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Microsoft Internal Emails Show Dismay With Vista
bfwebster writes "Microsoft is currently facing a class-action suit over its designation of allegedly under-powered hardware as being 'Vista Capable.' The discovery process of that lawsuit has now compelled Microsoft to produce some internal emails discussing those issues. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has published extracts of some of those emails, along with a link to a a PDF file containing a more extensive email exchange. The emails reflect a lot of frustration among senior Microsoft personnel about Vista's performance problems and hardware incompatibilities. They also appear to indicate that Microsoft lowered the hardware requirements for 'Vista Capable' in order to include certain lower-end Intel chipsets, apparently as a favor to Intel: 'In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded.' Read the whole PDF; it is informative, interesting, and at times (unintentionally) funny."
To sBallmer:
Steve, Why is it taking forever to send emails?
From sBallmer:
To bGates:
Bill, 640 minutes for roundtrip for email should be enough for everyone.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This could get quite ugly.
"I'm just grateful I kept XP on this machine."
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
.. this shows that Microsoft are not misguided/stupid enough to genuinely believe Vista is a Good Operating System.. Let's hope they learn from these mistakes before Windows 7 comes out.
Don't by so short sighted.
It's not about making a decision based on profit, it is about a decision to deceive and lie to make a profit. Big difference.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"I going to f---ing kill the 915 chipset!"
Are they going to reimburse me for buying extra RAM for my daughter's new Toshiba laptop that had 512 MB of RAM with Vista, officially offered for sale at a store that way, but with 64 MB of it reserved for video RAM, leaving the system with a whopping 448 MB of RAM? And it takes about 10 minutes to start up because the HDD is running virtually nonstop, thrashing as it pages in the minimal amount of stuff needed? And opening a web page or a simple program takes almost as long, for the same reason?
Someone decided that was a valid, acceptable configuration for a Windows Vista machine.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Intro Managing IT Low 500 level class. First Day of class. They show us a chart. Showing the statics of the more money quoted for an IT Project the higher chance of it failing. Vista tried to hard to make the Ultimate OS of all times and ended up with one that looks fancy but people rather use the old version. They tried to put a lot of money to make the Best OS Ever and ended up making a relitivly bad OS. Vs. Apple who did incremental changes over time. Then Unfreezing Changing the Code for new features then freezing agian to assure that things don't get to out of hand. If Microsoft after XP did a smaller approach of making incremental changes in the OS right now we may have a fast and efficient Vista, that could give OS X a run for its money.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Marketing gone wild...
First of all I think the 'Vista Capable' suit is ridiculous. Microsoft deserves to win that one, because I am well aware of what was on the shelf on the low to mid range during that time frame. And those machines should of been fine, I had Vista RTM up and running on my P3 1Ghz w/ GeForce 6600. And it ran with Aero, and was certainly 'capable' in classic.
However I can understand Microsoft's dismay at it's performance, for relatively little gain you are incurring tremendous performance hit's across the board. File transfer and gaming come to mind most quickly however. But during it's development cycle I got the impression they really had no idea what they wanted out of Vista, dropping key features over the years. And seemingly concentrating to hard on a 'shiny' UI, that although slick in some respects still feels like a mangled XP GUI, with simply a reworked folder system. And a much lauded search to run feature that should of simply been in XP SP3 to hold users over while something, smaller, better, faster, stronger was being developed.
But in the interests of full disclosure, I have Vista running in a VM... A couple more trips to newegg.com and I might finally install it, DirectX 10 is still exciting to me.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
whats actually surprising is that the profit wasnt exactly theirs. they were allowing intel to continue using the 915 chipset and calling it vista compatible.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
I want XP to be re released, it was actually a decent program. I could run every game I own and the new ones off it with out any trouble at all. This will hopefully push it's return.
considering that this is a tech/nerd site.. and considering that MS has a very very large portion of the OS market. i would assume it logical that the number of articals on this site be in the same proportion about them.
.. jsut filter it or stay in the linux or other sections
sorry if it bothers you
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
OK, I'm officially a Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist(tm).
I read the title as "Disney", not "Dismay".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
.. when, as one of our customers found out, The Sims: Castaway tells you the Intel graphics card in your laptop isn't a Direct 3D capable one. Despite Castaway's own box specs and websites listing it as compatible. The customer in question ended up swapping it for a bog standard ATI graphics card based laptop that ran it fine - for the same price.
Click Start > Right Click 'Computer' > Advanced System Settings > Performance Settings > Adjust For Best Performance
Runs like a champ in a VM on my AM2 Sempron, with 512MB of memory allocated to it.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
I have found that Windows server 2008 runs very well on a ~ 3 year old Dell 610 notebook, even when the system is locked into maximum battery life (and minimum performance) mode. It has a ~ 2GHz processor and 2 GBytes of RAM.
Playing graphics games costs CPU and GPU processing power. From my point of view, the reason to upgrade to Vista is its significantly higher security than XP, let alone the earlier OS's. Search is also very nice and quite useful.
Give MS a break! This sort of thing happens when the general public just can't wait to have the "newest" technology, operating system, what have you.... so thereby causing companies like Microsoft, and others, to "push" out thier newest prodcts in an attempt to try and please the general public.... now, now.... I have to say shame on Microsoft for marketing thier newest OS to computer producers as "Vista ready", or "Windows Visa capable". On the other hand, let this be a lesson to the general public that waiting for something can be a "good" thing and, not nessessarily nice to have the newest of anything,(Vista or whatever the case), as quickly as it can be had, which can cause many companies to be sloppy in thier final products rushed to the retail world. Let's all try waiting fo a change an encourage quality..... not quantity!
Here's a very informative discussion/blog that I've been following on the lawsuit. Much interesting information here:
yhttp://yro.topix.com/tech/judge-rules-vista-capable-lawsuit-can-proceedarticle.pl?s/
The problem is that the OS is so badly designed and un-optimized that you can't run it on that kind of hardware. There isn't any good reason why Vista should have been slower than XP really, and fancy FX should have been turned on only on premium hardware. Many other OSes can do it after all. Leopard is doing just fine on a core 2 duo with GMA 950 GFX after all...
Microsoft dropped the ball on this one. It is not a Bob, or ME situation, with a strong alternative sitting in the wings. This time, they bet the farm, and now have a lot of crow to eat.
What saddens me is that I want to like Vista, but I can't. My sister loves it, but to get to run it she has now 8x the PC that I do (Athlon64 x2 vs my ancient Socket-A Sempron), and I still crunch her into the ground for performance in many cases. Microsoft has managed to become the victim of it's own success, I believe. They worked on the premise that hardware would progress faster than it did, but people have hit the point of "good enough." More and more I don't see people upgrading their PC's. I used to pick up used machines easily that were just 2-3 years old. Now, this Sempron 2800 is the last one I got this way, and I've had it for years. People just aren't upgrading. Bodes poorly for Vista.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
"Someone decided that was a valid, acceptable configuration for a Windows Vista machine."
That would have been you, or your daughter since nobody forced you to buy it. Hell, 512MB on a laptop with XP is barely adequate so it should be no surprise that it's barely adequate for Vista. Especially with all the shovelware it most likely came with!
Add some more memory to that beast, it's relatively cheap these days and it will make a world of difference.
Heh, I got a chuckle out of that one.
I'm running Vista Ultimate with Aero & dual monitors on an old 875 motherboard, 2.4Ghz Northwood, 1GB ram, Radeon 9600 AGP. No problems whatsoever and performance is fine for work apps (don't play games). I'm thinking of getting a couple of radeon 2400 cards (one AGP one PCI) so I can run three or four monitors.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
I wonder if AMD can use this in a lawsuit of their own due to anti-competitive practices (On the other hand, it would be burning a bridge with the largest OS manufacturer, but since Intel appears to be getting preferential treatment, there may be something much more sinister below the surface). Not only that, but shouldn't Microsoft's shareholders be kinda ticked? By allowing this to happen, Microsoft opened the door to this lawsuit (something that will not help their investors), while helping out another companies investors, which it would appear was not in Microsoft's investors best interest.
I just read their internal emails and it appears that they changed the drivers required for Vista such that due to new DRM A/V requirements in Vista, most existing drivers were made inoperable and, in many cases, would never be fixed. They then colluded with Intel to say that machines based on the 915 chipset were sufficient to run the OS so that Intel would have good quarterly results.
To summarize, they just don't care about the customer. At no point do the emails indicate them making any decisions based on what's best for their customers. It makes it pretty obvious why Vista has been such a failure so far. They can't even get the service pack right.
I'm not big on the idea of predicting corporate downfalls but you really have to wonder whether a company that makes such incredibly bad decisions is long for this world.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
unfortunately, the liekelyhood of you seeing a penny is slim. Even at a few billion dollars, a class action settlement would mostly go to the government and the lawyers. At the market value for RAM by the time the settlement ends, you'll probably get about $12 for your 512MB upgrade, if you see anything at all. anything much more than that and it would bankrupt microsoft. They can't possibly refund all the copies, even at OEM pricing, combined with the expenses and upgrade troubles, and the nice chunk for the lawers and uncle Sam.
Also, the courts do have a basic understanding of the fact that if the machine you bought didn't have a graphics adapter, you shouldn't have expected the enhanced graphics interface (machines that run XP pro, but don't have GPUs don't play graphic games or screen savers either). As far as performance, they'll point of that the MINIMUM requirement meas MINIMUM FUNCTIONALITY, not RECCOMEDNED functionality. This is clearly understood by most in the industry, and considdfered common knowledge in computing. Whaterver the specs say the minimum is, you reasonably need 2-4 times that for performance to be fluid.
