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Preview of Vista On Old Hardware
Grooves writes "According to tests performed by Ars Technica, Windows Vista will need some coddling on old hardware. As a follow-up to their performance review of Vista Beta 2, Ars tested the latest public builds of Vista on hardware spanning from 2001 to a Thinkpad purchased a few months ago. The results show that Vista is extremely RAM hungry, graphical power is less of an issue unless you want eye candy, and hard drive I/O is critical. Also, their experience with 'in-place upgrades' was abysmal, and mirrored my own experiences."
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?
The OS keeps the hardware so busy it doesn't have time to run any viruses. (Or anything else for that matter).
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Don't know about you people but besides a handful of geeks, nobody installs new versions of MS Windows on old computers. It gets preloaded by OEMs who have financial strings requiring them to do so. So it does not matter if Vista sucks, doesn't work on old hardware or fails when upgrading over previous versions. It'll show up on new machines and those customers will use it no matter how bad or good it really is.
On one way, all these "features" making it difficult on older hardware are probably crumbs thrown to the OEMs so they'll sell more new computers preloaded with the "new" MS Windows. Funny how that works.
Only getting off the treadmill breaks this loop. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
To summarize,
"The new version of windows requires more RAM than the last version, and despite MS promises to the contrary, never do an upgrade"
It would be news if this *wasn't* true for a new version of Windows.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
So will RAM prices (DDR and DDR2) fall as Xmas passes or go up as people relaise they need more for Vista?
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.
How old is your hardware? For the article-imparied, they tried it on a 1.2Ghz Athlon Gateway box that had 512Mb RAM and said "We were extremely impressed with Vista on the five-year-old Gateway".
They did say more RAM is a good idea and recommended 1Gb.
So I guess you will be able tyo run it on your old hardware after all.
That's got some truth to it, obviously, but it's not entirely true.
I have an old celeron 333 laptop, I think it originally ran 95 or 98. I have had linux on it for years, including the latest Debian unstable. KDE was a dog on it, Gnome ran ok. Someone told me they needed a laptop, but they wanted Windows, so I tried to install Windows on it, any version.
Win XP installer would lock up after about 20 minutes of copying files. Win 2k did the same thing. I tried Win 95/98 but there was no place to get the drivers for the hardware, I'm not even sure what brand the laptop is anymore, the label on the bottom has worn off, and in those versions of windows, nothing works right on a laptop without a million extra drivers that don't come with the OS.
I know the hardware wasn't bad because linux worked fine on it.
So anyway, yeah if you want to talk sluggishness of the OS/GUI, windows and linux are not too different on older hardware. Linux, however, it a lot more likely to actually get the OS installed, detect the hardware, and give you a usable system.
I suspect MS probably puts less effort into making sure that quirks in old hardware are taken into account, as seen by the crashing installer of XP and 2K on it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
"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.
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.
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Direct quote from TFA: "We expect that the biggest headache for users will be so-called in-place upgrades. While Vista was reasonable on all the machines where we performed a clean install, it was an absolute mess on the machine upgraded from XP, and this problem has been noted by others." Ok, it said "absolute mess", not "abysmal", seems pretty close to the spirit of the article.
Nobody would click the link if it said anything positive about Microsoft or one of their products. You're right, though. Here is what the article was really saying: "The lesson learned is this: in-place upgrades may be a bad idea. We can't say that it's going to cause problems for certain, because we did upgrade a Compaq X1000 for our initial RC1 tests, and that machine did make it through." "We were extremely impressed with Vista on the five-year-old Gateway." "The Pentium-4 based shuttle represents what an average PC purchased in the last two or so years should feel like, within reason. Its hard drive and I/O system are recent enough to handle the demands of Vista and generally it felt no different than XP for normal use--it certainly was not slower." Equally true summary: They can't say that in-place upgrades will cause problems for certain. They were impressed. On the 2-3 year old computer, it wasn't slower.
RC2 isn't any better. You didn't mention how much memory you have, you pretty much need 1GB to do anything useful. Speed wise, Vista seems to be much better off without Aero running as it seems to be doing quite a bit of stuff outside the GPU that results in a bigger system memory footprint.
I had RC1, then RC2 running on a 3.2Ghz Pentium machine with 512MB. Apps like Adobe Lightroom (Beta 4) and Photoshop CS2 were slow enough to make me give up trying to use them.
