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."

Comments

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[Klaidas]

I guess I won't be able to run it on my old hardware :-D

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[minus_273]

it wont be

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[gbjbaanb]

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.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[GigsVT]

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.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[Xugumad]

Depends what you're doing with it. Sure, out of the box as a desktop system, you're fairly screwed, but as a headless system, or with some work to use less CPU/memory intensive window managers (WindowMaker, for example), and you should be fine....

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[a_ghostwheel]

What bugs me more that out of 3 VPN clients that I use (AT&T used by my company, Cisco used by client and OpenVPN used by myself) two either do not work or are not reliable.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[Mysticalfruit]

Same here! I finally gave the machine away, but for a long time my primary laptop was a 233mhz pentium (with a f00f bug!) Acer Travelmate laptop. Before the drive failed on it, it was running FC1 with xfce just fine.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[Scarletdown]

This story is no different than running the latest Linux distribution on old hardware.

That is not an entirely accurate comparison. The latest Linux distros will run fine on old hardware. Why is that? Because unlike the latest incarnation of Windows, you can pick and choose what packages you want that suit your needs and your hardware's capabilities.

Don't have the horsepower to run KDE or Gnome? Use IceWM, or Fluxbox, or some other lightweight WM. OpenOffice is too heavy duty for your system? Give AbiWord and Gnumeric a try, or even TED (if Rich Text Format is good enough for you). That's the beauty of Linux. Even the latest and greatest distro can be tailored to your needs and capabilities, and keeps otherwise perfectly good hardware out of the landfills.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[cyber-vandal]

If you run KDE or GNOME perhaps but then you have a lot more choices than just those two. To pre-empt the next comment: do the various shell replacements for Windows run on old hardware?

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[nexex]

I tried RC2 on an athlon 1700+ with 768Mb ram. Just sitting at the desktop with nothing open windows was using 40-50% of ram. I would say if you are going to play games on it, 1Gb would be minimum.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[cp.tar]

Nice try, but no cigar. (Speaking of which, somebody has been smoking in my apartment; probably the guys who are supposed to fix the plumbing. Disgusting.)

I'm running the brightest and newest Gentoo on my old Duron 600.
I left KDE there for those who want it (for some reason, Entrance won't boot into Gnome right now, so Gnome is currently inaccessible), but E17 works just fine and dandy. Even with the animated backgrounds.

I don't know exactly which distribution I'll use for my grandfather's computer (he got an old piece of trash which will work just fine after I switch the disk and the CD-ROM, which are busted), but it won't be Gentoo for one reason only - he doesn't have Internet.
I might try Slackware... or see how a 300 MHz processor handles Elive.

All in all, Linux on old hardware works just fine and dandy. And E17, with all the frills on, is way faster than Win2k on a comparable machine. I have one in the same room, so I should know.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[RiotXIX]

I'd also suggest you user a lighter window manager than gnome (you can still have the useful gnome applications installed) (eg. OpenBox). Not pushing one over the other btw - just googled it.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[larkost]

While I don't know anything about how Vista actually uses RAM, it may be that Vista is starting to use the same philosophy that *nix does in this regard: unused RAM is wasted RAM. In the *nix philosophy you keep eveything that you could ever use again in RAM and only release it when something else is going to use it. I am over-simplifying it a bit, but that is not far off the mark.

So, it could be that the memeory useage you are seeing is not the OS "hogging" memory, but rather that it is simply trying to use it a bit better. So when you launch that memory-intensive game it will give way for the game.

This is all said without any real knowledge of the inner working of Vista memory management.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[pete6677]

I've been asking this question for months now and have gotten no real response. Vista appears to have not one single feature that I can't get on XP with minimal trouble. Other than being harder to use, I don't see what the difference is. And why would any IT department even consider downgrading to Vista from XP?

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[Andrew Nagy]

Also it's pretty easy to upgrade to new hardware in the same machine. I mean, processor power is a little harder to upgrade (read: not worth it), but RAM and video cards are pretty easy to replace and much cheaper than buying a whole new machine. A memory company (granted vested interest) has set up a couple pages to make it easier to upgrade. You can see a computer memory page, and a video card page.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[SevenHands]

RC2 != Official Release. Alpha and Beta releases, even Release Candidates seem to traditionally eat up more RAM than official releases.

However, this is Windows. Most Microsoft Official Releases should really be classified as beta.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[BigDogCH]

Xp-pro running here on 333mhz system, perfectly fine. Many of the fancy GUI features are turned off, but only the real fluffy crap. You could also boot it without the GUI at all, but then it wouldn't be "Windows" now would it. Also, I have abiword, and a few other lightweight applications. They all work fine....you just can't expect to run software with it that wasn't designed for something this slow. If you have the ram (I have 384mb, you should be fine on a CLEAN copy of XP with a 333mhz system.)

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[laffer1]

I agree. With the release of IE7 and Windows Media Player 11 there is no new feature worth caring about. Its possible DirectX 10 could be an issue down the road with gaming but only if its adopted heavily by game developers. Regardless, as people buy new hardware the installs will increase. Even Windows ME is still run on some computers.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[laffer1]

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.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[springbox]

It might be more like Win XP's thinking: "Any unused RAM is wasted RAM, unless it's the last few hundred megabytes. Oh, and have fun swapping. A lot."

P.S. I usually use Win XP. I wish it had some sort of "swappiness" setting like Linux does.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[cibyr]

Vista has DX10. This is why I will be running vista Vista also has an assload of bugs. This is why IT departments will not be running vista.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[greg1104]

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.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[jaweekes]

Most things in Vista are not really worth it with a couple of exceptions.

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/libr ary/gpol/a8366c42-6373-48cd-9d11-2510580e4817.mspx ?mfr=true for more.

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!

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[networkBoy]

I just kill swap on XP. I have a thinkpad with a gig of ram and it's damn peppy with most of the optional crap turned off. I just have to remember to close and re-start FF every so often (especially before a compile).
-nB

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[Fred_A]

This was a laptop though. While you can usually add RAM (often at inflated prices, but at least you can), updating pretty much anything else on most models is a no no unless you're quite confident with a small screwdriver and sometimes a soldering iron (and even with that the graphics card is typically right out).

So while the /. crowd might be comfortable adding RAM or replacing a hard drive, or possibly changing a dead screen, for the regular public, an underpowered laptop is a dead laptop. It's hard enough to get most people to upgrade their desktop box when it makes sense to do so, with a laptop it would be quite a waste of time.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[rapidweather]

Take a look at the screenshots in the signature below.
I run this knoppix remaster on machines with 128 MB of ram, that were originally designed for Windows 98.
I do use the Windows 98 "dos" to have the autoexec.bat run a menu, from which I can choose Windows or any of the various windows managers in my remaster, KDE, twm, Fluxbox, and the default IceWM. The one item recommended is the "persistent home directory", a file called "knoppix.img" that is accessed via the loadlin command line in the various 'linux.bat" files that are selected with the menu. Here is an old page of mine describing the msdos menu now being used to multi-boot linux and windows. I do have one box that boots Debian 2.2, Mandrake 8, my remaster, and Windows 98. Only my remaster can run the latest web browsers, Opera 9, Flock, and Firefox.

No problem at all running my remaster on a 200 MMX box, I'm doing that now, using Firefox 2.0 to make this post.
The remaster is based on Knoppix 3.4, which uses a 2.4 kernel, so that is why it runs so well on older hardware.
I have experimented with livecd linux with 2.6 kernel, and that really slows down on these boxes. Some of those won't run at all.
There are some tricks to it all, one of them is to get the isolinux.bin file to test 100% with the "testcd" knoppix cheatcode. Not even the original Knoppix 3.4 can do that. If you get 100% in that test, then the livecd linux will boot on almost all older machines bios'. Damnsmall linux did not figure that out, and I had nearly 3/4 of my older boxes that DSL would not boot on once they went to an isolinux setup. They now have to offer a parallel "syslinux" setup to keep everyone happy. I don't need to do that.
I don't need a CDROM drive to "install", just use a backpack cdrom external drive to copy the 492 MB "/knoppix" to the Windows partition, set up the menu with the loadlin batch files, and reboot, choose your OS.
Most of the time I do place the /knoppix folder in a ext2 partition, however. Once you get going, you can refine your setup to do that.

I didn't just add some applications to the base Knoppix 3.4, I made a lot of my own, see the Getting Started Guide to see all the details.
I have used my livecd linux to boot into XP boxes that would not boot up at all, just a few lines of error message on a black screen. Then I can see what is missing, and have some idea what to do when I use the XP restoration CD to bring Window XP back to life. You can do a virus scan of all of the XP partitions using my livecd linux, if that makes one feel better.
I can use QTParted to partition the XP hard drive, and I have set up two separate XP installations on the same box, so each user can really have his/her own Windows XP. You have to reboot to get to the other one via the ntldr screen.
My main point here is bringing the latest web browsers to an old Windows 98 box, with my livecd linux.
I have a whole row of machines here that all do that, all were originally Windows machines, most with less than 256 MB of ram. There's a Toshiba 4015CDS with 160 MB of RAM, that boots my remaster, without the CD in the tray.
Very stable, with Guarddog firewall in place by default.

--Rapidweather

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[drsmithy]

Just sitting at the desktop with nothing open windows was using 40-50% of ram.

This metric is utterly worthless. Why do people continue to use it ?

