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UK Greens Declare Vista Bad For Environment

schwaang writes "The UK Green Party says that Vista's DRM requirements will force many unnecessary hardware upgrades. Quoting: 'There will be thousands of tonnes of dumped monitors, video cards, and whole computers that are perfectly capable of running Vista — except for the fact they lack the paranoid lock down mechanisms Vista forces you to use. That's an offensive cost to the environment. Future archaeologists will be able to identify a "Vista Upgrade Layer" when they go through our landfill sites.'"

7 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. they forgot to mention by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    that running a desktop in hardware accelerated 3d mode all the time also means more power consumption...

  2. Re:Strange... by Corporate+Troll · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Two year old isn't really old, is it? My main desktop is from beginning 2003 and it's still a nice machine.

    I found a perfectly functional P-IV 1.9GHz/512Meg RAM/40Gig HD/Dual-headed-matrox in the dumpster at the recycling centre. Booted it up, and a spyware infested Win2000 popped up in my face. That was fixed with a Linux install. How old is the machine I just described? It's perfectly capable of running WinXP. Vista, probably not all that much....

    People throw away the nicest machines if for them it "behaves broken" or "because a newer version is out".

    Those greenies may have a point, but I foresee golden times for dumpster divers....

  3. Faster PC's may be good for environment? by Knutsi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It seems to me that faster PCs in the past have brought them more and better functionality, making them replace other, potentially more enviromentally unfriendly technology. Not sure how the math on this works out tho'.

  4. Re:Strange... by CastrTroy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Up until about 8 months ago, I was running a PII 266 I got back in 1998. It fulfilled all my needs. But eventually all the RAM chips started dieing, and it would have cost almost as much for new RAM as it did to buy a new computer, so I bought a new computer, which cost more than the RAM did, but I wanted another computer that would last me 8 years. It's actually cheaper to buy a new PC than to buy even just Vista, so I think a lot of people will take this option.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  5. Vista Experience on older systems? by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 2, Interesting

    We all know what Vista is stated to require, but I would really be interested to find out what the minimum anyone has been able to run Vista on, while still have a satisfactory experience. For example has anyone managed to get it running on P3 with 512MB RAM.

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
  6. Re:Strange... by paganizer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Remote Desktop is made available by installing netmeeting on a win2k machine. if you would rather use it than VNC, that is.
    Fast User switching is a good feature? huh. my kids like it, but I can't figue out why; the only XP machine in the house is my uberfast new laptop, and it takes essentially the same amount of time to log out then log back in as it does to do the switching thing.
    and yeah, I capitilize too much when i'm feeling particularly fed up with something. sorry about that.

    --
    Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
  7. Re:Vista defaults to Standby, not Power off! by Simulant · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not only that, but Vista's standby & hibernate modes don't work properly on nearly all of the >= 1 year old hardware I've tried it on (about 4 systems). I suppose this could technically be the hardware's fault but... damn it, XP could suspend/resume on these systems just fine.

    I've had to turn off standby & hibernate on my 2.8 GHz Xeon work machine because neither work right in Vista, which I've been testing for a month or so. I'm sucking up way more power than I did with XP.