Look at Pinacle Studeo for example. The miniumum specs, 256MB RAM and 5GB disk space, cover only whats necessary to install and run the program, and edit a "short" video clip (5 minutes of standard TV resolution 15fps, with no audio was the banchmark) A 30 minute HD video with stereo audio, accoring to Pinacle phone support for version 9 when I had it , should only be edited on a machine with striped performance HDDs and at least 2GB of RAM, and a multi-core (pentium D at the time) processor. lawyers will easily argue that, especially early adopters should have recognised this. "Let the buyer beware"
The minimum requirements for Oblivion are 512MB System RAM, 2 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent processor , and 128MB Direct3D compatible video card. With those specs, at minimum resolution, the game gets aboutn 6FPS. With a $3,500 quad way SLI system, they still can't play it at higher than 30FPS at the game's maximum configurable resolutions. noone has yet built a system that can truly play the game. They reccomend 1GB of Ram and an x800 or better video card. Experts reccomedn 2GB and SLI systems to play at "comfortable quality at higher resolutions" Can I sue those guys becuase it' "unplayable" on my wife's computer even though it meets the minimum specs?
minimum means MINIMUM. Windows 95 could run on 512K of RAM and a 20MB HDD. You can't really use it that way, let alone open a 3rd party application, but it does in fact RUN on it. Why did you expect Vista to be any different? Why did you expect it to require the same specs as XP if it's 7 years newer!?!
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Where these chips "incapable" of running Vista or did it just run donkey slow?
Former, bad. Latter normal service.
Well, did Vista capable mean it could run ANY version of Vista, or a version of Vista? I'm not sure things are so clear. I suspect the managers got what they wanted; the dev team make many improvements, but at the cost of compatability in some cases. Fortunately, I haven't hit any of those issues.
I would rather be provided drivers to downgrade to XP than any refund rebate. They deliberately do not supply the drivers to keep you from abandoning Vi$ta. I own a license for XP, just let me use it!
LOL @ Mike Nash's complaint that his $2100 Sony was an email-only machine because it had the Intel 915 chipset that can't run glass or movie maker. Mike Nash is the Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I don't mind Vista, I have been using it for a while at home since I do a lot of gaming. My machine is completely capable though. The hardware vendors did a very shitty job of preparing their drivers for Windows Vista and some to this day are plagued by horrible drivers. For the same reasons I would imagine that they have horrible driver support on Linux.
Fault lies with Microsoft in this case because they bowed to the pressures of the OEMs, namely Intel. That was a horrible move on their part and will lend a lot of credence to the recent class action lawsuit. I still place a lot of blame on the hardware vendors and their terrible drivers.
When people are able to run Lord of the rings online in medium graphics level setting with a mid range graphics card, 1 Gb ram and Xp whereas getting almost the same performance with people on vista and high end gear, you can say that the latter os fails in performance.
and dont feed me the 'but those are games' bullshit. for, games and entertainment comprise almost half of the activity on computers, and even for business, only idiots would want to put vista on a client/standalone computer in the office, having the need to pour a few hundred bucks just for being able to run vista so that the computer is going to conduct the same work it did with xp.
on gaming front microsoft tried to push vista with the 'high performance' bullcrap to gamers with dx10. correcting - they FORCED it, and almost noone took it. now they have to oblige with nvidia's needs for putting dx10 capability for xp, because people are just evading not only vista, but high end graphics cards too, because they need dx10 to deliver the latest, but noone wants to take the vista sh@t just because of it.
sorry people. you in microsoft have utterly failed with vista, and you need to go back to drawing board, even, put on your thinking caps and reevaluate your approach to customer and their needs.
we are not the witless herd of the 90s anymore.
Read radical news here
That was always the gripe I had with integrated graphics chipsets. IGV take away the system memory and the OEM's "innocently" forget to do the subtraction when quoting the actual system memory in their marketing material.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Sure M$ lowered the requirements to provide a little backscratching to Intel, a company which has historically given a tremendous amount of support to them. It makes business sense to keep your partner companies happy. They should have held back vista another year at least. This would have given them more time to make sure its right, allowed Intel to have an extra year on the 915 chipset and might have prevented this current backlash.
That being said, its not like someone at M$, or Intel for that matter, spec'd that machine for Toshiba. If you're looking for reimbursement for having to pick up the slack from toshiba's poor design, you aren't going to get it from M$ and seeking it from them is misguided.
And lastly, who the hell buys a computer with less than at LEAST a gig of ram if not 2? Personally I would never purchase a machine that came with less than 2 gigs of ram these days, laptop or desktop irregardless of what OS I plan on running.
"Runs like a champ in..." Unless you're perhaps using it as a verb, the crowd doesn't think 'champ' means what you think it means, sorry.
...or he's from England and that makes perfect sense.
Are you serious?? You bought the cheap system and you knew it would run like crap, but you wanted to save $100. GTFO! :P
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
In case of performance issues, look! Over there!
Isn't that Britney checking into rehab?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Dismay, when contacted, said she was not even in the country when the photo in question was taken. Vista could not be reached for comment, but her publisher insisted that all struggling new talent has photos in the closet that invariably surface when they become popular. When asked, the man-on-the-street responded with a shrug and said "Good thing neither of them has dentures - someone could have lost a labia!"
Microsoft's REAL error was actually retaining these email messages instead of following their "do-not-save-e-mail directive" and "30-Day E-Mail Destruction Rule", like they did to thwart previous lawsuits.
"Consuming Internet bandwidth since 1991."
Has anyone else noticed that Steve Ballmer barely ever uses punctuation?
Circumcision is child abuse.
Maybe it's a typo -- "runs like a chimp" brings to mind knuckle dragging with occasional inexplicable detours into incoherent bursts of rage and feces flinging.
Someone should decide to run another OS rather than put up with such crappy performance. You can make your life a lot easier if you take a look at Ubuntu or the many other options.
btw, even the "Vista Premium Ready" specs are a bit low for the bloated mess that is Vista.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
My company just bought a dozen new machines. Before buying I checked with our vendor that provides one of our business software products and was told that since we use Samba on our servers, Vista can not work with Samba. So we bought XP and have had not a single issue.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Or maybe he knew exacly what it meant. Champ - The field or ground of a field. It ran itself into the ground.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
Other similar cases: Ford, Fender. Both used to make great products, but as they got larger, someone got into the mix and absolutely screwed everything up. Now both companies face competitors that make twice the product at the same cost- or half of it. The reason why? They are smaller. Smaller companies have more to prove, along with fewer cooks in the kitchen, so the product is usually better.
It was confusing, all their partners showed that it would be.
All there commercials advertised Vista Ready stickers meant it was Vista ready and was shown with a computer running Aero.
The market clearly wasn't ready for it, but MS sure implied everything you have would work fine.
Knowing it wouldn't.
There where some people that wanted to advertise Vista Basic and Vista capable but MS decided against that.
No, they shoved a product that wasn't ready out the door, knew they where doing it and hoped customers wouldn't complain too much.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Just feels like slashdot is turning into a sleezy tabloid, posting sensational "news" about the shortcomings of Microsoft. Just count the enormous amount of posts about Vista alone, that if you read the comments, nobody even use.
I'm fairly certain that most people are familiar with the idiom "like a champ" meaning; "to do something very well". Not quite sure what you are talking about though...
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
MSFT would likely have sold the same number of licenses either way. Keeping intel happy by allowing them to sell less expensive parts as compatible was not directly profit driven - it was keeping a partner happy.
Ergo, this decision did not directly line their pockets. meaning it wasnt exactly thier profit.
additionally, youre a bit of a douchebag - even for the internet.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
How should that be any concern of mine (the customer)? If they provided a faulty program, they should have to pay. I'm not going to pick and choose who can give me a refund on certain products. If you buy a faulty food, vacuum cleaner, car, etc. you have the legal right to get your money back within a reasonable time period. (at least in my state) It would be incentive for all these half baked programs hitting the market in "Beta mode" but labeled as release. Labeling it a beta is one thing, releasing it as a "release version" when it's clearly flawed (as noted in the internal conversations) is not.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Does anyone else find it funny that this same troll posts almost the exact same ascii art goatse guy and link on almost every story, and yet slashdot seems completely powerless to filter it? I dunno, for a technology site, this seems pretty pathetic.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
Microsoft got cheap. Instead of paying reluctant vendors to write Vista drivers for older hardware (supposedly this happened for Win95), they ended up turning Vista into a bitter pill. Case in point, I have an HP Photosmart 7350 printer that I bought in 2002. This printer is great because it was one of the last printers to not have HP's customer-friendly "your printer cartridge is too old so I won't print" mechanism. For a few months after Vista's release, HP kept saying that the printer was incompatible with Vista. Suddenly, the printer is compatible with the "HP Deskjet 5550" driver included with Vista. Huh? Of course, HP says that some features are unavailable, but doesn't say which ones...
Even Vista fanbois have to agree that hardware incompatibility/driver issues are the biggest problem with Vista. Microsoft's Vista Upgrade adviser, while offering great disclosure, doesn't help promote Vista. So that leaves people like me stuck between having perfectly useful hardware with no fully-functioning Vista driver (or no driver at all), and moving to Vista... So I'm sticking with XP.
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Please hire me to advise you on your products before releasing.
If you give me political amnesty from others within the company, I an give you an honest view of the quality of a product.
Based on these email, it seem that upper management is unaware that some of their employees have had their jobs threatened from people in middle management for getting to 'loud'. Nothing direct, but a lot of implied threats.
