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DRAM Makers Suffer Due to Lackluster Vista Adoption
quixote9 writes "We've heard conflicting estimates of how widely adopted Vista has been. Now comes some hard data. DRAM makers ramped up to meet the huge expected demand for more memory needed by Vista. Except the demand hasn't materialized. Now they're suffering. Alternatively, maybe everyone's cleverly hacked their Ultimate Aero Glass Vista to fit on their old PCs."
It's been well acknowledged here that Vista sales are roughly only equal to XP over the same time measured. OEMs were already standardized on 1GB (not low end of the market) of ram prior to Vista and Vista does run adequately on a GB of ram. What did they think would happen? Most of the PC market has been riding the MS/PC roller coaster long enough to have a feel for the time to buy and will likely hold on to XP until mainstream support has ended.
load "$",8,1
"Alternatively, maybe everyone's cleverly hacked their Ultimate Aero Glass Vista to fit on their old PCs."
...or my first thing.
Or maybe people are just so used to their computer running so slow from malware/spyware/etcware that, when they upgrade to Vista (hopefully a fresh install), their system is just as fast as it used to be (minus spyware, plus Aero Glass = same speed on original amount of RAM).
[karma whore mode on]
Or maybe nobody REALLY bought Vista 'cause Microsoft is the SUX0RZ! and NOBODY likes them...and...down with MS!
[/karma whore mode off]
Of course this was to happen! Microsoft showed its investors and key manufacturers that the OS release will be on par to its Windows 95 explosion, which everyone knew was not going to be the case. Times Square ads, articles, and lots of other forms of attention only brought a weak demand in the market. Windows XP was good enough, and consequential events like these show that.
However, I'm pretty sure that, as the article points out, this falling trend will reverse itself when back-to-school season starts and people need to upgrade their old machines to keep them running or up-to-date.
Haven't memory prices dropped every day since it were introduced?
I used to pay X amount for 256KB memory upgrades, the other day I paid similar for 1GB.
Maybe this is more to do with lifespan of memory than anything, changing design and automatically expiring themselves from the market.
I have just had to throw away a whoel gig of memory because I got a new motherboard, there was no chance I could have purchased another gig of the same and just expanded on what I had.
The newer fabs (from other companies) got my money instead of the established companies with older fabs.
liqbase
Since DRAM makers only "feel" the adoption obliquely (ostensibly through the PC maker demand for more RAM on newly sold boxes) this could be taken two ways:
1) Vista isn't being as widely adopted as has been declared.
2) Users are opting to buy cheaper boxes and disabling the heavy RAM features (automatically done by Vista if the system requirements aren't up to Aero Glass par).
It may even be some combination of the two. Now, I didn't go into any great amount of research as to the offerings of OOB PC manufacturers, however, I did note that Dell's website still does not offer XP in any flavor (although there was some talk of this eventually becoming an option). From this, I make the careful and qualified surmise that new Windows-preloaded PCs are getting Vista. Knowing the user base, it is unlikely that they are replacing the OS themselves.
As far as I know, most people's personal budgets are still a little tight, so it is likely that people likely to buy PCs from Dell (casual users for the most part) are going to opt for the cheaper models, which, upon a little further inspection, don't have the horsepower or the RAM to run full Vista rendering.
These really aren't "hard numbers". It is difficult to determine anything concrete with this indirect indicator.
A proper GUI will do far more that make the user look good, and will do more to increase productivity at the computer than most of the minor features touted by software makers. While a lot of GUI improvements are first used to cram visual garbage all over the screen most of them will eventually lead to improved usability.
I don't know Vista's Aero very well so I can't make a case of it one way or the other. I do have some experience with Beryl, and while more than half of its features are just goofball junk that only pre-teens wouldn't get tired of, there are some gems in there. Adjustable focus stealing is huge. Better control over desktops: moving apps between them, switching, their appearance in the toolbar....all improved in Beryl. Even subtle differences in the way menus open and close can be important.
To throw Microsoft a bone here, despite all the complaining about the Office 2007 interfeace, it is a major improvement. Anything that reduces the unrelenting cascade of menus is going to increase productivity and make the software easier to use.
Since Vista came out, there seems to be lots of different reports coming out with its adoption, with Microsoft saying that everyone loves Vista, and it is selling at record rates; and lots of incidental evidence (some companies still offering XP as an option on new computers, only 300 legitimate copies having been sold in China, this DRAM news) suggesting that it is not doing very well. But of course, none of this is complete or non-biased.
So, can we really say how Vista is faring in the marketplace?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Sun Ultra 40 running both Windows XP 64 and Solaris x86 , (disclaimer: I work at Sun) I run this box with 16 gigs of ram. I had 8 last time I booted to windows. And it still swapped out even with the kernel paging executive tweak.
Absolutely great system for everything but windows. Windows seems to drag it down.
