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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."
Don't know about you people but besides a handful of geeks, nobody installs new versions of MS Windows on old computers. It gets preloaded by OEMs who have financial strings requiring them to do so. So it does not matter if Vista sucks, doesn't work on old hardware or fails when upgrading over previous versions. It'll show up on new machines and those customers will use it no matter how bad or good it really is.
On one way, all these "features" making it difficult on older hardware are probably crumbs thrown to the OEMs so they'll sell more new computers preloaded with the "new" MS Windows. Funny how that works.
Only getting off the treadmill breaks this loop. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I still run 2K as there are no games that require XP.
Actually yes there are. Several in fact.
AOE III and Company of Heroes to name 2.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Microsoft's worst enemy and toughest competition has always been previous versions of Microsoft products. Word, Excel, and the like haven't changed much in quite some time save for esoteric features 99% of the population doesn't even know about. Same with Windows, lots of people run 2000 and they're just fine. Obviously the adoption of any new Windows OS isn't going to be immediate and overwhelming; it takes time as people purchase new computers with Vista preinstalled and games begin demanding Vista only (just as they began demanding 2000 only, etc.). Windows OSs always creep into popularity rather than gaining overnight ubiquity. I myself didn't like XP and really didn't think I'd ever upgrade (hearing the same "DRM OS" arguments being lobbied today), but eventually I found myself liking it more and more and finally moved over entirely. It's great; I like the stability and performance it provides versus previous versions. It took some time, however, before my PCs were up to the challenge. I feel the same will gradually be true of Vista and the hardware requirements we're all so worried about will, again, fade. Microsoft likely put high requirements on purpose to ensure the operating system has a decent lifecycle. Like buying a shirt that's too big for a child since they'll "grow into it" anyway.
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.
Yours is anecdotal evidence based on a pretty small sample size; I wouldn't draw such broad conclusions from such little data.
I can easily extrapolate exactly the opposite conclusions with a similarly limited experience. In the last six months, I've done two Linux installs on PCs from that same era (approx 400MHz P2) that were happily running Windows 2000. The theory was that even though they were too slow for Windows use I could recycle them into small servers. The Linux installed locked up hard either during installation or on first boot. In both cases, it turned out there was a problem with enabling DMA on these systems that caused the IDE driver to lock-up hard. I noted that both machines worked perfectly well with the older 2.4 Linux kernel.
I don't think the Linux developers working on the latest 2.6 features are paying any more attention to actually testing compatibility with ancient hardware than Microsoft is with Vista. The fact that the Linux kernel model forces drivers to be rebuilt from source with every new kernel release is different from the way Microsoft provides a stable driver API, and which model is going to get you better results with a random old piece of hardware is very unpredictable. The main advantage for Linux in situations like the one I ran into is that the problem was more transparent, and there are many more workarounds to try and resolve issues when they come up. I would hesitate to generalize on this subject beyond that.