I need 120K a year, 100,000 shares, and to work remotely most of the time. I will need to be extracted from the daily 'in the office' routine in order to maintain objectivity.
I work in the strictest confidence, and I assure you know email will be leaked from my office.
Regards,
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I see Windows Update mentioned a lot in the PDF.
Has it ever had a third party driver on it? I've never seen one. I always assumed it was like Windows Media Player which always says "looking for a codec" then "codec not found" - even if it's the most common codec ever which is missing.
Microsoft could fix an awful lot of problems by making Windows Update actually do something useful. I don't know why they don't do it...
No sig today...
While you may be correct that the best reason to upgrade to Vista is the improved security, that was clearly not how the product was primarily advertised to the general public. People were shown ads with amazing Aero eye-candy, and told that Vista was the way to get it. When purchasing a computer that says "Vista capable," it's a reasonable assumption for a non-technical user (to which those ads were targeted) that buying a "Vista capable" computer will deliver the most prominently advertised feature of Vista. I'm not saying it's a bulletproof case, because the small print was there, but it's rather self-contradictory to advertise Windows Vista as being easier than ever for novice users, but also expecting same novice users to understand the system requirements of a GUI that is an optional component of an OS.
"Consuming Internet bandwidth since 1991."
reading is critical:
what I typed:
"and I assure you know email will be leaked from my office."
and what I meant to type:
"and I assure you, no email will be leaked from my office."
two good sentence, to different meanings, one typo*.
Wouldn't it make more sense to spell typo 'typi'?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hardly the stuff of a great leader like Ballmer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk
No sig today...
My blog
I can think of several people and groups. Non-profits, companies, corporations. They usually make a config sys, image it, and then install it on other comps. They dont need more than 512 MB (my work comp is running XP with 256 MB.) Other people are those who do nothing but do some minor web surfing and e-mail.
Just remember, net everyone buys a computer for the same reasons
Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night- Ginsber
I never saw any commericals at all with Vista Ready in them, so I can't comment on those. I can also understand deciding against having two similar stickers, I think that would have been confusing as well. What did the fine print say? Or was there none?
As far as the product not being ready goes, I have to disagree. I use it on a fairly older computer (see one of my other posts in this discussion) and it runs great. I also have it on a new laptop (bought with Vista Business, upgraded to Ultimate) and on my work computer. Its been exteremly stable, and I've noticed I haven't had any problems printing. XP printing though always seems to be a crap shoot.
I release people have had problems, but there's lots like me that haven't.
"People who rely on using all the features of their hardware will not see availability [of drivers] for some time, if ever, depending on the mfg. The built-in drivers never have all the features but do work. For example, I could print with my Brother printer and use it as a stand-alone fax. But network setup, scanning, print to fax must come from Brother".
Yes - buying Vista is a really good idea if you want to keep any existing hardware.
Jim Alchin says: "I have no idea what a 'modern cpu' means".
LOLOL maybe microsoft is hiring in the near future?
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
Of course not. C'mon, if you walk in to Best Buy, and run the sales person gauntlet, you don't know by now that Vista is useless with less that 1gig ram, and you STILL buy the Toshiba loss leader they have nailed to the floor, you're pretty much getting what you deserve.
You can do what I did: buy a 1G ram chip, wipe the disk drive and put Ubuntu onto it, and find yourself an XP install to run in a VM if you need it.
Problem solved.
No sympathy.
sorry if it bothers you
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
> I have an old XP box (Dell GX620, ~ 3 GHz processor with 1 GByte of RAM)
That's powerful compared to the 'Vista Capable' hardware discussed here. You may notice that they're making due with half (or even a quarter) as much RAM as you are, for starters.
It attempted to download and run something on the computer I'm using. There's an "extra anonymous modifier" om the post so it's a registered slashdot user.
I have nobody in my "foes" list but if this guy had not posted anonymously, he'd have been the first. Is there any way to unmask these asshats? Maybe the program he was trying to plant was benign, but I really doubt it. At any rate, that is the last link I click from an A/C post.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
"So far I am surprised at the low call volume in PSS [Product Support Services]. I think we have a lot of new PCs which helps and the hobbyist people who bought FPP/UPG [Full Packaged Product or upgrade] just know what to do and aren't calling, but I know they are struggling."
A lot of hobbyists just aren't moving to Vista as it doesn't allow them to tinker as much. A lot of OS components are signed and you can't plug in your own. Stuff like substituting your own front-end GUI is a lot more complicated and since stuff is more tightly integrated you can't substitute your own apps where you would want them sometimes. A lot of OS GUI extras will never have an end-user authoring specs or software and don't even allow casual users to plug in their own content by specifying another file. This is an end-user OS and nothing else, there is nothing for hobbyists to do with it.
I refuse to believe this. I will *not* read these documents. They are probably forged by these European users anyway. Everybody knows that Microsoft goes all the way to support it's users and Bill Gates is a nice man who supports a lot of charities. How can you even suggest that they would join the forces of evil to steal our money. It's true my Vista is a bit slower on the HP with 512Mb memory, but I bought it that way and it is supposed to be like that. If not then it is certainly not MS fault but HP. And if the SP1 is dropping a lot of functionality in a range of programs then that is only to protect us users from evil software that profits from the great source code MS produces. I hate you all for making fun of MS[tm].
from
From: Steven Sinofsky
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2007 12:08 PM
To: Steve Ballmer
Cc: Bill Veghte, Jon DeVaan
Subject: RE: Vista
"Massive change in the underpinnings for video and audio really led to a poor experience at RTM"
HA HA! M$ sold out to the MPAA & RIAA and got burned. Too bad the failure of this product was not directly linked to the decision to sell out customers.
One line said it all:
... Apple did not lose their way."
:)
"We really botched this."
You tie that together with his memo from 2004:
"I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems [our] customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn't translate into great products.
I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.
Anybody know if he's since switched to using a Mac?
Score 0: Disagree with our religion.
Shh.
Basically, it was practically unusable with Vista, pretty good with XP, and I've fallen in love with Linux on it. Especially multi-tasking. People can say whatever they want about KDE or Gnome being slow. And yeah, if you have any even slightly older hardware running either of those two DE's on default settings then, yes, it will seem a bit sluggish until you reign the eye candy in a bit. But, as one that keeps a large number of programs and virtual desktops, etc. going simultaneously, nothing can touch *nix for multi-tasking. It's just so smooth, it's utterly amazing. Since I've gotten going here and all, I'll also mention that I make extensive use of virtual machines. VMware never ran so smoothly on XP or Win2K for that matter. It feels seemless. You fullscreen your VM and put it into exclusive mode and you will forget that you aren't on the bare metal. With Windows there was always some little stutter or jerky mouse, or something that broke you out of the moment and reminded you that you were in a VM. Linux really is amazing. I can't speak for the BSD's since I don't have any experience but if they're anything like as good as Linux, Microsoft has something very serious to worry about in the long term.
And that's my 2 cents. Sorry for the rambling. I haven't had my coffee yet. Going now.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Steven Sinofsky, page 3... LOL
Stop! Dremel time!
i figured he was just compaining aobu thte shear number of MS articals there have been in the past few months.. and trying to rationalize it.. although attempting to rationalize why anything is put on the front page of slashdot is about as wise as using a slashdot poll as the basis for research
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
It is up to the consumer to only upgrade when necessary. This allows a company time to regroup and rethink their product to produce the best possible. This concept not only applies to the OS, but to movies, cell phones, cars, and almost anything that can be purchased. Haste makes waste. Change is a good thing, but Chaos is wasteful and produces insufficient products. Sometimes the latest & greatest deserves to be examined before purchased. Maybe, perhaps, someday Vista will outgrow the awkward stage. Maybe it will mature. Maybe not. Maybe the world of OS will shift and move on. For now, I chose to stay where I am at with my system. It works. Why not? What does Vista offer me? This is not a new attitude for me. I totally skipped the WinMe fiasco. I made it just fine. This too shall pass!
Actually letting windows "adjust for best performance" causes thrashing because it adjusts on the fly the size of the cache. If windows is working the page file hard, almost all the case on these underpowered machines, then it is almost constantly adjusting the size of the page file more than actually using it. The best configuration to set the page file so it is static. This is done by setting the min and max to twice your physical RAM. On desktops having it on a second hard drive increases hard performance even more. If you are setting a system up from scratch then having a separate FAT32 partition at the beginning of that second drive is excellent.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Franklin
512 is XP "barely adequate?" For what?
From what I have seen, for 98% of things in XP 512MB is enough on a properly configured system. I'd say for XP that 128mb is "barely adequate."
It really depends on what you're doing. Personally, I like to have 2GB or more, especially if we're talking Vista, but 512MB is XP is fine for everything but serious gaming or trying to burn a DVD while multitasking.
Is it usual for CEOs to have the grammar of twelve-year-olds? Reading through the PDF, most of the Microsoft employees have respectable spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. And then I read Steve Ballmer's e-mails. Here's a verbatim excerpt:
"You are right that people did not trust us have you checkd windows update I assume you found no drivers there either?? thanks"
Most of what he writes is of similar quality.
Microsoft Windows Vista - Ballmer Edition
(Oh c'mon. You were thinking it too)
How much OS do you need to run a browser?
The OS is pretty much a moot point for most people now. Most everyone I know uses a PC to run a browser
and email. Sure they may use office or whatever occasionally but the browser and perhaps a email client
can just about get you anything you need.
Got Code?
Insightful? If the box says it will run Vista (or if the Vista box says it will run on 512mb) it should run Vista with 512mb or it's a classic bait and switch. And you shouldn't have to reconfigure anything or add any hardware, it should WORK. Speaking of which, my box at home has 512mb and it runs XP fine. Most of the time anyway; sometimes it has trouble booting, bluescreening and rebooting itself repeatedly.