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
The licenses sold, claimed by MS, can be fairly accurate. After all, a sale by MS can still sit on the shelf of some retailer, or been force-fed to people buying new hardware. When it comes to licenses used, I'd rather take other factors into account. One would be hardware sales, but after all it's possible to turn off all those goodies, so I wouldn't call it the best possible indicator.
Personally, what I'd deem a very good indicator would be the sales numbers of the different licenses. I.e. how many of the "minimum" Vista licenses have been sold vs. some of the "useful" ones. We all remember WinXP Home and Pro, and how "useable" Home was. Generally, whoever got the "Home" edition of XP got it 'cause he couldn't get his PC without any license and tossing Home was cheaper than tossing Pro.
So it would be fairly safe to assume that a considerable fraction of those "force-fed" minimum licenses have been bought because there's no way to get the computer without any OS and the first command issued on the new crate was fdisk. So, pants down, how mand licenses of what level have been sold?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's my understanding that most modern operating systems have essentially the same memory management underpinnings - historically *nix and Windows had different memory management models, but *nix has evolved over time from the 1960's style swap() mechanism to a modern VM system that is effectively the same as the Windows VM system (which was designed for systems with modern VM architectures). It's a tribute to the modularity of *nix that it's been able to survive such a major transformation untouched.
According to this blog post, what you're describing is called "standby list erosion" where a number of low priority applications can (over time) cause the foreground application to swap out. According to that post, it should be fixed in Vista.
Rising up the bar aren't we first it was the text installer, the text boot or the "multitude" of package managers in linux world. Now it's clicking on an fat install icon all that makes the difference? Man, we aren't running out of arguments aren't we?
Listen... I've got a couple DBAs, people that struggle daily with Oracle RAC HP-UX, DB2 and MSSQL wastin' 2 business days hunting down drivers for an HP "Vista Ready" business (read, humdrum) laptop... and they're still dissatisfied... and these machines would run flawless on a good ubuntu, centos.
I've stopped caring, Linux isn't a donkey and your arguments aren't a good enough carrot.
All I know and see is that GNOME is becoming the poor man's OS X.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
I just bought a new machine for the younger kid. Its not a high end machine by any stretch. Dell upped the RAM from 1Gb to 2Gb for free.
The bigger problem for the DRAM manufacturers is the 32 bit limit which means that the most RAM you can squeeze onto a personal computer today is 4Gb. Windows 64bit is certainly a solid platform, but many of the applications running on it are not.
Even if you buy a 64bit machine the chances are your motherboard is limited to 4Gb of memory. And machines that can take more than 4Gb are not typically outfitted to run high end graphics cards. They exist, but they are not necessarily on offer from regular manufacturers.
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I built together a new computer 3 months ago, with vista in mind (i.e. all hardware selected so it is supported well), and bought a vista ultimate OEM to it. I have been using it for 3 months: there were no problems with the hardware, but still I could not get used to it: it is slow and really clumsy, after a while I disabled aero but still things where slow and annoying. Disabled UAC, got some hotfix to fix slow file copying/moving/deleting, but it didn't help.
Last week I bought an xppro OEM and reinstalled it on the machine. What a relief. It is just incomprehensible that this crap vista is being forced down everyones throat (most people that buy a new PC now). The arrogance of MSFT has reached new limits if they think they can get away with it.
If I were a dumb user and not able to reinstall xp myself, I would revert from windows alltogether in disgust and probably buy a mac now. Really, people keep telling that everyone will get used to it and will be using vista sooner or later since there won't be an alternative. I doubt it, I think this time they have gone too far and have overestimated there market power. This may well be the beginning of the end and cause further and larger scale defections towards Mac OSX and maybe also linux for some more advanced users. I cannot imagine that vista will really replace all other windows version, even with MSFT's power, this product is just too crappy even for them.
Most companies will wait till 2010 when the last commercial support for XP expires, and then who knows what is available in the market. I think there may be enough alternatives by then to being forced to 'upgrade' to vista in 2010.
Consumers spurned DivX, why shouldn't they spurn Vista?
Maybe end users aren't that dumb. Maybe they recognize the value of DRM and WGA? Of course Microsoft will view this as a PR problem and throw a billion dollars at a Vista advertising campaign. Microsoft won't recognize the fact that legitimate users don't want to be treated like criminals.
All Windows users I know dislike WGA. Who wants to called a thief after purchasing a computer? Are there any slashdot Windows users that actually like the fact that WGA is running?
As evidence that absolutely means nothing, this year I've upgraded two desktops and a laptop to XP from Vista (speed issues). I upgraded four different XP desktops and a Vista laptop to Kubuntu (laptop owned by me). So far, no requests to go back to Windows. I wasted four hours of my life fixing the printer problems caused by a Microsoft/HP automated update to a XP Media Center Edition computer (Both companies blamed the other). If Ubuntu had better HP All-In-One support I probably could have upgraded that family as well.
Food for thought,
Enjoy.
It's just the normal noises in here.