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[Aczlan]

I have seen somewhat similar results here, I have a 450mhz p2 with 300ish mb of ram it ran XP just fine but when I went to put Ubuntu 6.6 (install off the live CD nothing extra or fancy as it was my first successful Linux install) but it was slow as a dog... it took FF 15-20 seconds to appear to say nothing of loading a page... XP on the same box was almost twice as responsive... not sure why it was so but I wont be switching to Ubuntu anytime soon.


Aaron Z

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[cheater512]

My only laptop is a Pentium 266. It runs KDE wonderfully.
I run Gentoo on it and for compiling I just Distcc it with my AMD X2 server.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[Bing Tsher E]

I use FVWM and now have a .fvwmrc file that is so complete and nicely customized that I couldn't imagine switching to anything else. There's something really nice about running an environment where the whole GUI is set up in a single well-characterized .dotfile.

Screaming fast, too. The Tab Window Manager is similarly customizable and it's even a built-in component in the core X11 distribution, so there is NOTHING to add except your cherised .dotfile on any freenix with X installed.

Minimalism can be cool. And it's an especially good concept to introduce to subvert online discussions of anything as bloated and baroque as $LATEST_FROM_REDMOND.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[imboboage0]

Even Windows ME is still run on some computers.

Where? They must be quarantined!

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[Bing Tsher E]

RAM and video cards are pretty easy to replace and much cheaper than buying a whole new machine.

A lot of people who incrementally upgrade are already going to have the most RAM and a fairly good Video card installed in the machine they use. There's no magic way to add more RAM to a machine with, say, all 3 256M SDRAM modules already installed.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[cheater512]

I dont think you know exactly why it was locking up.

Most modern distro installers will try to enable DMA. It makes the install process a lot faster.
Some hardware doesnt like this (its pretty rare however) which is why if you pass the kernel option nodma (I think thats it. Dont quote me) then it wont try enabling DMA and it'll install fine.
Your blaming the kernel developers when you just didnt RTFM.

Most Linux drivers are in the kernel to begin with so unless you have exotic hardware you never need to recompile kernel modules.
Microsoft on the other hand has very little drivers built in and generally needs the mobo cd so of course they need to keep it consistant.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[Planesdragon]

Vista appears to have not one single feature that I can't get on XP with minimal trouble.

It has more than a few. Off the top of my head:

* "Windows key" searching. (The new start menu as a whole is a distinct improvement, but the "search" bar takes the cake.)

* Backup to DVD or CD.

* User Account Control, and the related security model.

* New "sleep" mode -- suspend then hibernate

* Windows Sidebar

* Windows "meeting space."

The reason not to get Vista is "The new features don't justfiy the cost", not "there's nothing new."

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[jridley]

Heck, I bought a brand new machine that was a Celeron 400 with 64M RAM, and it came from the factory with XP Pro installed. I bumped the memory up to 256M, and it was fine. This was about 4-5 years ago IIRC. I don't remember thinking it was slow at the time, and honestly I think I'd be pretty happy with it now. It bit the dust and I bought a new machine, but I didn't replace it because it was slow.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[greg1104]

Most modern distro installers will try to enable DMA. It makes the install process a lot faster. Some hardware doesnt like this (its pretty rare however) which is why if you pass the kernel option nodma (I think thats it. Dont quote me) then it wont try enabling DMA and it'll install fine. Your blaming the kernel developers when you just didnt RTFM.

Did you notice where I suggested Linux has lots of workarounds for resolving problems? When I said it was a DMA issue, that diagnosis was from having corrected the issue, sort of. I was able to get both systems to work under 2.6 (albeit with glacial performance, far worse than the Win 2K install) by turning DMA off. Part of the reason it was hard to figure that out was that the same hardware worked fine with DMA on under kernel 2.4 (the same way some people report that hardware that works fine with Windows 98 doesn't work correctly under newer versions).

If you must know: there seems to be a change in the rewrite of the PIIX driver in the 2.6 kernels that causes problems for some subset of people who have older computers based on the 440BX motherboard chipset; I'd direct you to this handy meta-note: http://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2006/10/msg0 0505.html where you'll find the following statement and many additional references should you wish to spend some time RTFM'ing:

"This is *not* a hardware problem or a CD problem. This problems has been replicated on different hard disks and on another similar computer...So far I have found it in Ubuntu and Debian distributions. Other MS OS's work fine on these computers...I suspect that it may be related to the Debian support of the southbridge PIIX4 chipset and/or the Intel 440BX and 440LX AGPset."

Here's a complete example of what I was suggesting to my parent post: here's an entire class of older machine that used to be very popular and that work perfectly under many Windows variants, but that plenty of people have reported issues with under recent Linux releases. There is very little difference between this and the Vista situation. The idea that Linux works better on old machines than Windows, especially if the install is done by someone who isn't going to RTFM and find all these little parameters you can tweak, is certainly debatable, and it takes a lot more evidence than "that's what I found" from one person to support such a statement.

The only blame that needs to be assigned here goes to whoever is responsible for you not learning where "your" supposed to put apostrophes at.

Most Linux drivers are in the kernel to begin with so unless you have exotic hardware you never need to recompile kernel modules.

I never said that I was rebuilding kernel modules with each new Linux release, but someone sure is because it has to be done with each release. My suggestion was that I doubt the main kernel developers are prioritizing new code based on backward compatibility tests with ancient hardware any more than Microsoft is.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[Barryke]

The reason not to get Vista is "The new features don't justfiy the cost", not "there's nothing new."

imho: There are *no* features in Vista that *i* want *and* not already have access to.

So basicly, right now it has nothing to offer me. My current work environment and game configuration is just fine. If anything, the entertainment will bring change. I don't bett on business that much, the only reason i perceive is locking system and network down.

To bad the new filesystem was dropped from Vista, that was the motivator for me. I want to be able to deposit one file on two places at once. For example a pdf manual should both exist in /ebooks/manuals pdf/ and /software/someprogram/,
and certain mp3's should be in /music/someartist/somealbum/ and /music/all/ and /music/alphabet/s/ and /music/genre/rock/ and /music/favorites/someselection/ at once.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[Omestes]

Linux does work wonders on broken hardware. I have an old iBook that had terminal (to OS X) HD failure, but it runs Ubuntu perfectly (sans driver issues from running it on an iBook), but cannot support any version of OS X or OS9.

Punchline, Linux is more durable to hardware failures, not that any OS is more intensive. I've had windows 95/98/2k and XP running on 5 years before installation release hardware for years (XP was a bitch, but mostly because of my remainder hardware to give to my parents). The only real problem I've run into is disk space.

And yes, Linux could run on any of these boxes fine, HD space also being a limiting factor.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[sponga]

It will run on Vista RC2 perfectly fine and runs better sometimes than XP did while navigating folders or other network folders. Been playing all of my games pretty fine and some of the newer games like BF2142.

2 computers- AMD Sempron 1.3GHz
Nvidia Geforce TI4200 64/ also ran on AIW 9800 Pro 128
512 MB/ I added 512MB more and seems to help a lot more with the games and heavy applications.

Hell I threw in my Nvidia Riva TNT2 64MB and it still ran it pretty fine; mind it I turned off some of the shadows and other stuff but kept the visual theme of Vista it ran fine. Just the loading process in the beginning is really the difference you will notice between a system like mine and one some guy pays $5000 for.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[electrosoccertux]

If I have a hardware firewall and don't open stupid attachments/other shady .exe files, do I even need better "security"? Unless there is a Firefox exploit, nothing gets executing on my machine that I don't want. Isn't this security enough?

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[jaweekes]

Sure but most people are not computer people, and companies also have to worry about internal hackers , and people who will run unknown exe's from a link that was in an email sent by Uncle Stuart...

As we are all computer people, yes I think you are fine.

I'm going to install Vista on a new laptop at work, but only because it will give me a better computer ;-) (gotta love the required specs!), and I need to know about it for my job.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[oblivionboy]

Right. And why is then I had no problems reinstalling Win2k SP4 on my old Penium Viao. Yes. Exactly, a penitum I Viao. Granted it was the last of the Pentiums at 233 mhz with MMX, and 128mb of RAM, but not only does it run this well, I have no issues running Firefox 2, Thunderbird, and the occasional game of Starcraft.

Its always easy to find the "worst" case scenario, but please. Just because your "unkown brand" laptop locks up during installs of the NT Code based versions of WIndows, could suggest a couple of things: one that your laptop has some problem that causes this to happen, or then of course, that those versions of Windows simply won't work on an old laptop like that. Which paves the way for you to say how great Linux us, how convenient!

For the record, I enjoy Linux alot, and certainly am not a microsoft lover. But lets try and be a little less biased here. .o.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[recharged95]

Yeah, but after installing MS Office, Quicken, a couple of games, all those extensions, DVD player, etc... will it still hold up?

Considering XP boxes appear to lose performance after installing many apps, will Vista be the same?

Why should we really upgrade.

[suman28]

I am sure there will a few hundred posts pointing this out, but XP seems to do the job just fine for now. Just wait till Microsoft releases Vista SP2 or SP3, if that. What intelligent person would really want that DRM OS on their box anyway?

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[LordPhantom]

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....

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Scarletdown]

What intelligent person would really want that DRM OS on their box anyway?

Sadly, that would be the sheeple who don't know any better, the ones who don't even know what DRM is all about, and don't realize that there are viable choices out there instead of just unquestioningly accepting whatever Redmond tosses their way through the big chain stores like Circuit City, Best Buy, Office Depot, etc.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[kfg]

What intelligent person . . .