I have better uses for my money (like paying my eye doctor, Dr. Odin) than buying yet more memory for a computer that worked fine with 98 and works fine with mandriva/KDE. If I were the guy who typed the GP post I'd be pissed too.
Did thieves just take over all corporations this century, or was I just not paying attention the first half century of my life? When did lying become acceptable?
Microsoft and its employees should stop making excuses for their piss-poor crapware and actually produce a quality product instead of the bloated buggy crap they shovel out the door these days. If I bought whole computers instead of building them from spare parts I'd buy a mac.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
MS must have approved the machine to have a "ready for vista" sticker. They must have set those required specs and apparently the chose to allow anyone with a bare minimum specked computer to put one of those stickers on. They should have at least required the "preferred" specs for such a program to avoid stuff like this.
Don't get me wrong, most people on this site should know better, but we arent the target of this campaign.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
No it wouldn't. Just checked. Update manager still points to ubuntu.com
Anyone stupid enough to buy a Vista-Capable machine to actually run Vista deserves a lemon. It was product misrepresentation on the part of Microsoft as well as the hardware vendors, but then again, a lot of businesses do this borderline issue and is perfect candidate for a class-action lawsuit. I fully support a class-action lawsuit, eventhough I don't intend to run Vista on my Vista-capable-certified laptop. The upgrade-checker program reports that a few devices won't work properly if I actually install Vista on the system. It was cheaper to buy a laptop with Windows-XP and run Linux on it, than to buy an equivalent laptop with Linux preinstalled or with no OS. If only somebody publishes an "Idiot's guide to manufacturing laptops in China", that might create a lot of linux/laptop businesses.
Sure, when the disk image is served from the host system's buffer cache, why wouldn't it run quickly? Also, what display driver are you using there? Probably not one that requires tens of megs of RAM that are taken away from starved applications.
Cleary. There. Are. Some. Exceptions. To. This. Rule.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I'm not sure if "they" meant MS employees writing drivers, or hardware vendors writing drivers. Either way, it seems MS has a credibility problem.
Also, the unsaid meaning of some of the emails is: recognizing that they failed to set a high enough priority to having the device drivers ready when Vista shipped.
It's not surprising that MS corporate brass had these discussions. You'd expect them to. What is surprising is that they failed at something so fundamental to the business of selling OSes.
I wouldn't say "funny", I'd say "pathetic". What's even more pathetic is that the guy probably thinks it's hilarious.
I bet he's on my "freaks" list.
Modding myself down with the "no karma bonus" box.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Wow, Vista runs well on a 3ghz box with 1 gig of RAM? Call the media.
To all the Microsoft apologists out there--this is your Waterloo. Here we have a concrete example of how Microsoft decided to do one of their corporate buddies a huge favor--letting them meet their f'n quarterly numbers. So, Microsoft chose to help one of their rich pals over every single one of their users. That should tell you who they value. And the common perception that Vista is a piece of crap? Confirmed internally! This is just despicable.
Nearly all OEMs still allow you to upgrade to XP, but you have to ask. They won't tell you about it, you have to be active about it. But then, those that make active decisions about hardware and systems rarely end up with Windows, let alone MS Vista. Lots of people are getting burned by leaving too much of the decision up to the sales staff.
But even if you can't upgrade to XP, unless she's playing heavily some games that don't run in WINE or surfing a lot of WMV porn, then she'll get more mileage out of a linux distro like CentOS and Kubuntu. Try it. If they suck, then you can crow about it. If they save you time and effort, then it was time well spent and you can go around to any MS Vista users and rub their noses in it. Nowadays even Photoshop runs in WINE.
If it's for school only, then the 13" macbook is perfect for the backpack and can run your choice of Linux or OS X or both, plus a number of legacy applications from Windows.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Man, rootofevil is right... I've never been so tempted to mod somebody Insightful for calling somebody else a douche bag...
I've never seen the ascii art or the link you mention and I read /. every day, multiple times a day. Perhaps you need to adjust your filters.
sorry if it bothers you .. jsut filter it or stay in the linux or other sections
Considering that the article is about how badly Vista sucks, my guess is that the logged in AC (extra "anonymous" modifier) is either a big Microsoft fan, a Microsoft programmer, or likes to throw chairs. At any rate I'd bet money he doesn't have any computers with any OS except Windows and hates to see his favorite company called out for the incompetents, liars, and thieves they are.
Yes, I'm an insensitive clod. So sue me.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
it takes about 10 minutes to start up because the HDD is running virtually nonstop, thrashing as it pages in the minimal amount of stuff needed...
I bet you anything the disk thrashing is from the bloatware OEM applications installed on the laptop by Toshibia. Remove them using PC Decrapifier and see if that improves performance.
What I've always found funny about Vista is that it had poor compatibility with existing Windows applications, and abysmal hardware support. You know, the two things that (rightly) prevent people from using another OS instead of Windows...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
"Runs like a champ in..." means "Runs like a champion"
I thought everyone knew about nimp. Nimp links are the Internet equivalent of asking the new guy to bring you a form ID10T or a left handed monkey wrench.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Gez, there's nothing worse than having your company emails posted for the whole world to see. It always seems like Microsoft internal communications are the first to be released.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
TSIA. HTH. HAND.
Kid-proof tablet..
i honestly don't know why you guys are complaining so much, vista(now anyway) runs great for me. No problems so far. When it first came out, yes it sucked.
Techie
--- quote ---
From what I have seen, for 98% of things in XP 512MB is enough on a properly configured system. I'd say for XP that 128mb is "barely adequate."
--- end quote ---
Unless of course you like to run Photoshop, or you have a need to run Word and Dreamweaver at (gasp!) the same time, or you like to play mp3s while working or a number of other situations.
Novice users - you might say - are not going to be running Photoshop, but I will be that they *will* have a large number of applications open at once, without thinking anything of it.
I would argue that 512 was ok for 2000, but is inadequate for XP or (god forbid) Vista.
DON'T CLICK. anonymous piece of shit, go fuck your mother.
I'm seriously thinking about filtering out all anonymous posts.
Modding myself down with the "no karma bonus" box... where do these asshats come from anyway?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
It's not the volume, it's the tone. Slashdot has become less and less about promoting Free and Open Source software, and more about publishing every little bit of scuttlebutt about Microsoft, especially Vista. It doesn't have to be significant. It doesn't have to be correct. All it has to do is fill in enough spots on the editor-du-jour's buzzword bingo card, and up it goes, front page news, truth or consequences be damned.
Anything to get those figurative 15-year-old fanboys in their parents' basements to post comments and generate page views, I guess.
Not with that apostrophe it doesn't. It makes no sense at all!
What surprised me the most about reading through the PDFs is that Microsoft caved to Intel. First off, I'm surprised that Microsoft caves to anyone, let alone a chip manufacturer. More interesting is the way they back pedaled on their promises to OEM about what kinds of hardware it would take to achieve the "Vista Ready" logo.
HP and other OEMs spent a lot of money putting in newer, more expensive WDDM-compatible video cards because they were required for the "Vista Ready" logo. Microsoft promised with a 100% guarantee to HP, that they would not regret making these investments because there was no way Microsoft was going to allow crappy Intel chipsets to get the "Vista Ready" logo. After enough pressure from Intel (and far after HP and other OEMs made pricey investments) Microsoft apparently caved and reduced the requirements for their logo. 915 and 945-based chipsets are apparently suffering from horrible performance and customers are pissed. Now all the OEMs are feeling cheated as well because they met Microsoft's initial demands, only to watch cheaper and slower chipsets make the same grade while offering terrible performance.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Circumcision reduces the threat of HIV, and is required of Jews by their religion. Keep your god damned laws off my kids and their bodies!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
That's an interesting point. I bought a Toshiba loss-leader with 512k. Disk thrashing, sloooooow, etc. When I uninstalled the 60 day trial version of MS Office things were actually, you know, tolerable....
Then my torrent finished and I installed kubuntu...
Click Start > Right Click 'Computer' > Advanced System Settings > Performance Settings > Adjust For Best Performance
Are you fucking kidding me? That's really in Vista? If it's a checkbox, why isn't it checked by default? If it's a slider, what does the other side say? "Needlessly consume CPU cycles"? "I'm stupid, tell me where to buy new hardware"?
What does this option do that turning off Aero (or going all the way back to 'Windows Classic' theme) doesn't do? Does this work on desktops, or is it a laptop-only thing where the other option is "Optimize for battery life"? Sorry, I don't have a Vista machine here or else I'd check for myself. Really, I want to know. I remember a tab like that in XP but all it did was turn off visual effects.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
minimum means MINIMUM. Windows 95 could run on 512K of RAM and a 20MB HDD. You can't really use it that way, let alone open a 3rd party application, but it does in fact RUN on it. Why did you expect Vista to be any different? Why did you expect it to require the same specs as XP if it's 7 years newer!?!
By that logic, one could argue that you could run Vista on my old 486sx-25 computer, as long as I have a big enough hard drive and a lot of RAM.
Hey it runs!
I can even play Oblivion on it. I get 6 FPY.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Hehe- a 2nd hard drive as a Vista performance improvement. I would take it one step further- get a 2nd computer if you want to see Vista run (other than the one you intend to use to run applications). Interesting data point: I recently bought a laptop (Athlon 64 dual core, 2.0 Ghz, 1 Gb RAM) and from when I turned it on (first time Windows boot & all that goes with that) to when I could use the desktop took longer then the wipe & install of the other operating system I found more useful after completing my 2 week evaluation of Vista.