My interest in Vista stems mostly from having attended a photographer's summit put on by Microsoft early this year. They were seeking input from pros about the features we'd like to see in Windows and there are actually a few things in Vista that were brought up there, even though the bulk of it was more of a pitch about where they are better than OSX. They still have a long long way to go though.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
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.
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?
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.
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.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
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.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
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.
Most things in Vista are not really worth it with a couple of exceptions.
r ary/gpol/a8366c42-6373-48cd-9d11-2510580e4817.mspx ?mfr=true for more.
1) Security. Vista has improved security, and Micro$oft will not update XP to the same level as Vista to ensure that people have a reason to switch. IMHO that's what happened with the upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP.
2) Group Profiles. If you are a M$ shop you will be using Group Profiles to control XP. Vista has new setting you can play with including the Power Settings, blocking Device Installations (including USB drives) and a vastly improved "Network Location Awareness" which takes into account VPN clients. See http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/lib
If you don't use GPO's, or you really care don't about the security improvements, then I don't think it's worth upgrading.
No, I'm not an M$ fanboy... I just make my money supporting their mess-ups!
And why would any IT department even consider downgrading [sic] to Vista from XP?
Security?
UAC
User Account Control is a new feature affecting administrator accounts - they run with limited priviliges, just as a normal user account does. When a program/user wants to do tasks that actually require admin powers, you have to explicitly allow it by clicking "continue" on a message box that pops up.
Do message boxes get annoying? Depends. Weigh the extra effort of one extra keystroke when you change screen resolutions or install a program against viruses having to ask you permission to rape your computer.
Address Space Layout Randomization
ASLR means that system libraries and DLLs are loaded into random locations in memory at boot time. (Some Linux distros have had this for a while.) This means that even if a zero-day exploit compromises your machine and the attacker can run code on your machine, he won't be able to build the locations of kernel functions into his hack.
"Protected Mode"
New features in the Vista kernel let each process run in its own specialized, super-limited user account. Ninja-ing an svchost process won't do much, since each kernel service lacks the ability to access any more than it has to.
Internet Explorer 7 uses these features to run in something called "protected mode." Iexplore.exe runs under its own super-limited user account, has all disk I/O redirected to some crazy folder ("c:" from IE7 redirects to something like "c:\program files\internet explorer\temp\c") that's locked down tigher than tight.
Although XP has Internet Explorer 7, the XP kernel lacks the ability to manage proccesses in this way. It's not possible to use "protected mode" under XP because XP's kernel is too primitive.
Stability?
Windows Driver Model
The new Windows Driver Model means that drivers not digitally signed and approved by Microsoft will not be allowed to run in kernelspace, meaning crappy drivers - the cause of most Windows bluescreens since the dawn of time - simply won't be allowed to run, let alone crash the system.
The flip side of this is that a new part of the Vista kernel means almost all drivers will not run in kernelspace. The new interface lets 99% of drivers be run in userspace, which doesn't require an expensive Microsoft signature and cannot crash the computer.
About the only drivers that inhabit kernel space are video drviers, which means that we could potentially be seeing less frequent driver releases from nVidia and ATI, but oh well. The Vista kernel will also restart your video driver when it crashes - even with beta drivers, the only time I've seen a blue screen in Vista was when DivX raped my install of Windows Media Player 11.
Windows Update
Yeah, we've had it for quite a while, now - but it's integrated with Windows now, meaning no silly webside + ActiveX control install. You no longer have to use IE for anything.
Shininess? (Though this one's been done to death.)
Granted, there's no one "killer app" for Vista - but that doesn't mean it's not worth using over XP. I haven't been able to make it crash (after removing DivX), and that's running the beta nVidia driver, Steam games (HalfLife 2, CounterStrike: Source, Might & Magic: Dark Messiah), software development on Visual Studio 2005, running the Office 2007 beta, and schoolwork on TASM (legacy DOS programs still seem to run just fine without tweaking under Vista, just that they're not allowed to run full-screen for whatever reason.
Is it RAM and disk heavy? Sure, but so was Windows 95 back in the day, and memory and disk space are cheap. I used to dual-boot Vista over XP, but Vista's my primary OS now - sacrificing a few FPS in HL2 is worth the stabilitiy, although the only antivirus offering compatible with Vista as of now if from TrendMicro.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Even Windows ME is still run on some computers.
Where? They must be quarantined!
Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
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...
;-) (gotta love the required specs!), and I need to know about it for my job.
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