Ya talking about both of them?

KFG

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Holi]

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.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[DerGeist]

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.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[gstoddart]

I'm sure you'll find out about the time they release DirectX 10 for Vista only....

Ummm .... other than gamers, what about Direct X 10 is gonna make me want to leave my currently working XP box for Vista?

I'm not sure I currently use anything which is affected by Direct X.

Cheers

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[mcmonkey]

I am sure there will a few hundred posts pointing this out, but XP seems to do the job just fine for now.

Post all you like about good XP is, I just don't see any reason to upgrade my Windows 2000 boxes. Do I really want WGA anyway?

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Thansal]

I did not know that.

admitedly, I have no interest in either game.

(quick google tells me that it is simply a lock out and not actualy incompatable)

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[LordPhantom]

Well.... my point to the parent:

What intelligent person would really want that DRM OS on their box anyway?
is that people who like games will. Remember, the world doesn't revolve around you(or me).

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[abigor]

Exactly. I have a dual boot Gentoo/Windows 2000 laptop, and it works just great. I've barely ever even used XP.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Minigun_Fiend]

I think you'll find they run under 2k fine, with a little persuasion.

Much like Battlefield 2.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[bberens]

Actually, Quicken runs under Crossover Linux according to this slashdot article.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Shawn is an Asshole]

What intelligent person . . .

Ya talking about both of them?

I know I won't be using it. I don't know about the other guy, though.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Lord Apathy]

To hell with that. Wait till the crackers get ahold of it and remove all that activation and other bullshit.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Grant_Watson]

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.

Because, as we all know, Microsoft wouldn't want their OS to perform too well on that new hardware near the end of its lifecycle.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Ant P.]

You're wrong. For most people, XP simply doesn't do the job. 9x does.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[zcsteele]

What intelligent person . . .

Ya talking about both of them?

I know I won't be using it. I don't know about the other guy, though.

Nope, me neither.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[westlake]

What intelligent person would really want that DRM OS on their box anyway?

The person who doesn't share the Geek's obsession with DRM. The person who expects media play and PC gaming to "just work" out the box. The person who is in the market for a new and more capable OEM system. The person who likes the look and feel of the new OS and its backwards compatability with his existing software library.

The person who gave Microsoft 95% of the home PC market.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Iron Condor]

I am sure there will a few hundred posts pointing this out, but XP seems to do the job just fine for now. Just wait till Microsoft releases Vista SP2 or SP3, if that. What intelligent person would really want that DRM OS on their box anyway?

Here's how it's going to happen: Our IT folks at work will hear that Vista is supposedly better at keeping viruses and trojans and such at bay than XP. Which doesn't really mean a lot, given XPs performance. So I'm very much inclined to believe MS when they say Vista is going to do better (i.e. less awfully). Given that this crap is what gives the IT folks one of their biggest headaches, they'll tell us to run Vista on the machines here at work. Then they'll insist that laptops connected to the (internal) network run Vista as well. Then the people who somehow manage to cling to XP will find that they cannot open the documents that were sent to them from Vista boxes any more because Office-007 (with the license to kill) is going to be just a smidge incompatible with Word-XP. Just enough to force everybody to upgrade their stuff and re-(re-re-re-re-)learn how to do some simple thing in Excel because the UI was changed just enough to obsolete all the keyboard shortcuts you finally learned.

At least that's kinda how we were forced from 98SE to XP.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[evilviper]

but XP seems to do the job just fine for now.

And 2000 does the job better...

What intelligent person would really want that DRM OS on their box anyway?

What intelligent person would really want an OS that phones home, anyways?

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[ranger_lady]

I'm one of the managers in my IT dept. and the last thing I need or want is another crappy MS OS to deal with. AFAIK, MS has not changed the way they create software, so it's guaranteed to be buggy and problematic.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Creepy Crawler]

Yeah, whatever. If they really wanted to, they could create a near-perfect activation that would be un-"fixable".

How? PKI service running that feeds the kernel specific information gleaned only by username, user_privatekey and MS_publickey. You could turn on or off certain kernel functions with the appropriate kernel calls and responses.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[jazman_777]

For everyone life is full of little constraints and oppressions. We geeks tend to loathe any of those on our computers: we want and like full control. These aren't just tools, they're our toys. That's why we have a problem with DRM. It's not because we're just so smart, or that geeks have such a love of liberty in general over the masses.

For the non-geeks a computer is just another item in life, and the little constraints and oppressions on a computer don't mean a thing. Hey, that's how life is.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Asrynachs]

There are enough dipshits who think Halo 2 is a good game to get some upgrades from XP
I imagine that's probably a route Microsoft is going to take.. suddenly every single game they release.. will be taking **FULL** advantage of all Vistas amazing tweaks and shoo shaws that were previously unavailable.

Lordy lordy if I couldn't live without my desktop crossfading into the games main menu.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Slithe]

What would stop someone from just modifying the kernel not to require activation? Microsoft will have to wait until Palladium becomes more widespread to do this.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[orkysoft]

What game developer would develop for a platform that only a few people use? It'll take years before Vista gets a significant marketshare.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[ThePengwin]

This reminds me of the smartest girl in school's question to me one day "What is linux?" Sadly, 3 people asked after her. If Steam ran Natively in linux id be so there, because as much as you can get it done, i couldnt be bothered to tweak and tweak until i got it completly right. I dont want an OS thats for the majority of people, i want one for me. and DRM is not on my list.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[r3m0t]

The old keyboard shortcuts still work. Even stuff like alt-f s to save.

The only problem is that you don't get much feedback. I tried Beta 2 (pre-Technical Refresh) and all it did was show a shiny box which said something like "legacy Office 2003 shortcut: Alt-F " without any indication of possible finishers. Even emacs does it better. ;)

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[PastaLover]

I very much doubt Microsoft will provide application support for Linux any time soon. If you're a windows developer then it's pretty logical you'll be using windows for your development (unless you're lucky enough to work on something cross platform).

Linux has some interesting features (especially its software ecosystem) that Windows doesn't have, but I agree that it doesn't apply to everyone. For the average person doing web browsing and mail it'll work well enough though. There's replacements out there for quicken too. (though I have no idea how well they work)

My point being that you can't simply expect it to have the exact same software as windows available. For something with a 5% market share (number pulled out of my ass) you'll have to look at some alternative apps if you actually want the same functionality, quicken right now has no real incentive to get ported to Linux. Though it seems that, by its apparent popularity, a Linux port of it would be a real selling point for the OS.

Cunning strategy.

[Headcase88]

The OS keeps the hardware so busy it doesn't have time to run any viruses. (Or anything else for that matter).

Re:Cunning strategy.

[jazman_777]

Kind of a reverse DoS, eh? Clever devils there in Redmond.

Re:Cunning strategy.

[syousef]

I said basically the same thing yesterday and got modded troll instead of funny. What's your secret?

2001 != old

[TheStonepedo]

I know I can't play hot new video games on a 133 MHz pentium, but it does run windows 2000 just fine. I reckon it would run XP a bit slowly. It runs xubuntu like a champ. Except for a few utility-oriented operating systems, most new ones are designed for new hardware. It's about time Microsoft give up on their ridiculous supporting-every-piece-of-hardware-from-the-last-d ecade legacy mentality. It's not so much about the age of the computer as it is about the ability to support all of the new doodads without taking up ridiculous amounts of space with unused drives.

Re:2001 != old

[TheStonepedo]

I ran windows 2000 on a 133 MHz pentium 3 with 64 MB RAM and it was able to run a quake 3 server for 7 players with local pings of about 100. While by no means the kind of ping you'd expect on a LAN, it was sufficient. The computer was an NEC that came bundled with windows 95 and microsoft bob way back in the day, so I don't think it was any kind of overly fancy miracle setup.

Re:2001 != old

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

No real point to this post, just thought it was funny how you complain Vista won't run on your 133 MHz pentium and on the very next line complain that they need "give up on their ridiculous supporting-every-piece-of-hardware-from-the-last-d ecade legacy mentality" ;-)

I realize your original comment may not have been meant as a complaint, but wasn't sure so just used that word. Feel free to substitute, "comment", etc in its place if more fitting.

Re:2001 != old

[GnuAge]

W2K will run acceptably on Socket V hardware as long as it isn't running antivirus software and a software firewall. Once you add those background processes, it slows to a crawl. Linux, on the other paw, doesn't need to run those extra services. Plus, you can chose a lightweight window manager like XFCE or Fluxbox, which isn't an option with Windows. Slackware or a Slack-based XFCE distro like Vectorlinux, Zenwalk, Wolvix, etc. is what I install on hardware of that era.

Re:2001 != old

[shotgunsaint]

I'd almost forgotten about MS Bob... I remember hearing about security problems about a week after it was released, which was amazing considering I didn't have internet access at that point. Can any of Redmond's newer failures ever measure up to the travesty that was BOB?

Re:2001 != old

[dook43]

I'm quite certain Windows 2000 prevents itself from installing to a P5-133. I know that Windows Millenium prevented itself from being installed on a similarly speced system (p166-mmx). You have to resort to cunning tricks in order to do such a thing.

, but it does run windows 2000 just fine. I reckon it would run XP a bit slowly.

Just fine and bit slowly are relative terms.

Re:2001 != old

[Bing Tsher E]

I ran windows 2000 on a 133 MHz pentium 3 with 64 MB RAM

The slowest Pentium 3 system made is (was) 450 MHz.