Or 384 MB with 500Mhz PIII that was also adequate for XP + VS2005 + Office + ...
There is something right in a world where Steve Ballmer is reduced to doing tech support for Vista...
:-)
have you checked windows update, I assume you found no drivers there either??
Now if only everybody could CC their support requests to mailto:steve.ballmer@microsoft.com, I'm sure they will all be attended to quickly
No, that would be "flies like a chair". Which is wrong. Flies like a banana. Chimps like a chair.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I really wish people would stop pretending they knew a damn thing about memory. Half a gig of RAM so 1 gig of swap? By the time you hit that your computer won't be running anymore. Hell, if you're using 512M swap and 512M RAM every time you do something you're bouncing back and forth between disk/RAM. Performance only works for about half your RAM digging into swap; these days with 8 gig desktops that's 4 gigs, and it only works THERE because most of it's idle if you're running that many programs. If you have one big hog, you might just die at 500M or so anyway (say, a very active piece of music software with gigs and gigs of memory-resident samples and real-time effects generating tons of intermediate data?)
Support my political activism on Patreon.
If your Windows XP system is BSOD-ing you're going to have to buy more RAM anyways. I've yet to see a BSOD in XP where the culprit wasn't a bad stick of RAM. Doesn't mean it this isn't the first time though so I would download The Ultimate Boot CD and run a few of the memory tests.
X= <-- Joke
/\
o
+ <-- you
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Hey Pal,
When you lift a joke for use as a tag line, it is proper to give the author credit. If you do not know the identity of the author, please refrain from using it and try to come up with something clever all on your own.
Way cool!
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
512MB was fine for me banging your girlfriend while multitasking last night.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Microsoft executives collusing with Intel executive in securities fraud. What a surprise!
I really hope that the SEC looks into this in more detail.
Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't pay for a guy with one eye to work on my eyes.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
I got stuck with a Vista upgrade when several too many games told me that my aging Windows 2000 installation was not supported and refused to install. That's all I want Windows for anymore, really. I've got Linux and OSX for real work, right? So I went for the Home Basic, reasoning that for simply running games, that was all I wanted, and I didn't want to fill MS's coffers more than necessary. I also reasoned that I didn't want Aero, and would be trimming the services to the bare minimum.
Mission accomplished, right? Except the hard drives thrash a great deal more than they used to. So far, I've had to upgrade my sound card, but that's not so bad. The real deal is that the security model spams you so much that you regard its pop-ups as noise. Also, the software incompatibilities tend to undermine the sole reason that I keep Windows around at all.
I much prefer my experience with OSX or Linux or *BSD. Game makers ought to get serious about porting their titles, because I believe at this point that that's the main reason home users are still putting up with this crap. I won't pretend that there aren't obstacles to this, but for the love of god, let's dump this old broken system.
"Are you fucking kidding me? That's really in Vista? If it's a checkbox, why isn't it checked by default? If it's a slider, what does the other side say? "Needlessly consume CPU cycles"? "I'm stupid, tell me where to buy new hardware"?"
There are four radio buttons:
- Let Windows choose what's best for my computer (default)
- Adjust for best appearance
- Adjust for best performance
- Custom
The first radio button is selected by default, and at least on my system, is the same as "Adjust for best appearance", which is what I would expect to be selected by default. This might be different on lower powered machines.
The "Custom" option lets you enable and disable about two dozen fine grained options such as "Slide taskbar buttons", or "Smooth edges of screen fonts".
Here is a summary for those that don't want to read the PDF:
Early 2006: Microsoft got cozy with HP to make sure that HP invested in a better graphical experience for Vista. Intel had to make its quarterly earnings and convinced Microsoft to call their chipset "capable" even though it couldn't meat the graphic standards. Microsoft had explicitly told HP that they wouldn't do this, but they, led by some dude named Will Poole, decided to bone HP to make Intel (specifically some SVP chick named Renee-most likely Renee James) happy. Then MS discussed how they are going to try to play it off to intel with some fancy obfuscating letter. They got this guy at MS named Jim Allchin to sign off on it, which he reluctantly did, but chastised them for pulling this crap. Some dude named Mike Ybarra pointed out to Jim that they are boning HP and their customers just to get cuddly wuddly with Intel and Jim seemed to agree, but figured the wheels were in motion and could not be stopped. Mike specifically said, "We are caving to Intel... We are really burning HP... We are allowing Intel to drive our consumer experience..."
Fast forward a year later and some board member John Shirley sends some borderline literate guy named Steve Balmer an email about how his shit won't work with Vista and that some of the stuff may never get Vista drivers. They surmise that vendors didn't trust them to deliver Vista (gee, wonder why) so they didn't make drivers. Balmer sends an email to some guy named Steven Sinofsky asking about the driver situation. Sinofsky agrees that vendors didn't expect them to ship and also says that changes to Vista made it so XP drivers wouldn't work, he questions how smart it was to call the Intel chipset "capable" when it wasn't, and says that they need to be clearer with the industry. Then some exec named Mike Nash points out how his company boned him because he bought a $2100 "Vista capable" laptop that is only good as an email machine.
In the end, some exec John Kalman says that lowering their standard for Intel screwed them and they won't make such a stupid mistake with Windows 7.
In short, Will Poole is a weasel who is just trying to make some Intel chick happy. Mike Ybarra is too thoughtful and has too much foresight to work at MS. Jim Allchin needs to go with his gut and remind Will Poole which side of the desk he sits on. Steve Ballmer is missing some keys on his keyboard. Steven Sinofsky and Kohn Kalman have 20/20 hindsight. HP deserves to kick somebody's ass at MS. They should probably kick Intel's ass too, but MS is too busy licking it.
Myself, I don't think Intel is evil at all, just a little bit naive about the seriousness with which Europe takes the "level playing field".
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This is so far out of whack, it's time for whack-a-troll.
(1) You point out that "novice users" (and that would be the vast majority of computer users), are not going to run Photoshop. Yet you mention that 512MB ain't enough to run it. Why did you even mention it then?
(2) You say "or you like to play mp3s while working", implying that this would overload a 512MB XP machine. I have mplayer.exe running with a movie paused -- 17MB of RAM used. 17MB more is going to break the XP camel's back?
(3) "or a number of other situation". You mean like running AutoCAD, a continuous system benchmark, and playing WoW...while downloading pr0n? Man, I see novices doing that all the time.
(4) "but I will be [sic] that they *will* have a large number of applications open at once". Well, in my experience novices tend to have a grand total of one program open at once, and if you try to leave a second one open they will close it, sometimes even when you have carefully minimized it. Many developers are this way as well -- wanting to squeeze an extra 50msec out of that recompile. Oh, and that one program is almost for sure 99% most likely you-can-bet maximized.
Real world situation #1: upgrading the dreaded mother-in-law computer to XP involving a machine with 64MB of RAM. Yup, one-eighth of what you are whining about. EVERYTHING I re-installed worked. MS O2k, CompuServe 2000, graphics editors, alternate browser, etc. Yes, everything ran slowly. Yes, it was slow to boot up (but not as slow as 512MB Vista machines). And when told how cheap RAM was, the m-i-l rushed out and bought 256MB.
Real world situation #2: my wife upgrading her computer while I was away. It went from 98 to XP Pro, with 320MB of RAM. The thing ran hundreds of games and everything else. Nobody ever thought it was slow. I used it myself for some things for a time. It was only replaced a year ago, and died of dust overload, if anything.
Somewhere a chair-thrower is rubbing his hands together and saying "Vista is right on target!"
I come here for the love
Well, if it was a joke, consider that before the GP responded to it as if it was not a joke, so had a half dozen other people. Not one moderator has found it funny enough to mod +1, Funny. And the poster of said 'joke' has not come back to defend it as such. In fact, the only one who seems thinks it was a joke is you.
That's because Photoshop (and photo editing in general) is a demanding little bastard, not because Windows XP is.
Now, I'll acknowledge that it's reasonable to expect an operating system to leave enough capacity for two or three applications to run, but beyond that you're starting to blame XP for the application's shortcomings (or demands). Ditto if a company wants to load up their laptop with auto-running crapware that MS didn't have anything to do with.
I ran XP quite happily with 256MB for over two years. I eventually bought more because (I thought) I needed more memory to run Oracle under *Linux*.
The stuff I'm doing now (Photoshop included, oddly enough) would do better with even more than the 768MB I have now, but that's not XP's fault. In fact, most recent apps need more memory, but unless SP1 and SP2 upped XP's demands significantly, that's not its fault.
The GP is right- 128MB *is* the "barely adequate" limit. (It supposedly runs in 64MB, but I really can't imagine how bad that would be). My laptop with 128MB was clearly hobbled by its memory- it was borderline usable for simple stuff, but thrashed horribly with much more. It's much improved and more usable (though not perfect) with 192MB.
And of course I'm not using ******* Photoshop CS3 on the laptop, but so what? Stop trying to blame the demands of heavy apps on XP. If PS ran under Windows 3.1, or any flavour of Linux, I doubt it'd make that much difference.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
We bought an $800 Mac Mini a year or two ago. The dual core intel version. It came with 512MB of ram. My wife would complain that the dual core was worthless because the thing wasn't any faster than my single core PC. And in fact seem slower. It would take forever for Safari to load for example.
We finally got around to bothering with it a month or so ago and asked an Apple rep from Apple.com what kind of memory the thing used. It was standard SODIMM stuff so we looked it up on NewEgg and found the exact memory that the rep mentioned for about $25 for 1GB.
