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Microsoft To Dump 32-Bit After Vista
SlinkySausage writes "Microsoft has used its annual hardware engineering conference to announce that Windows Vista and Server 2008 will be the last versions of Windows capable of booting on 32-bit CPUs such as Intel Pentium 4 and Core Duo. AMD, which introduced 64-bit CPUs early — much to the derision of Intel, which said there was no use for them at the time — must be delighted with Microsoft's decision. Owners of first-generation Intel Macs that used (32-bit only) Core Duo CPUs may not be so happy knowing that Vista will be the last Windows they will be able to run."
....I assure you, I'll be alright.
Does this mean that MS are going to inflict another operating system on us in the near future?
Could it possibly be because the next version of Windows will require more than 4GB of memory to run? ;)
(Yeah, yeah, I know about PAE. It's a joke.)
The Real Motivation:
Buh-Bye Flash, hello Starlight! (or whatever it's called)
Abridged, I assume?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Well, I bet that was awkward.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
What can the newfangled 64-Bit future Windows do that won't be feasible with a 32-Bit version lurking around?
It can use all the bits in your processor instead of half of them.
But running an emulator just for a quick game of Missile Command, Asteroids, Centipede, Battlezone, tempest, Tetris, etc, etc, is annoying.
The other day I put Win 3.11 up against Windows Vista at Chess. Just to clarify I played Chess Titans up against Chess.exe from the Microsoft Entertainment pack, at expert level.
With Vista being the newcomer Titan's got to play first. After about 30 seconds of thinking, Vista made it's _first_ move, in which chess.exe responded to immediately. From there a furious battle across the board started, with chess.exe taking more and more time to think along the way.
After about a half an hour of playtime the game ended with Windows 3.11 crashing, In some sort of ironic twist, one move from checkmating.. Vista.
Heh.
Chess.exe might have had an advantage in that it is thinking on the opponents turn, but I'm still surprised Chess Titans was beat out by a fifteen year old program made for a computer a thousand times slower. Go Microsoft!
Exactly! At the rate they're going the next windows should hit retail sometime around 2017.
The Farewell Tour II
Hey! Look at MY name - I am a wildly profilic and inconsistent poster!
by the time the successor to Vista comes out. I doubt very much anyone will care about it not running on ~20 billion-year-old hardware. Not even Mac users :-)
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Yeah, it'd only contain 32768 words...
And 64-bit Flash (Not that I really want such a thing), why is that taking so long? Sick of the 'blip' noise with every page I hit with 64-bit IE wanting me to install flash to see some lame ad. And you click on it and "There's no 64-bit Flash, but you can run Flash on a 32-browser running on your 64-bit OS" And Why The Fuck would I want to do that?
I believe we call that a "feature."
A few years ago, those 64-bit CPUs _WERE_ the workstation market.
Yeah, all 5,000 seats of it.
>Wasn't all the talk during vista's development that it would be the last operating system they'd make?
World's End scheduled for late 2012.
Vista *will be* their last OS.
I heard Vista's successor was named Microsoft Windows Forever. It was supposed to be out last month, but they decided to rewrite it to use a new engine. Shouldn't be long now ...
you forget, it's a 64 bit processor, so the sweet spot will be 16gig of ram to run your windows checkbook program
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Yes.
2002
What? Windows XP Pro is crap, bloated, and has ridiculous hardware requirements. Wasting system resources on a Fisher-price UI? No thanks! 2000 is the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft has made.
2000
Windows 2000? I think not -- it requires 64MB of RAM for god's sake; and recommends 128MB! Who has that much RAM? Bloated piece of crap. 98 is the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft has made.
1996
Windows 98? I think not! It barely does more than Windows 95 did, but have you seen how much bigger the sysreqs are due to bloated crap like active desktop and IE4? No, 95 is the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft has made.
1995
No, Windows 95 is crap, bloated, and has ridiculous hardware requirements. Can you believe it needs a 32-bit CPU? What applications need 32-bit, anyway? None! Bigger isn't always better, you know; and that's certainly true for 32bit/16bit. 3.11 is the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft has made.
1992
Windows 3.11? Crap, bloated, and has ridiculous hardware requirements. What use is a GUI, anyway? I can do things faster at the command line. Give me MS-DOS 5 and-day.
1991
MS-DOS 5? Crap, bloated, and has ridiculous hardware requirements. COMMAND.COM is over 47kB, can you believe it? I long for the good old days of 2.0 and 3.0.
1983
MS-DOS 2/3? Bah. Who needs the bloat? Give me something lean and mean like CP/M any say.
1976
CP/M? A general purpose operating system? Who needs it? Everyone knows it's more efficient to have different machines to do different tasks. Do one thing and do it well, I say.
etc., etc.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Yeah I know. My Nintendo 64 was 64 bit and those things are way outdated now.