Re:2001 != old

[kiddygrinder]

true, but you can't do shit once you've got the os running anyway, so why not just chuck it in the bin and by a $50 p3 second hand?

Re:2001 != old

[Unski]

Wrong. For a while I had a Compaq Presario laptop - P133 /w 32 MB of RAM & 2 GB disk space running Windows 2000. Running even one app did put it into swap, but it did let me install it.

Re:2001 != old

[toddestan]

I installed Windows 2000 on a Socket 5 Pentium 120 with 128MB of ram (I managed to dumpster dive what would have been a small fortune in 32MB FPM simms in 1995 a couple of years ago). It went on with no problems, once I figured out how to get around the fact the computer had no idea how to boot from CD. It ran fine, though it was obviously a bit sluggish. Still, once it booted up I could surf the web fine in Firefox 1.0.

I'm really curious to see what kind of ancient hardware that these guys are going to get Vista to boot on.

hardly anybody installs Windows, it's preloaded

[Locutus]

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

Re:hardly anybody installs Windows, it's preloaded

[msobkow]

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.

Re:hardly anybody installs Windows, it's preloaded

[Locutus]

Why would customers buy a "new machine" if it feels more sluggish than the old computer it is supposed to replace?

Because they buy new computers becaues their old one does not work or does not work with the software they think they need to run or they want another computer, etc, etc. And I hardly think they'll purchase a new computer which is of lower quality( spec's ) than the one they are replacing so in the worst case, they'll get something that'll have a new version of MS Windows which 'feels' about the same as before but looks prettier and therefore 'feels' new.

Hasn't this been the case since the early 1990's? The only exception I can think of is when the new Pentium Pro came out and surprising to some, all the 16bit code in Windows 95 caused it to run slower than the older Penium CPUs.

LoB
 

Re:hardly anybody installs Windows, it's preloaded

[jfengel]

The main target for installing Vista on old computers is in offices where they don't want to pay to upgrade the hardware, but want to keep a uniform OS environment for simplicity's sake. They buy the upgrade in bulk, so it's not quite as expensive a proposition as it sounds.

There will also be some home users who will want the new games available only for Vista, or perhaps want the security promises MS is making.

There's another brand-new market for Windows in its non-OEM form: Apple Intel computers. Obviously it's not a terribly large market, but Parallels and Bootcamp give some people a reason to actually buy Windows retail and install it, rather than have it pre-loaded by an OEM.

Re:hardly anybody installs Windows, it's preloaded

[kfg]

Only getting off the treadmill breaks this loop.

But all my lights go out when I do that.

KFG

Re:hardly anybody installs Windows, it's preloaded

[level_headed_midwest]

Bingo. Corporations with MS support contracts and yearly fees do commonly upgrade existing machines. The university that I go to upgraded >1000 machines of various vintage (ranging from PII/233 boxes to 3.0 GHz Pentium 4s) to Windows XP Professional from Windows 2000 two years ago.

Re:hardly anybody installs Windows, it's preloaded

[Foofoobar]

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

And so those thousands of boxes sold at Costco, Walmart and other retail outlets are all just bought by geeks? I seriously doubt it. But this time around, I think those people who DO purchase their copy over the counter are going to be returning alot of those boxes.

Re:hardly anybody installs Windows, it's preloaded

[gatesvp]

Some tools already require 2GB or more per workstation to do enterprise development -- those requirements will only increase under Vista.

Now if only the people I worked for recognized that this was the case, *sigh*.

Re:hardly anybody installs Windows, it's preloaded

[Locutus]

Since Windows 95 I've heard Microsoft say they were rewriting their OS from scratch yet year after year we find the same flaws across many versions. They are a marketing company, don't ya know? Just look at that WMF flaw and you'll see that the coding error is from code used in Windows 3.x yet it was found in everything up to Windows XP.

Sorry but in my book, Microsofts "new" OS's are nothing but updates. It would be different if they'd stop lieing about rewriting it all the time... IMO.

LoB

Your Mom would!

[legal_asshole]

Not intended as a "yo mama" joke, but here's what will happen: our parents, who as a whole are ignorant when it comes to computer issues, will see that Vista is "new and great" from the MS marketing mac--(pause)--hine, and think they need a new computer, since the last one they bought was when XP came out as the "new and great" thing from the MS marketing machine. Nevermind that all she's doing is checking her hotmail account for new pictures of her friend's grandchildren, she needs a new computer, because Madison Avenue told her she did. We're sheep--most of us at least.

At least this time, Vista is so secure that she doesn't need anti-virus ;)

Re:Your Mom would!

[rucs_hack]

pardon me, but I'm 40, a parent, and frankly I know more about operating systems then my son does, and he's supposedly adept at computers.

Mind you, I work with real operating systems, not the godawful rubbish microsoft sells. XP, and I'm sure vista after it, are forever relegated to running games and trivial things that he needs (and endless damn fixing). Anything serious happens on our linux or unix boxes, that he has little or nothing to do with.

Re:Your Mom would!

[dar]

I'm sure your post is true in general, but my Mom is smart enough to use OSX.

Re:Your Mom would!

[foobsr]

Anything serious happens on our linux or unix boxes

The serious things are more likely to happen on IBM mainframes.

CC.

Re:Your Mom would!

[rucs_hack]

Most of my work is with distributed software to perform HPC tasks, trying to move such serious work into the realm of the pc, so no, it isn't all for IBM mainframes.

Well ok a lot of it is, but I go with the idea that a better way is to utilise rooms full of unused undergrad lab machines at night and save money on the big iron. God know undergrads don't utilise them, unless you count flash games and msn messenger as correct utilisation (especially during workshops, dammit).

Re:Your Mom would!

[level_headed_midwest]

You forgot Facebook and MySpace- the two most widely-viewed websites on colleges.

Re:Your Mom would!

[foobsr]

but I go with the idea that a better way is to utilise rooms full of unused undergrad lab machines at night

Yes, this is what I would think as well, but imagine you are a big insurance company - security, backups etc. . (I have a close friend who works with Allianz (Based on preliminary figures, total revenues at 22.6 billion euros were slightly down compared to the equivalent previous year's quarter, but the operating profit increased by 42.7 percent to 2.7 billion euros. Net income for the quarter rose by 100.4 percent to 1.6 billion euros.) and he sometimes shares a little insight with me). Basically, I am with you, but there seems to be a trend (see google data center post) that opposes intelligent use of computer resources as maybe SETI does.

CC,

Re:Your Mom would!

[rucs_hack]

hear that whooshing sound? Thats those numbers going over my head.

Good god, I'm just working on the idea of saving a few thousand pounds a year and enabling poorly funded researchers to get stuff done without the large budgets others have. This is primarily inspired by my struggles as an undergrad, and later, post grad, trying to do HPC problems on crappy desktop computers. SETI is an inspiration in this respect, but I prefer to originate my own distribution software.

I couldn't conceive of anything involving such large amounts of money, what with being an academic and all. I do absolutelly hate the awful waste of money that is having hundreds of computers on campus ticking over and doing nothing but burning energy.

Re:Your Mom would!

[holdenholden]

I admire your use of parentheses.

Re:Your Mom would!

[foobsr]

Again, I am with you (And my friend is a poor SAS programmer involved in mainframe performance evaluation), and me myself is not in the big bucks either (I would not post here, would I :).

I do absolutely hate the awful waste of money that is having hundreds of computers on campus ticking over and doing nothing but burning energy.

Society is more likely to waste, both the energy that the boxes consume but also the energy of those who could do a job on how to save resources.

CC.

Re:Your Mom would!

[foobsr]

Don't.

The real capability has vanished in the (bitter) course of time.

CC.

Re:Your Mom would!

[turbidostato]

"Yes, this is what I would think as well, but imagine you are a big insurance company (...) there seems to be a trend (see google data center post) that opposes intelligent use of computer resources as maybe SETI does."

Don't think so. Banks, insurance companies and the like are not making such big profits by being dumb.

As an example here you have one of biggest Spanish banks using distributed computing for financial computations: https://lists.cs.wisc.edu/archive/condor-users/200 6-November/msg00063.shtml

As they explain, the resulting reduction on cost per Gigaflop was from 44 to 4EUR over a standard SMP solution (big iron).

Re:Your Mom would!

[legal_asshole]

what part of "as a whole" did you not understand? Clearly I was speaking about the parents that "work with real operating systems", since that's the majority of parents. I also meant *OUR* (as in /. readers') parents as a whole, so the average parent I would be referring to would not be a 40-yo.

Re:Your Mom would!

[drsmithy]

pardon me, but I'm 40, a parent, and frankly I know more about operating systems then my son does, and he's supposedly adept at computers.

Then you should be able to explain how/why linux and unix are "real operating systems" and Windows NT isn't.

While you're at it, can you explain why using 'then' instead of 'than' is such a common error ? At 40, you should be able to offer a good perspective.

Re:Your Mom would!

[rucs_hack]

on the spelling thing, don't know, I'm dyslexic. Personally I go with whichever version of a word appears, and leave others to work it out :-)

Windows NT is a single user operating system that allows multiple, but not simultanious logins, unix and linux are true multi-user systems.

Unix and linux are posix complient, which windows is only barely able to manage in any incarnation, and conform to open standards for operating system design, NT doesn't.

Unix and linux are more easily bent to the distributed processing model, by their design, the availability and low cost of software, and their multi-core support.

Linux has more efficient process management.

Windows NT is moderatelly competant in it's role, but not superior to unix or linux.

Windows NT does not implement pipes.