The Mini is designed to not be easily upgradable by a user so I figured since it was only $25 for the memory I'd splurg and let the Apple Store take care of it. I figured $20 - $40 tops for the installation. I call them up and ask if they'll install a 3rd party memory module. Nope. So I ask how much for 1GB. They told me $150 dollars and the "installation is free." I told them that was ridiculous and hung up.
So we went ahead and risked opening up the thing to install the memory ourselves. There was a guide on-line we found. It wasn't too much trouble.
So this isn't an MS problem. It's a "cheap bastards" problem. They'd rather cut costs on the hardware to save a few bucks. At least with MS, you're working with a system that can be easily upgraded cheaply. I'd be annoyed with lack of memory from Dell but at least they don't make their system a pain to upgrade or mark up their prices astronomically.
We'll never buy a Mac again. The system is fine, we'll forgive them for not including enough memory for OS X by default but charging $150 for a $25 part is inexcusable.
Work Safe Porn
Or just install openSUSE 10.3. It comes with a version of OpenOffice.org that can open/save .docx documents, runs brilliantly on my Gateway m250 tablet with 512mb of RAM, and even has the fancy desktop effects (though not Compiz, that'd be a bit too much for it. Still, rotating cubes and panorama views get people saying "Ooh"). Others who are running XP on the same tablet (you simply can't run Vista) are impressed with its performance.
Gee, the performance of the 915 chipset with compiz and xgl has been pretty good for me. Maybe the problem is less about Intel's HW prefs and more about MS' code?
From what I can see, that's pretty much what it does. So in order to get good performance on Vista, according to Microsoft, you need to roll it back to Windows 2000 look-and-feel.
Breakfast served all day!
I believe this guy would disagree.
Yes because if theres one thing that absolutely, positively, without a shadow of a doubt always works in Linux it's the drivers.
Read The Fucking PDF
Here be signatures
"If it's for school only, then the 13" macbook is perfect for the backpack and can run your choice of Linux or OS X or both, plus a number of legacy applications from Windows."
Um, it can also run current Windows apps using BootCamp with no emulation, full hardware support, or you can use Parallels, or VMWare.
At that point it can run more applications (outside of hardware limits like having an integrated GPU) than any Windows machine, natively. Kinda nice...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Hell, 512MB on a laptop with XP is barely adequate so it should be no surprise that it's barely adequate for Vista.
WTF are you on? ALL my XP systems run on 512MB. Prefectly adequate doing page layout, Office, hardware and software development. Cretainly not one is as slow as Vista with 2GB and a lot more processor. No, face it; Vista is a pig!
The problem is not that they lowered the requirements but it's how they lowered the requirements. Instead of refining or redesigning the software they refined what got printed on the box and left it at that.
I want this account deleted.
Are our beloved overlords running XP or Vista? That is the deciding factor of where my loyalties lie...
My other sig is a knife wound.
I got a Win98 system with 192 MB Ram and surprisingly that's not enough these days for even casual web browsing. I do wonder how I ever could have thought that system to be fast. Before that I had a P60 with 24MB memory and in my mind it was wicked fast. 24MB meant that I could open 24 windows of ie5 (or so I thought), so when I dialed up it opened just that many. It must have been horrendously slow, but I remember it as fast.
;)
I recently used a Sony PSP on the internet. It out specs my old computer but even that was slow and a good number of web sites fired of an "out of memory" message.
Seems the internet needs more and more memory as time flies by. Soon even 512MB will be way too little for web browsing, mark my words
More likely the memory has a bit of corrosion or dirt where it connects, or possibly the hard drive cables do, since it got like that gradually. When it stops running completely (meaning the Mandriva side woin't work either, so far not the slightest hiccup) I'll take it apart and clean it out.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
64 megs of ram for *any* Windows after 98 is a nightmare. My sister's computer is tragically running XP on 64 MiB of RAM. Unbearably slow. Though I wouldn't be fair to say that most modern flavors of Linux won't run very well on 64 MiB either, unless you count compact lightweights like Damn Small Linux or if one never uses the GUI, I suppose. I am mostly guessing on that part, my Ubuntu box ran fine with 512 MiB, but if I ran Compiz, it would slow down very quickly, so I tried not to use Compiz much until I treated myself to a full GiB stick and Compiz runs like a dream. Worth it to me.
My point being is "barely adequate" is more a matter of preference than it gets credit for. A Linux could probably run in a low-end manner pretty well in well under a plain BASH prompt without a desktop manager or window manager in less than 128 MiB, whereas if you launch KDE/GNOME you might be smart to have at *least* 256 MiB in your system to really enjoy it to full flair.
Different base uses have different "barely adequacies." The same applies for Windows, though Windows uses more memory than Linux for various reasons.
It's the Challenger story all over again. As I understand it from those emails, is clear: Vista was developed for the graphical experience to be not just essential, but the major selling point. Microsoft established this early on (as in Summer 2004). Another key plank was that Vista was going to be a major rewrite of how things are done, requiring entirely new hardware. So Microsoft developed a program to aid consumers in navigating this sea change in hardware.
At the last minute (~1 year before the official release), Intel comes up and says: "look, old chap, we've got this cheap chipset that we need to move units on to make our quarterlies", and the guy whose job it is to deal with Intel happens to outrank everyone else, and not be in the loop concerning the nitty-gritty details of what he's selling. So he changes the specifications of what constitutes "Vista-capable" to satisfy Intel. As a knock-on, every manufacturer out there gets to slap "Vista-capable" on similarly lame (aka "runs XP, sorta") hardware.
Yeah, that's a lawsuit that will be settled pretty quickly. I feel sorry for the folks who had to deal with this crap. It ain't what they asked for.
Oh yeah, Vista sucks.
Windows update has literally thousands of 3rd party drivers. You can search for them directly without having to use the Windows Update application: http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/site/Home.aspx
Note that IE6+ is required to search the driver catalog. Try searching for ATI, Nvidia, or simply just "video"!
Not even a Norse god?
Believe or not, that actually is his name, Here's a link to the office. Dr. Yeh (YAY!) is the one who turned me into a cyborg (see the journal my sig points to for details). Resistance IS futile and you WILL be assimilated!
And there's an attempted murder; no TWO of them, (my car, which was stolen shortly after I bought it, was used as a murder weapon) and an alien, in my journals, too.
Oh wait, I almost forgot about Mo, he was murdered (IMO anyway) by a guard when he was in jail.
There's an old Chinese curse which says "may you live in interesting times". I surely do!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Bad ATI driver for the X600pro took down my XPSP2 install.
Bad enough to re-apply the ghost with the previous driver on it.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
In the last two motherboards I had, the CPU died when their fans got so dirty they stopped. Yes, by "dirt" I am indeed referring to dust.
And I thought I had a bad hard drive once, and it turned out to be a marginally bad cable. It did indeed give me BSODs (win98) as well as some other flakeyness, and like the present problem didn't affect the Linux side at all.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
It was the lack of memory that was slowing it down. We know because that's all we changed and it runs great now. Opening a new safari window used to take several seconds. Now it's nearly instant.
Mobile harddrives are not that much slower than desktop drives.
"You'll probably still be saying it when it's the only machine still working when all the PCs you've bought since are failing in a couple of years time."
I build all my PCs from parts and they last as long as want them. I don't buy a new MB/CPU/Memory unless there's compatibility issues involved with getting a faster processor. I don't buy a new computer because the MB/CPU or memory failed.
When the 1.66GHz processor in the Mini doesn't cut it anymore we have no options. You have to buy a whole new Mac. You can't just spend $200 on a new MB/CPU and possibly some memory.
And like I said, since Apple tried to rip us off on memory I don't trust them anymore. I'd hate to buy a Mac and have to buy their parts. We got lucky this time.
Work Safe Porn
*blinks* Are you for real? 512MB is quite adequate for XP. That's what my wifes machine had before I upgraded it and that only because the RAM was on sale. I have a good dozen programms running in WinXP Pro and I have... wait for it.... 547MB used... So, yes, it would hit a bit on swap... However, with a good swap out strategy , it would be stuff I rarely use (if Windows has a good swap out strategy is another discussion). 512MB for XP is very adequate.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
"If I bought whole computers instead of building them from spare parts I'd buy a mac."
You can build a mac from spare parts. See here:
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
or here:
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showforum=137
or here:
http://forum.osx86scene.com/
Of if you decide to buy a cheap pc for your project, here's the instuctions:
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=74964
I have an ASUS P4P800 Deluxe (945 Chipset) with a 256 MB Radeon 9600 and 3GB of ram that I use as a 3D modeling station. It runs like an indycar under XP but when I tried upgrading to Vista it slowed to an unresponsive crawl, particularly when I tried playing sound (iTunes) or running flash. ASUS was no help. "We aren't making Vista drivers for that board" they said.
Vista does NOT play nice with the embedded sound / graphics on old Intel boards. These emails clearly show that they knew this. Microsoft should fry. Free copies of Vista or cash value for anyone running "Vista Capable" would be a good start IMO.
I, for one, was one of the few that got hit with Vista problems. However, I'm no longer running vista. Acer tried to tell me that I couldn't get drivers for anything but, but I showed them wrong. Don't applaud me for sticking it to the man, and being a linux geek, with that new copy of Kubuntu. I didn't. I'm running XP... It works. It's stable, and I'm more familiar with it. But, what's the first thing I do with my new copy of XP? I install a pack to make it look like Vista... Why? The pretty... I LOVE the pretty of Vista, however, I'm not going to run a Virtal Machine to get my scanner to work! I'm not going to put up with no memmory left! I'm not going to put up with a two to ten second delay in opening a window! Microsoft, get your heads out of your ass... Try building an OS that people want. Try actually making a good product for once. Don't argue that it's fine. It obviously isn't, because if it were, you wouldn't have the "Vista Sucks" stereotype. Obviously, you messed up. Get your head in the game for 7, or it'll end up being your last commercially viable OS, mark my words... You have a lot to learn from Sega... Don't be too innovative... People don't buy it...
