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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."
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!"
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....
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
I still run 2K as there are no games that require XP.
Actually yes there are. Several in fact.
AOE III and Company of Heroes to name 2.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Microsoft's worst enemy and toughest competition has always been previous versions of Microsoft products. Word, Excel, and the like haven't changed much in quite some time save for esoteric features 99% of the population doesn't even know about. Same with Windows, lots of people run 2000 and they're just fine. Obviously the adoption of any new Windows OS isn't going to be immediate and overwhelming; it takes time as people purchase new computers with Vista preinstalled and games begin demanding Vista only (just as they began demanding 2000 only, etc.). Windows OSs always creep into popularity rather than gaining overnight ubiquity. I myself didn't like XP and really didn't think I'd ever upgrade (hearing the same "DRM OS" arguments being lobbied today), but eventually I found myself liking it more and more and finally moved over entirely. It's great; I like the stability and performance it provides versus previous versions. It took some time, however, before my PCs were up to the challenge. I feel the same will gradually be true of Vista and the hardware requirements we're all so worried about will, again, fade. Microsoft likely put high requirements on purpose to ensure the operating system has a decent lifecycle. Like buying a shirt that's too big for a child since they'll "grow into it" anyway.
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.
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)
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.