A goodly portion of the unix and linux code was written for the love of coding, producing undeniably superior results. This is, I will admit, a subjective view, but one that is shared by many.

Re:Your Mom would!

[drsmithy]

Windows NT is a single user operating system that allows multiple, but not simultanious logins, unix and linux are true multi-user systems.

Windows NT is, and always has been, a multiuser OS.

Unix and linux are posix complient, which windows is only barely able to manage in any incarnation, and conform to open standards for operating system design, NT doesn't.

What "open standards for operating system design" ?

Unix and linux are more easily bent to the distributed processing model, by their design, the availability and low cost of software, and their multi-core support.

You need to be more specific. Windows NT was designed from the ground up for multiprocessor systems and supported them a lot better than Linux did, a lot sooner.

Linux has more efficient process management.

You need to be more specific.

Windows NT is moderatelly competant in it's role, but not superior to unix or linux.

There are numerous areas where Windows NT is superior or, at worst, equivalent.

Windows NT does not implement pipes.

What definition of "implement" are you using here ? AFAIK Windows NT has pipes.

A goodly portion of the unix and linux code was written for the love of coding, producing undeniably superior results. This is, I will admit, a subjective view, but one that is shared by many.

I doubt there are many people working on NT who don't enjoy coding.

Most of your complaints sound very much like "it isn't unix, so it sucks". That's an opinion you're welcome to, but UNIX is not Operating System utopia - it's not even close.

The more things change...

[tkrotchko]

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.

Re:The more things change...

[tkrotchko]

I've been using Windows since 3.0, and I must say, this is the first major version (I'm not counting ME) that has me completely uninterested in upgrading my PC. It's not just the hardware requirement; I'll buy a new PC. It's just that I appear to be getting a slightly upgraded XP that has as it's major feature a cool windowing system and a lot of DRM thrown into the box.

I'm going to stick with XP for a while and then upgrade to a Mac Pro. My thinking is that the Mac lets me run most of the things I'd like to run, and that I can run VMWare/Parallels for stuff that is Windows only (or dual boot).

My kids have been using OS X for a couple years now and there really is no problem with it, and Apple seems to be able to get new versions out without the drama (I mean, once OS X was released about 10 years late).

Re:The more things change...

[drsmithy]

I've been using Windows since 3.0, and I must say, this is the first major version (I'm not counting ME) that has me completely uninterested in upgrading my PC. It's not just the hardware requirement; I'll buy a new PC. It's just that I appear to be getting a slightly upgraded XP that has as it's major feature a cool windowing system and a lot of DRM thrown into the box.

Which is a rather strange attitude, because from a technical perspective, Vista is probably the biggest Windows update ever released...

Re:The more things change...

[tkrotchko]

Oh, I realize that. I just don't see the end-user benefit over XP.

Seriously, what is the day-to-day benefit of Vista over XP? Nobody has done a good job explaining it. If you follow the course of Windows, 3.x-> Win95, Win95->Win98, Win98->WinXP, Win2K->WinXP, there were benefits to consumers at every step.

Where's the benefit with XP->Vista?

Re:The more things change...

[r3m0t]

Microsoft said it was reforming its "minimum requirements" policy, along the lines of "a computer which follows these 'minimum requirements' doesn't merely run Windows, but runs it reasonably with a few applications besides."

I'm waiting to see how that pans out.

Re:The more things change...

[r3m0t]

Note: When I started writing this post, I decided to pick out only common tasks made easier and front-end changes. I diverged a little.

Well, there's the find in the start menu (press Start and start typing a command line or the name of an application... just like Gnome's deskbar-applet, but without pluggable support for other actions like typing e-mail addresses, words to look up in the dictionary, search queries, web addresses, calculations and other stuff)

Then there's the sidebar - hang on, they removed that and made it a ghost of its original plans.

Then there's the per-application volume control (which is of course enforced by Windows and not left to the application ;-) ).

Then there's the new networking stack (I think there's selective ACKnowledgment or something like that, which speeds up your transfers. Also IPv6 support improved *rolleyes*)

You might like the Aero style including the close button being larger than the others. You can tone down the transparency. The close button and start button both appear to be quite far from their screen corners - "snatching defeat from the jaws of success" as somebody said. (Look up Fitt's Law if you don't know what I'm on about.)

There's Previous Versions aka Volume Shadow Copy which silently backs up your files and lets you restore past versions from the file properties dialog. (Only available in Enterprise and Ultimate for some reason.)

There's Stacks in Windows Explorer. This looks a bit like sorting in Outlook 2003 and up where your messages are grouped and clearly seperated.

Thumbnails in Windows Explorer can display the actual file contents, like Gnome and KDE have done for years.

You can install more than one language and switch between them. Changes appear the next time you log on. (Enterprise and Ultimate only.)

Windows Desktop Search is improved and is pluggable. (I haven't jumped onto the search bandwagon yet...) Indexing uses low priority for I/O (apparently the concept is new to Vista) in order to keep your system snappy.

The Explorer address bar has the breadcrumbs view which is pretty neat. You can also now use Alt-Up to go up one level. This keyboard shortcut is christened "Latest. Addition. Ever.".

You get a clone of iCal, if you want such things.

New backup software. (Check out the shellrevealed.com forums for some hilarious complaints about functionality removed compared to NTBackup.)

Firewall can block outgoing connections.

UAC is useful to prevent pesky applications from doing pesky things.

Parental Controls, if you take that attitude. Also pluggable.

DRM support so that your next-gen video discs will refuse to play without a "Protectd Video Path", etc!

Flip3D allows you to see all your windows while switching between them. A bit like Expose and its Linux clones.

Apparently printing is improved although I can't understand how.

File associations can be managed from a simpler user interface which is also far less flexible. The old UI is also removed.

Wireless support improved. (Also handwriting recognition improved if you use a Tablet PC.)

Better ACPI support.

Transactional NTFS. (Multiple file commits can all be done in one transaction - they either all fail or all succeed.)

Lots of backend stuff improved. (No, really.)

Re:The more things change...

[toddestan]

Which is a rather strange attitude, because from a technical perspective, Vista is probably the biggest Windows update ever released...

Well, with about 8GB of drive space used for just the install, and with a memory footprint of over 512MB, I can't argue with that.

Ares Technica dead

[SuperKendall]

You have got to be kidding - Ars used to be an amazing source of technical detail, with awesome in-depth and truly technical reviews of things.

Now look at it today. It's basically just a tech news site, only with not as good commentary or technical details as most other places. Basically baboons have set up shop in the ruins of the Ars that was.

Re:Ares Technica dead

[vought]

Now look at it today. It's basically just a tech news site, only with not as good commentary or technical details as most other places. Basically baboons have set up shop in the ruins of the Ars that was.

It's still light years better than the swamp of News.com. Talk about ignorance on display...

RAM prices to rise or fall?

[Brit_in_the_USA]

So will RAM prices (DDR and DDR2) fall as Xmas passes or go up as people relaise they need more for Vista?

Re:RAM prices to rise or fall?

[springbox]

DDR SDRAM is still way too expensive. $100 for 1 GiB of it doesn't seem to bad if you're comparing it to the past prices of basically the same thing, but I would have thought that it would have been a bit cheaper already.

Well, of course

[FuzzyDaddy]

They just delay the release so that the hardware can become powerful enough to run what they've got.

Vista RC1 is slow

[Craig Davison]

Disk-intensive operations in Explorer were very slow in the Vista RC1 release on my 2003-era (with no GPU) hardware. Deleting a folder that used to take 5 seconds now takes about a minute. I saw similar results for unzipping (with Explorer) and copying folders. I don't know whether it's the new pane-of-glass-sliding-across-the-window progress UI, or whether some optimizations were turned off for RC1.
Also, if you're upgrading, keep in mind you need 10.7 GB free disk space to upgrade from Windows XP. In the end, Vista takes up about 8 GB.
But, hey! It's got IPv6, and the hourglass cursor is now a circle!

Re:Vista RC1 is slow

[Hijacked Public]

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.

Re:Vista RC1 is slow

[loraksus]

I experienced the same problem.
This is a screenshot I took on one of the occassions where file operations would just seem to stall for no reason at all.

And it actually took 3 minutes to finish deleting 9mb

Re:Vista RC1 is slow

[zcsteele]

But, hey! It's got IPv6, and the hourglass cursor is now a circle!

Cursor,n: The object that occupies the space between the chair and keyboard.

Re:Vista RC1 is slow

[kamochan]

...and the hourglass cursor is now a circle!

They copied even that from the mac? Oh, my head hurts...

Re:Vista RC1 is slow

[kalidasa]

That's very interesting - I guess Aperture has improved enough to the point that it has Microsoft running scared when it comes to the Pro photographer market. Yes, the Adobe product line is much stronger - just Photoshop makes it much stronger, and most folks think Lightroom is better than Aperture - but it's available on both platforms (though of course most Adobe software still runs in Rosetta on Intel Macs), while Aperture is only available on the Mac.

Re:Motherboard Sales Falling

[Headcase88]

I submitted that article yesterday but it wasn't accepted--must be my crummy authoring skills.

That's ok. You probably just need to bash Microsoft less ashamedly next time.

Seriously though, /. gets a lot of story submissions. Your submission was probably received by a different editor who didn't think it was newsworthy, or didn't fit the omelette for that day, or something.

Violating EULA?

[Brickwall]

Wasn't there an article here in the last couple of weeks pointing out that the Vista EULA wouldn't allow benchmarking? Or am I imagining things in my dotage?