The MS Vista debacle is fantastic. These Vista (in)capable machines run Linux just fine.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Nobody seems to be pointing out that these emails are proof that the guys over at Microsoft actually do want to make Vista a nice experience for the user.
A lot of high end MMO games are notorious for memory leaks and when you are playing for several hours plus running voice communications, internet browsing etc I have seen my pagefile hit 1.5 GB before. Microsoft actually recommends 4GB. Best practices for partitioning a hard disk http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/tulloch_partition.mspx I also do a lot of multi-tasking and photoshop work so the pagefile does get up there. Anyhow for those still sticking with XP the above link and this one are good starters for increasing performance. http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1590&page=1
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Franklin
Again, if you take my stance and ask yourself one question when you buy anything, there shouldn't be a problem here: What will I do if [maker] goes out of business tomorrow?
If you don't ask yourself that question, it's your own damn fault. Especially if you run your business with it. I say let them go bankrupt. Maybe people would learn a lesson and control monopolies before they get to this point.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Microsoft is being bit by its own successful campaign of getting hardware manufactures to only support Windows with "Designed for Windows" hardware. These WinDevices (WinModems, WinPrinters, WinScanners, etc.) rely on Windows to do the bulk of their processing and if you change the way Windows interfaces with these devices (as is the case with Vista) you need to create brand new drivers from scratch. The problem is that hardware manufactures are not going to invest the time and money to make a discontinued piece of hardware work with Vista when they can sell you a shiny new one.
If Microsoft would have promoted "real" hardware that did not need specialized driver software which is intimately entangled in the internals of Windows, they would not be in this position. Take, for example, a standard Postscript printer: complicated low-level drivers are unnecessary in most operating systems and it just works (to steal a line from the Mac world).
Could you imagine a world where every multi-function device used standard USB communication to interface to the Postscript/PCL printer, SANE/TWAIN scanner, and the built-in fax modem was a standard serial device that used AT command sequences? If Microsoft promoted such standards, this device could not only "just work" with Vista, but also Mac OS (X or otherwise) Linux, OS/2, BeOS... basically everything. The conspiracy theory part of my brain says that MS just can't stand for that, which is why it did not "discourage" hardware manufactures from tying basic functionality to Windows.
But now that it needs to change the internals of Windows, Microsoft's hardware lock-in is coming home to roost.
(BTW, does anyone else think it is monumentally stupid that Vista does not support generic Postscript or PCL printers out of the box and must rely on HP or Adobe for such drivers?)
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
Check the Mozilla store and change your sig.
WINDOWS VISTA: The Great Wow Experience
Copyright (c) 2006, 2007, 2008 Microsoft, Inc. All rights reserved.
WINDOWS is a registered trademark of Microsoft, Inc.
Revision 6093 / Serial number FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
West of Desktop
You are standing in an open field west of a desktop, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
>open mailbox
Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet.
>read leaflet
(Taken)
"WELCOME TO VISTA!
VISTA is an operating system of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing window decorations ever seen by mortals. No computer should be without one!"
>photoshop.exe
I don't know the word "photoshop".
>help
I don't know the word "help".
>reboot
I don't know the word "reboot".
>dir
I don't know the word "dir".
>C:\ I don't know the word "c:\".
>
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I'm using a PC with pretty much that specs, and you say old? Windows Vista should run faster than XP.
(I'm going to repeat myself from another post, but...)
They only place layers of s*** without cleaning and optimizing code.
They rely on the latest generation of CPUs to run all that junk and produce "satisfying" results.
One day, they will wake up and realize they 1) got to clean all that code or 2) start all over again (yeah right...). Either way, they lose!
We have a divergence in the interests of the users and the customers. The customers for PC's are largely HP, Dell, etc. Dell, HP, et al, want reasons to get users to buy new PC's, rather than just upgrade their existing SW. If people bought subscriptions to the SW, the business model would change. That said, I expect the movement to software as a service should have some interesting impacts, and not only on Microsoft.
as noted in the related thread, the hardware manufacturers are equally to blame: for trying to pass off their products as vista-capable, and thereby increase sales. MS made product A, Dell/HP made product B - and the sales pitch was that A and B worked well together.
True CPUs overheat without a fan, but I'm not sure how that is related to your current situation except to prove that you're not taking very good care of your computers. It's also true you could get BSODs in Win98 with a bad IDE cable, 98 would BSOD if you sneezed at it wrong. XP however is much more forgiving of hardware failures and does not BSOD (that I've seen) from a bad HD.
If you don't believe me that your RAM is going that's fine, just trying to offer some helpful advice. Seems you have a variety of issues so maybe it really isn't your RAM. Either way the test disk is free other than the CD you have to burn it to and is very helpful with a lot more than just RAM testing, I highly suggest it.
"airly older computer "
Don't confuse age with power.
I ahve a 4 year old machine I'm sure it would run on, but it has 4Gig of Ram and one of the most powerful chips of the time.
we are talking about the 64MB wonders that they claimed it would run on.
Two stickers could have been different, hell making one Black and White would have been enough to grab someones attention.
So, what are the specs of this 'Older Computer'? Unless you are a time travel, all computers are older. Even then it would be older to your frame of reference. Being a reasonable person I assume you meant a few years old.
Well, we have had many tests with Vista, and the end result is we won't be getting Vista for our organization any time soon.
Market and PR speaking, it's starting to look like Windows ME. NOT TECHNICALLY. Please, nobody tell me the technical difference, I know them.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
(A company I'm associated with sued Microsoft, and I attended the trial. Plaintiff entered into evidence all kinds of interesting internal Microsoft emails they obtained through the discovery process. Anyone interested in seeing interesting internal Microsoft tidbits should consider finding one of the many court cases they are involved in, and attending)
I don't think so, for two reasons. First, the standards were subsequently lowered for everybody, including AMD, so enforcement was fair. (Although you could make the argument that they were all treated poorly, I suppose.) Second, I understand that AMD was not selling desktop or laptop chipsets in 2006, as they had not yet merged with ATI. AMD chipsets would therefore not have been affected by this change, although ATI chipsets may have been. But it is not clear whether they were negatively impacted. Some ATI chipsets with integrated video may have benefited from this change, in fact. You just may not hear about them because they aren't as widespread as the 915 was and still is.
From what I understand, this decision was largely forced upon Microsoft by several OEMs (e.g. like Dell, Sony, Lenovo, IBM, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Acer), who had relatively large inventories of 915-based products which they wanted to sell, and were afraid that without the "Vista Capable" logo they wouldn't sell well. Some OEMs (apparently HP) had already updated their 2006 product line to the original published Vista requirements, and were therefore understandably upset when the standards were lowered to include their competitors' less capable (and less expensive) offerings as "Vista Capable" too. I can certainly understand why these OEMs would be upset.
The fact that some systems (especially laptops) would lack Aero support was clear long before Vista shipped. Around June or July 2006, or 6 full months prior to Vista's release, Microsoft went live with the official Vista logo programs, of which there were two: "Certified for Windows Vista" (premium), and "Works with Windows Vista" (basic). One of the chief differences between the two was Aero support. (It is no coincidence that Windows Vista Home Basic edition does not contain Aero support, while Home Prmium does. The two SKUs were intended to align with their respective logos.)
Therefore, OEMs knew by at least mid-2006 that not all hardware would be able to achieve the "premium", Aero-enabled logo category. In June/July 2006 Microsoft released a logo test kit for these new Vista logo programs, which included a test called the "Aero Acceptance Test" which was required for the "Certified" logo. It failed several manufacturers' integrated video solutions, including the Intel 915. But since Vista was not yet shipping (and therefore these logos, although "ready", were not yet shipping to customers), OEMs were free to continue selling these non-Aero chipsets to customers with the older "Vista Capable" logo. At this point, however, they knew full well that these systems could never achieve the "Certified" logo. But obviously they felt no obligation to warn potential purchasers of the future limitation.
Ideally in my opinion, Microsoft should have specified two different "Vista Capable" logos all along, anticipating the fact that not all hardware was created equal and were equally "Vista Capable". However easy this is to note in hindsight, it is obviously difficult to specify hardware standards. It takes a lot of work. Having two such programs ready a year in advance of a fluctuating OS release date is even more complicated, and deciding where to draw the line between the "basic" and "premium" versions in 2005, when you don't really even know what features will make it into the finished product, is well near impossible.
So while I sympathize somewhat with customers who purchased hardware in 2006 with the understanding that it would run Aero in 2007, frankly no one promised them anything, and their systems are capable of running 95% of Vista just fine. Purchasing hardware with future expectations of 100% feature support has always been a gamble. You don't know whether something is going to work 100% until it's actually available.
Why not just use GRUB? Who needs that proprietary Bootcamp crap? It's a fancy name for a bootloader. Apple seems to be feeding the general market something old and they think it's something new. Only Apple seems to have the marketing capabilities to make ancient technologies sound amazing and shiny. Then again, I might be bitter from hearing people say "But, you can install Windows on it!". I simply reply to them that they're paying too much for hardware.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
It failed with a BSOD? I'd believe it since it's a graphics driver but in that case you'd have a pretty good indication it was the driver and not the RAM since it was fine until you installed the new driver.