Re:Violating EULA?

[Shados]

Most Microsoft EULA's don't allow benchmarking, but unless you have a lot of visibility, they rarely call anyone up on it. You can see SQL Server benchmarks everywhere, yet these are what Microsoft is the most anal about.

What's going on here?

[MaWeiTao]

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.

Re:What's going on here?

[Shados]

Please note I do not know the details of the -implementation- of Aero, so the following is just the theory behind the concept:

The idea is, by making the UI hardware accelerated, you shift the burden of the UI from the cpu to the video card, which would be almost idle at that time, thus getting -better- performance overall (since GPUs are more efficient, and, again, was idle). Now, if you're hitting the GPU anyway, you have a lot of spare cycles, so might as well add eye candy, its "free" so to speak, since its just eating up idle time.

Then, the reason for a Direct X 9 requirement (thus forcing newer cards), is purely to be able to use the newer and more powerful APIs. As shown often in Macs vs Windows debates, keeping legacy around is often an issue. Now, if the decision of Microsoft to flush legacy in this scenario is right or wrong, is beyond the scope of my post.

Now, maybe Microsoft coded their UI in a way that went beyond just the idea of tapping into the idle GPU, and thats a stupid decision. The original idea though (as seen on both Macs and Linux), is a good one.

Re:What's going on here?

[realmolo]

It's not more demanding than contemporary games, really

But remember, the GUI has to work with every other part of the system. It can't be "optimized" in the same way as a game, because it's not really a standalone application.

Or are we all forgetting that OS X's GUI was fairly sluggish until they switched to Intel machines with real graphics cards? The Intel Macs should run Vista pretty well.

Re:What's going on here?

[Ruie]

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.

Well, the big difference is that a game has a (relatively) small number of windows displayed at the same time and it can know exactly what their graphic demands are. I.e. if an extra transparent overlay is too much programmers can turn it off - before the release or in the patch or options..

With OS the easy way is the bruteforce "have each window paint into its own area and then combine" which (obviously) places a lot of stress on the hardware. Now, I am sure Windows is smarter than this, but likely not by much - it would not be able to get window snapshots otherwise.

In other words, there is a reason that old-style GUIs use static opaque rectangular windows - this can be done efficiently even on 1 Mhz cpus.

Re:What's going on here?

[tb3]

That's utter crap.
OS X 10.4 ran perfectly well on my G3 500Mhz, with 16MB of VRAM. It runs even better on my Dual G4 450 Mhz, with a Radeon 9000 with 128 MB of VRAM.
OS X has always looked better than Windows. No painting delays, no shearing, no remnants of other windows left behind on the screen.

Re:What's going on here?

[pherthyl]

I have to second this. I don't use mac's (the UI annoys me), but they really got the performance of their GUI right. At work I once had an old 500Mhz G3, (running 10.3 or something) and the UI performance was great. Resizing windows was a bit choppy, but everything else worked very smoothly. Now if I run Vista on my laptop from last year (AMD64 3200, 1GB RAM, ATI Xpress200m), it is not as smooth as that ancient iBook. I can guarantee you every component in my laptop is far far faster than anything in the iBook.

So the question remains, why is the Aero UI such a pig when it has been demonstrated by both Apple and Linux distros that the same sort of effects can be done with garbage hardware.

Re:What's going on here?

[flyingfsck]

It is just bad code. Loading the same fonts over and over - opening the same files over and over. Abysmal performance is typically due to dumb-ass C++ code creating and destroying the same old objects for no good reason.

Re:What's going on here?

[davidsyes]

Moving the cube around in Compiz reminded me of Half Life/Counter-Strike levels where one could see world while awaiting resurrection.

Back in 2001 on Dell Latitude, panning was not too bad, but it was much better on my desktop at home. When I played with Compiz recently, I couldn't help but wonder how cool it was, and what the hell was going on with mshaft.

I, TOO, feel they are doing this on purpose to drive hardware sales. After all, Compiz worked on a 128 MB Radeon (fglrx) it tested, and I've read somewhere online that even a 64 MB card supporting XGL/3D ran fine. Of course, when I turned off 3D and stayed only in 2D, even my 16 MB ATI Rage in my slim desktop ran fairly fast, depending on if I hit sites with too damned many graphics intensive Java or flash or music players popping up all the time.

But, from ms' line of thinking, it's probably like this "who'll want to buy shiny new vista and then run it on a shitty, two-year-old card?".... Ummm....

Re:What's going on here?

[stanleypane]

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.

Re:What's going on here?

[CastrTroy]

I was running XGL/Compiz on Linux, and it ran quite smoothly on my AMD64 3200+ with Radeon x550. I disable it because half the time it wouldn't start up, most likely due to bad ATI drivers. Anyway, speed being the issue, it was very fast. According to a comment here the specs are very low, at P3 1GH and 512 MB of memory with a weak GForce Card.

Re:What's going on here?

[Trixter]

"But remember, the GUI has to work with every other part of the system. It can't be "optimized" in the same way as a game, because it's not really a standalone application."

That is the most absurd thing I've read this entire thread. Just because it's not a standalone application doesn't mean it "can't" be optimized. Usually system libraries are the *first* things to be optimized because they get so much use.

Re:What's going on here?

[Trifthen]

But what about Compiz? That just slaps directly into a XOrg installation and makes use of 3d video card features, requiring little memory or CPU usage to accomplish this mighty feat. In the video I link, they're rotating the desktop cube with videos playing on top of each other, in the crease of the cube... all in realtime. This is on old video cards such as ATI x200's.

Seriously, MS has taken so long with this, even Linux has passed it. ;)

Re:What's going on here?

[drsmithy]

So the question remains, why is the Aero UI such a pig when it has been demonstrated by both Apple and Linux distros that the same sort of effects can be done with garbage hardware.

Because the base video card to get decent Aero performance is five years old and costs US$30.

What _possible_ ROI benefit is there to optimising an OS for people who won't even prepared to spend US$50ish upgrading their 5 year old PCs with a better video card an a gig of RAM ? Because they sure as hell aren't going to buy Vista if they're that tight.

OS X runs (badly - anything less than a G5 is awful at running OS X) on old hardware because *it has to* - it was released back when that hardware was common. Vista is being released when an "old and slow" machine is a 1Ghz+ P3 class box (which, with a gig of RAM and a cheap video card, runs Vista better than a 1Ghz G4 runs OS X) and a brand new PC - where the bulk of Vista installs are going to come from anyway - costs less than US$500. Why on earth would Microsoft expect developer time and effort on making it work on anything less ? Where's the benefit ?

Re:What's going on here?

[GigsVT]

The UI did suck up 100% of the CPU on those old macs though. I remember moving the mouse over that menu bar at the bottom with the zoom effect, and watching the CPU max out.

Once you turned off all the "slick" stuff it wasn't as bad. People often forget that a lot of the eye candy had to be disabled on those old macs before OS X didn't suck.

Re:What's going on here?

[drsmithy]

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.

It's not.

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 minimum video card for Aero is ~5 years old. A modern equivalent costs US$30ish. How well do "contemporary" games run well on such video cards ?

Re:What's going on here?

[mr_matticus]

100% CPU isn't a bad thing, and considering that the "old Macs" you're talking about are 233MHz G3s, it's not hard to imagine filling up the CPU a lot of the time.

The only time 100% CPU is bad is if you're trying to do something else at that exact moment. I don't understand this nearly holy practice of making sure that your CPU stays as close to idle as possible.

It's like free RAM--if you have free RAM all the time, it's a waste of money and silicon. As long as the OS is smart enough to give up most of its RAM/CPU cycles when a higher priority application requests it, there's no downside, except for weird Slashdot benchmarking types.

Re:What's going on here?

[brownsteve]

I think Apple did a pretty good job optimizing Aqua for OS X. The minimum requirements, IIRC, are just a G3 processor and 256 MB RAM. You still get all the lickable widgets and compositing goodness, with much fewer resources.

Re:What's going on here?

[pherthyl]

What _possible_ ROI benefit is there to optimising an OS for people who won't even prepared to spend US$50ish upgrading their 5 year old PCs with a better video card an a gig of RAM ?

I can think of several:
1. Laptops. They are selling more than desktops these days, and you can't upgrade the graphics card on them (usually). Also, even modern laptops rarely have high performance video cards.
2. Power consumption. GPU processing isn't free like some people want to pretend. More processing = less time that the GPU can be in power saving mode.

Also, since you didn't read my post properly, my laptop is just over 1 year old, and yet Vista feels sluggish on it. Yes the video card isn't the best (ATI Radeon Xpress 200M, 128MB dedicated RAM) but considering it runs reasonably modern games like HL2, I don't see why it is sluggish on the effects in Vista.

Re:Remember kids...

[Overzeetop]

Well, a P-M 1.5 with integrated i915 graphics and a 4200RPM disk drive isn't going to be exactly snappy for real compute-intensive stuff anyway. My 2 year old lappy smokes that "new" thinkpad, and I haven't upgraded a thing since I got it.

Somehow, a "prettier" OS isn't really very high on my list. The ability to hide more and more of the inner workings behind a "friendly" interface does squat for me when I need fix a problem. I suppose it's good for the average user, 'cause it keeps them from screwing stuff up too easily. I still run with the classic windows style, and all the fancy stuff is off. Heck, until two weeks ago, I didn't even have a background. Don't get me wrong - I like an aesthetically pleasing, well laid out UI as much as the next guy, but I can (and will) do without the window dressing for its own sake.

In contrast

[anomaly]

I just picked up a "spare" thinkpad T21 (PIII 800MHz, 384MB RAM)

I booted Puppy Linux, and after about 5 minutes figuring out where Puppy stores the WEP key, had that box on line. It's rocket fast and requires no tweaking. I was blown away with how well I could open word and excel documents from OWA.

New OS' from Redmond always need more CPU and RAM. Interestingly, I was also recently shocked at how usable Tiger was on a G3 233 with 256MB RAM. DARN usable. Try that with a current MS OS and hardware built in 1999! :)

Re:In contrast

[SillyNickName4me]

Hmm, XP is actually pretty responsive on my late 90s dual pII 333 with 512mb ram. Usable? that would mean I have an actual use for XP, which I don't, but it was definitely usable for some mail and web browsing and even office (2k) seemed pretty workable. Of course any cpu/gpu intensive gaming is out of the question

Re:In contrast

[rthille]

Interesting comment about Tiger. I recently had one of my Crucial 512MB SO-DIMMS go bad in my 400MHz pismo (G3) laptop. I definitely noticed the difference in responsiveness and usability between 512MB and 1GB while I was waiting for the replacement memory. Of course, it's Safari. I would only panic when running Safari...

Re:In contrast

[drsmithy]

New OS' from Redmond always need more CPU and RAM. Interestingly, I was also recently shocked at how usable Tiger was on a G3 233 with 256MB RAM. DARN usable. Try that with a current MS OS and hardware built in 1999! :)

If you find Tiger "usable" on a 233Mhz G3 (_especially_ a laptop) then XP is going to be - at worst - similarly "usable" on a ca. 1999 PC.

Unless you're applying double standards, of course...

Wrong

[Constantine XVI]

Sorry, but Longhorn server will be able to run a bare-bones UI - a blank desktop with a command prompt. Come back next week.

Re:This is news?

[Shados]

Actualy, I remember Microsoft stating that they were going toward a path of less is better with their server not long after they released Win2003. My guess is that the UI probably will be turned off by default, even.

Will it run on my UNIVAC?

[Rob T Firefly]

And does anyone have a copy on punch cards they could dupe for me? I had the early release candidate all ported over to the UNIVAC standard 90-column cards and ready to go, but during the last inventory I spilled coffee on one of the DLL batches, jumped up in surprise, and accidentally knocked over crate #47,128.

Will someone please bring me a new rip of Vista right away, or at the very least a large rake?

Re:Will it run on my UNIVAC?

[alexhs]

Please submit an Ask Slashdot entry and you won't ever be lacking dupes. If it's less than 16 777 216 crates, Slashdot will handle it just fine.

Re:Will it run on my UNIVAC?

[brundlefly]

This is why slashdot needs a "Score: 7, Soil Yourself".

Change Everything! Now!

[Petersko]

"I must be getting old because I don't see what upgrading will do for me. I chug along nicely on my ancient PIII-866, I repaired the motherboard twice now and I have no plans on changing. Besides, all I do is check emails and program a bit of microcontroller code and design some small PCBs, why do I need Vista and a new machine for this? I barely know how the win2k OS really works, now I'm supposed to change everything?"

You know, the simple fact that somebody is pointing a gun at the back of your head and demanding that you upgrade should be enough to get you to do so.

Wait... What do you mean, "Nobody's forcing me?" from the tone of your post I could swear your death was imminent, should you choose not to comply.

It works OK

[FuturePastNow]

I installed the Release Candidates on a Sempron 2200+ with 512MB RAM. The system would have been fine for simple office/parent use. All the hardware worked right away, including the budget VIA chipsets and a generic PCI gigabit card. Vista really does need a gig of RAM, though, with only 512 it was constantly accessing the pagefile.

Really, the memory requirement is important, the others less so. Any Intel or AMD CPU from the last four or five years will run Vista well.

Re:Vista is just background noise.

[mozkill]

well, OSX is a huge ripoff of Gnome and KDE.

Re:Article summary about the same article?

[PseudoQuant]

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.

To paraphrase...

[Petersko]

" just picked up a "spare" thinkpad T21 (PIII 800MHz, 384MB RAM). I booted Puppy Linux [puppylinux.org], and after about 5 minutes figuring out where Puppy stores the WEP key, had that box on line. It's rocket fast and requires no tweaking. I was blown away with how well I could open word and excel documents from OWA. New OS' from Redmond always need more CPU and RAM. Interestingly, I was also recently shocked at how usable Tiger was on a G3 233 with 256MB RAM. DARN usable. Try that with a current MS OS and hardware built in 1999! :)"

Translation: "Windows is a hog. I heart linux. Mod me up!"

Sure you want to go out on a limb like that here on slashdot?

Re:Vista is just background noise.

[__aaclcg7560]

So you don't want any coal this year?

Re:Article summary about the same article?

[IGTeRR0r]

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.

Re:Remember kids...

[pjameson]

I don't know if it's really that bad of a computer to expect some performance out of. I have very similar specs on my laptop and it's running compiz on Linux just fine. I don't see what should make aero unusable on anything less than a gaming card.

In Summary

[UnknowingFool]

My summary:

Vista will run on older hardware but you're not going to get any of the cool UI features unless you have a newer video card and lots of RAM. There are some kinks that are still in Vista at this time. When installing Vista always do a clean install.

Personally, I'm getting not getting Vista. I'm hoping that XP drops in price when Vista comes out. I'll recommend XP to my friends who are still on 95/98/ME/2K and want to keep their hardware.

Re:In Summary

[AlexMax2742]

Don't expect this to happen. If I recall correctly, when XP came out, they kept 98 at Home's price point and 2000 at Pro's price point, even years after their release.

Requirements don't seem bad

[archcommus]

Being able to get a decent experience out of Vista on a 1.2 GHz processor with 512 RAM and a 64 MB video card is pretty decent. Being able to get the full experience out of Vista and still play games okay on a system like mine (A64, 1 GB RAM, X800 XL) is also pretty good. Of course I will want to move to 2 gigs in time but the fact that gaming performance of recent titles should still be up to par with 1 GB is nothing to complain about. I think it's pretty ridiculous to assume they purposely made the OS sluggish and poorly coded to entice hardware upgrades.

And really, if your system is less powerful than the Gateway box Ars used, it's probably a very basic use computer that is absolutely fine with 2000 or XP anyway.

Re:Speaking of spin

[Procyon101]

Are you saying that performance suffering at 512MB under normal usage conditions *isn't* extremely ram hungry??? You must work for Microsoft.

Your point is...?

[Petersko]

Wow - you went all the way back to a different thread to check my consistency, but you didn't really make a point with it.

The guy in this thread does email, writes some microcontroller code, and designs some PCB's. Doesn't sound like he has a single reason to upgrade. In the older thread, somebody had to interoperate with others, and had to decide whether or not it was worth their client relationship to disconnect.

What exactly is bothering you about these two viewpoints? You know it's possible to decide something situation by situation.

Its true

[Jahz]

Half a dozen Microsoft Engineers, marketeers and QA people held big technical talk at my university a few weeks ago. They did not hide the fact that Vista was designed for the future, not the past. First of all, nearly all of the new visual fluff will disable itself on hardware older than probably around 3 years old. If you get your old laptops and aging 5+ year old machines to run Vista, it will revert to the same old XP UI. I'm not sure about any non-fluff features... they probably disable depending on hardware as well.

So bottom line is that the Vista "experience" will vary from machine to machine. Old machines will feel just like XP. Recent machines will likely have a mix of low-resource XP features and new Vista stuff. Vista-ready machines and other very recent machines will be the only ones to get the whole "experience" (aka Aero Glass, etc).

This is what the told an auditorium of student. I also have a pre-release version that I don't care to install...

Re:Its true

[SoulRider]

low-resource XP features

Thanks for the laugh!

Re:Article summary about the same article?

[mattgreen]

Slashdot editors tend to accept stories that re-spin what the original article was spinning if it violates one or more of the Basic Memes (Linux/Apple/Google = always good, Microsoft = always bad). One of the most memorable proofs was the recent CIA/Google article which suggested that one adopt a dismissive attitude toward the whole thing, based on needing more evidence. Everyone knows that if the article was about the evil, evil em-dollar sign, that comment wouldn't have been there.

Re:Speaking of spin

[Control Group]

Two responses:

a) The point is that the ars article was nowhere near as negative as the /. blurb.
b) Vista is no different in this regard than XP, while the blurb implies that it's worse.

and?

[xlordtyrantx]

But, hey! It's got IPv6, and the hourglass cursor is now a circle!

I have IPv6 on my Windows XP machine. And I can put whatever kind of cursor on there that I want.

Re:Article summary about the same article?

[dlapine]

There were 2 articles. The original, which nothing about upgrades, and a follow-up which had information about performance after upgraded. The slashdot summary is correct- the article noted that upgrading produced a much slower system in several cases.

What I found interesting was the default install size- A clean install of Vista 64 bit is sitting at over 12GB!! That's 3 times the size WinXP. I note that the author of the article reported that without comment. Ouch.

Some new distros still work fine on my PPro/200.

[Richard Steiner]

Minidistros like Puppy Linux, DSL, Feather Linux, INSERT (from the Ultimate Boot CD), and Austrumi all work just fine on a PPro/200 with 192MB of RAM (of which I have several), and even Gentoo boots and runs in an acceptable manner. SLAX also works (at least the Popcorn Edition CD I tried).

Not all Linux distros are bloated, thankfully, or even default to GNOME or KDE.

why, why . . .

[dweebzilla]

Why do we continue to bash this dead subject?

Like many others I refuse to run XP, and it will be a cold day in hell before I run Vista, But who fucking cares.

I only hope that I'll never have to support it.

Re:why, why . . .

[angrykeyboarder]

Just because you don't like Windows doesn't make it a "dead subject".

Frankly, I'm bored with (and tired of) Sci-Fi and Game stories. I just ignore them and move on.

Re:Article summary about the same article?

[SoulRider]

stooped? now?

You must be new here.

Re:Speaking of spin

[Procyon101]

I have used both. I am intimately familiar with Vista. Vista is indeed more ram hungry than XP. Personally, I would not recommend running Vista with less than 2Gigs, and I assume that ars will change their recommendation (I'm pretty sure they didn't recommend a Gig for XP when it went gold.. many people were running it in 128M.)

If you can't run basic apps without swapping in 128M then IMO your OS is a *HUGE* ram hog, but that's just my opinion... and of course the current state of all OS's in use not made by Microsoft.

Re:Does anyone..

[vought]

Does anyone have a side by side comparison with OS 10.4?

No, but I do have 10.4.8 running on a 1998-vintage PowerBook G3 Series machine with 256MB of RAM. We use it as a wired iTunes station for our studio and a web-browsing machine for in front of the TV.

Subjectively, it's not bad. I wouldn't try to accomplish any photo editing or other heavy-duty tasks, but for e-mail, web, and iTunes, it's snappy enough to be usable. With iTunes and Safari running, it's almost out of RAM, but runs without paging to death for about an hour of web surfing.

Based on this article, 1998 PC hardware is not going to provide the same level of service - if it'll even run Vista. Running Vista on a Virtual PC with 512MB of RAM is unusable, but I can't claim that as a valid comparison.

Aero Glass?

[vought]

More like Garish Ass!

Why the problem with upgrades?

[ben there...]

That's the question that the article failed to answer. The laptop had integrated graphics, which would steal some system memory. So it was probably paging a lot. Was the pagefile fragmented to 5 chunks on a 4200 rpm drive? The extra seeking would cause some slowdown.

Did he have spyware or a bunch of stupid "helpful" services running, that were absent in the clean install?

Or was it, as he said, "...we'd guess that it's related to how system drivers are upgrade in the upgrade process?"

Security

[Z34107]

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.

Re:Security

[chrisvdp74656]

although the only antivirus offering compatible with Vista as of now if from TrendMicro.

Avast is fully compatible.

Re:Security

[nexex]

Problem signature
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
OS Version: 6.0.5744.2.0.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033

Files that help describe the problem (some files may no longer be available)
Mini102906-01.dmp
sysdata.xml
Version.txt

  View a temporary copy of these files
Warning: If a virus or other security threat caused the problem, opening a copy of the files could harm your computer.

Extra information about the problem
BCCode: 1000008e
BCP1: C0000005
BCP2: 842A1E5E
BCP3: 8FB8F914
BCP4: 00000000
OS Version: 6_0_5744
Service Pack: 0_0
Product: 256_1
Server information: 31900db2-98fd-451c-acfb-6c3aa5dddffd

You must not be trying hard enough :P

Re:Security

[porl]

the only time I've seen a blue screen in Vista was when DivX raped my install of Windows Media Player 11.

so what you are saying is that the 'only' time you have seen a blue screen on vista is when two programs that should have *no* access to lower level functions without going through special sandbox privileged paths designed to keep them from being able to crash the kernel when they crash crashed and brought down the kernel with them?

doesn't sound much better to me. when xp was released (you can see this in the installation banners if you don't believe me) they claimed that when a program crashes you will no longer need to restart the computer as they are safely in their own memory spaces... i think someone is crying 'wolf!' again...

Re:Security

[r3m0t]

I know it isn't relevant for deciding whether to use Vista, but ASLR has been in Linux for a long time now.

The WDM comment only applies to 64-bit, and what you're basically saying is "instability is largely caused by bad drivers. Microsoft will not allow bad drivers to run by disabling your ability to install unsigned drivers." In other words, "in the name of stability, Microsoft has decided what I can do with my computer."

If I wanted to not run unsigned drivers, then I WOULD not run unsigned drivers. But I still think the choice should be left to me.

Still, it's nice to know that most drivers will be usermode.

Re:Security

[syousef]

You sure know how to defend Microsoft when.
UAC is a joke. Thousands of popups to nag me to death on normal everyday tasks is just not an acceptable tradeoff for secuirty. ASLR is a neat idea, but as you said not new nor worth an OS upgrade. Protected Mode is a lot more work for the admin and developer alike. WDM - they do this every time - new OS, new driver model. Breaks plenty of drivers that work well for some limited benefit with new ones. Windows update - you said it yourself we've had it for ages. Who cares if it useds a web browser and active X or some other interface. Not important.

Stop drinking the cool aid before it's too late.

Mod parent insightful!

[XSforMe]

"It gives most of you something more with Microsoft about which you may gripe. "

Slashdot needs this new windows version, as bad as Microsoft does!

Isn't that the point?

[gelfling]

Isn't the Wintel Deathmarch Upgrade cycle something we understand by now? You make a new OS IN ORDER TO make people buy more hardware.

Re:Article summary about the same article?

[NineNine]

I know. 12 Gig? WTF does this thing do that it needs 12 Gig? That's absolutely unbelievable. I still use lots and lots of 6-20 gig hard drives at work. I won't be upgrading to Vista any time soon just because of the hard drive space!

Old Hardware Guy here

[Bing Tsher E]

I am the guy who back in the day installed Microsoft Excel for Windows 2.0 on an 8088 system. I had to 'image' the 1.2M floppy disks over to fit on multiple 360K floppies. And that was the easy part about getting it installed.

I think I'm ready for Vista. I have several really nice Dell Optiplex GX1 systems with P3-450 processors and 512M of RAM. They run NetBSD really, really nice (typing this comment on one of them).

The sad part about it? A Dell Optiplex GX1 with a P3 and 512M of memory is actually a really nice machine and very useful, at the price I've been paying for them ($3-5 apiece at University surplus auctions.) Just not if you go with Redmondware.

Great summary

[Plutonite]

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.

I don't know about you, but I feel enlightened. I also found out yesterday the sky was blue , and that was a real killer as well. Submitter must have missed out on all the "yes but can it run vista" jokes.

I've tried this

[drsmithy]

I installed VIsta RC2 on an old PC I had spare - 900Mhz P3, 768MB RAM, 20G 5400rpm drive, 64M GeForce 5200. Mainly to compare to my 1Ghz iBook (768MB, 40G 5400rpm) running OS X. I used the machine for a solid week to get a good feel for it.

I was pleasantly surprised. Vista is noticably more responsive on the PC than OS X is on the iBook, and quite usable for basic tasks. Some more RAM would certainly be nice (on the iBook to) but it's far from unusable.

Re:Does anyone..

[drsmithy]

Does anyone have a side by side comparison with OS 10.4?

I do. See this post.

XP SP2 Home Upgrade for $50 at OfficeMax

[westlake]

I'm hoping that XP drops in price when Vista comes out. I'll recommend XP to my friends who are still on 95/98/ME/2K and want to keep their hardware.

Why wait? You'll find XP Home SP2 Upgrade, retail boxed, on sale now at OfficeMax.com for $50.

Re:Define old hardware

[sillybilly]

I have an Athlong XP 2500 Barton of 1.8 GHz, and I downclocked the whole thing to 1.1 GHz to save electricity costs. It's still more than fast enough for what I need - Knoppix-3.6/KDE with Mozilla 1.8b and Win2K SP2. The newer versions of Knoppix and Windows don't impress me much. As a downclocked version of a .13u CPU this Athlon is a better power saver than the old cpu's with similar GHz.

Having tried the betas and RC's I agree...

[mike_diack]

I've tried the betas and the release candidates as fresh installs on a 3GHz hyperthreaded Xeon with 160GB drive, Quadro workstation GPU and 2 GB RAM as fresh installs each time (i.e. in theory the optimal scenario)
I'm massively underwhelmed. It's been so slow. The best performance rating I got was a 3 and the OS was painfully slow by comparison to XP Pro on the same hardware, really laggy.

Combine that with the fact that they've changed how you reach/do things (eg network setup etc) - more radically than anything since Windows 95 and it makes the whole process too much like hardwork.

The whole UAC thing is a nice idea but poorly implemented - as many have said, by running all accounts as limited users on XP Pro with antivirus and firewalls etc, you can get much the same effect - I know I do. The weakness with UAC though is the fact that before long people via social engineering get used to clicking Yes every time priviledge elevation is requested, and lo and behold the box is "owned" again.
Why can't they do it ala Unix...

Mike

Re:This is news?

[mike_diack]

You say you need to 2GB to use it well?
On the kit I tried (very high end) - it didn't even run well in 2GB!

"Old" hardware?

[Centurix]

I've just cleaned up my PDP-11, hopefully it won't take too long to install.

In other Microsoft news of the obvious....

[angrykeyboarder]

Windows 3.1 won't run on new hardware.

This just in..

[angrykeyboarder]

Winter leads to colder tempretaures
                                        Nightime leads to darkness
                                        Quake 4 won't run on Windows 3.1
                                        The Pope is Catholic!
                                        The Sun rises in the east and sets in the west.