The point, which you've missed, is that the laptop should at least function properly as sold without tweaking by a nontechnical user.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Wife: "My photo application is slow, we need to upgrade"
She also can set the timer on the VCR: "Hon, can you set the VCR clock?"
Quite a capable woman actually..
I kid, my wife could upgrade the computer if she wanted to, easy peasy. But she doesn't like to, so I get to do it.
Hmm..same thing with the Yard work..damn! she IS smart.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
for Microsoft to be secure, they need to change their platform.
It's architecture is horrible. This is a huge part of the problem, it's not easy to fix.
Here's the deal:
Good architectures mature, bad one's age.
IF it was a good architecture, it would just need to fix the exploit, and you would have in less problem. Probably in a module someplace. As time goes on, the OVERALL design and implementation gets better.
This is why most of the really secure OS have been around for a while.
Evolve to prevent new threats.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is available in Windows XP, as well: Right click My Computer->Properties->Advanced->[Performance]->Settings->Adjust for Best Performance.
What it actually does is listed on the dialog.
Though I get your point, I'm betting no company wanting to stay kosher would, unless they could de-monopolize it. Seems kinda counterproductive though. (Well, more than Windows normally would be.)
It's pretty much the same, really...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQVWDoqbN48
that's like the simpsons comic book guy.
Shatner is more like:
Cleary ThereAre. SomeExcep,tions. ToThisRule.
hey, I'm just having nerd fun.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That's only partly true, chimps like bananas too! Although they have a lot more hair than Steve Ballmer. And manners. And dance skills.
A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's an erection for?
"Unless of course you like to run Photoshop, "
I do. I use an older version running under Win98SE and with plugins that do the equivalent of today's photoshop, from what I've seen. Eat my 96 megs of RAM on a paltry 533 MHz P3.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The joke isn't even funny. Seems like he's doing the author a favour.
Vista's biggest problem, from day 1, has been buggy, shitty drivers. NVIDIA's drivers were horrible at release. So were Intel's.
Go read these emails. They are expressing dismay at two major things:
The first problem puzzles me. Many of the emails seem to reflect my confusion about this - WHY weren't drivers ready when Vista had been feature-complete for over a year? Manufacturers seemed to get used to the idea that Microsoft wasn't going to ship, which after 5 years of delays, I guess isn't so unreasonable.
The second problem is typical MS. They do this with WinMo devices, many of which still ship with a TI OMAP 850 (200MHz ARM - it was slow when it was released 4 years ago) and 64MB of memory (~30-40MB of which is used as a filesystem cache to avoid killing the flash memory). That's why I now carry an iPhone.
But has WMP ever downloaded a non-MS codec?
No sig today...
If a noob bought a laptop and it ran like ass, how would they have the qualifications to know what is required for vista? I have used a core 2 duo laptop with 512 megs with vista basic and it really did take 10 mins to boot, and IE was such a pig to load as well. It is CRIMINAL that such low specced systems were sold with vista on them so that extra hardware purchases are REQUIRED just to make use of what you bought.
I installed XP expecting it run like a dog, but i didn't have another option at the time. You know what though? it runs suprisingly well! granted i haven't got much installed on it (anti virus, mozila, Reason 3.0) but it runs much much better than i thought it would.
As long as i don't flood it with windows live crap (eg, messenger etc..) i'm sure it'l continue to run fine.
my 2 cents:)
Ditto. Co-worker turned up yesterday...
co-worker: Can you fix my laptop, its running really slow.
me: how old is it?
co-worker: 2 days.
me: Vista right?
co-worker: yup
me: how much ram?
co-worker: 512mb
Thats just a joke. of course he doesn't know how to buy ram or install it so i'm stuck with organising that for him.
MS should be paying for the RAM and my time.
Also, when I first bought the computer, the BIOS it had didn't have the ability to emulate IDE or whatever on the SATA drives so XP couldn't even see them to do the install. An update to the latest BIOS fixed that.
You can slipstream SATA drivers onto the XP install disk and have it work - this is what I did to make my u305 talk to XP.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
My GP got modded troll twice, funny 5 times, overrated twice, Redundant once and underrated once. Wondering who got that kind of mod points to waste?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That would have been you, or your daughter since nobody forced you to buy it.
Naturally! He should have employed his awesome psychic powers to realise that the recommendations of the only people who actually knew what Vista was going to be like when it shipped were crap.
If people would just get off of their lazy butts and polish their crystal balls once in a while, we could scrap all of those silly truth in advertising laws and other consumer protections.
I just got one I haven't seen in a long while. Tuesday Morning one of the systems was BSOD with a non bootable device error. The guy whose computer it is said he tagged reboot as he left Monday night because it was running slow. I booted knoppix and mounted the drive with no problem and with the minimal amount of locally stored company data intact. However, I didn't tool around the OS files too much. Utils said the memory was right and smartctl gave the drives a healthy. ClamAV on the mounted drive came up clean, and I haven't seen any hits on the file server logs for infected files. chkdsk \r in recovery console fixed it up nice and it has been running clean and fast since 10 am or so Tuesday. I am definately not a windows guy so if anyone has ideas on how a NTFS partition with XP can become unblessed I would love to know.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
uh... "champion"?
"The emails reflect a lot of frustration among senior Microsoft personnel about Vista's performance problems and hardware incompatibilities."
You should get a load of what the rank and file are saying. It's not pretty.
256MB is fine for XP when you don't have users that install every piece of software they see and have 100 little tray applets and background updaters running. Sure newer OS's need more RAM, but it's app bloat that I find really increases the need for more RAM over time.
On the other hand, when XP came out all you heard was people bitch about how it barely worked with 64MB and how slow it was with only 128 when that's what most entry level XP systems had. 98 and 2K ran wonderfully in those scenarios. 512MB was a luxury for high end boxes. Thankfully RAM just always gets cheaper in the long run.
Some day when Windows 7 comes out we'll talk about how slow it is running with 4GB and how you really need 6 or 8 for it run well. We'll complain that we need to spend an extra $50 to upgrade the shiny new $400 box from 4 to 8 gigs. We'll reminisce about our 5 year old Vista boxes that run pretty well with only 2GB.
The more things change...
so flattered that kdawson herself took the time to mod this down - luv striking that nerve :)
I didn't find this surprising (most developers /LOVE/ *NIX), until I read that you were in mgmt. Were you a developer who had the misfortune of being punished for writing good code by being dragged in to management? Or were you actually a manager... that would surprise me. I'm a software development major in college, among my peers it's almost a running joke that management just doesn't *get* *nix yet, but it'll grow on them over time if they give it a chance. I'd really be surprised to hear that technical managers (who aren't from a development or admin background) are running *nix, regardless of company. When I heard that the new CEO of Red Hat used to run Slackware, I /still/ nearly fell out of my chair!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I grant you Windows 98. However Windows 2000 on a 64MB box? Never. Back when W2k was in SP0 phase, I ran it on a P-III 800MHz that had a whopping 256Meg RAM. It was unbearable.... It was unbearable while 98 ran fine. Only when I upgraded to 256MB, it ran fine. Do also keep in mind that 98 to W2k was an architectural change. W2k to XP was an evolution (and the memory requirements only doubled after XP SP2 came out, before that they were on par with W2k). XP to Vista is also just an evolution, but it put the bar very very high. None of the machines I currently posses (ranging from 10 to 1 year old) are able to run it fully featured. That isn't a good sign.
True, true.... But then I'll be there posting that Vista on a 1GB system was pure horror ;-) On a more realistic note, you have to realise that the scenario you describe needs a transition from, 32-bit to 64-bit (just ignore PAE for now, mmkay?) and as far as I can see Vista (the ones sold at best-buy) is still 32-bit (I know there is a 64-bit version, but is Joe User going to buy it? At a a premium?) 8Gig machines on a 32-bit platform? I don't think so....
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
If he got a refund, he presumably no longer has the OS installed and so doesn't need their support. That and the very reason he needed a refund is that they couldn't even manage pre-sale support.
BSOD, STOP error, specifically referencing the ATI driver/fatal exception.
Even newer cards are causing issues in my lab with Vista/XP64bit. XP32 and older cards (like the X600) with the later driver builds are also problematic.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Heh, I just read through the PDF of emails. Allchin is quite the corporate survivor. How many times does he say "I wasn't involved in that" or "I didn't know" or "The dog ate my homework?"
Take the latter first. Code running in kernel mode runs on CPU ring 0; User mode, ring 3. What's been causing problems with device drivers is that Vista's new driver framework puts a lot more restrictions on what can run in kernel mode (e.g. kernel mode printer drivers are now banned).
But this is not the same thing as user account privilege seperation, which is a higher level distinction -- for example, different users might only have write privileges to their own home folders, wheras administrators have write privileges to the entire hard drive. This has also cause some compatibility issues, but with programs rather than device drivers -- mostly programs that write to areas they shouldn't (e.g. the root of the C drive), and thus will complain if they aren't run elevated.
So, for example, even if a program is elevated to administrator [user account privileges], the actual code will still almost always be running in User mode [CPU rings].
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Oh, come on, modders -- "Troll"? For what, pointing out that more modern operating systems doing more things takes more system resources?
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
This one will trigger Last Measure....don't click !!!
512 of RAM on WinXP is great.
My old system that I used for the past 5 years had 320 megs of ram, and ran at 500mzh.
I never ran into problems using that system for running photoshop 7 (with 100mb+ files), cubase 3, audiomulch (with 10 or more VSTs running) Adobe Audition 2, Premier.
sure, i had to wait a few seconds to apply a filter, but thats no big deal. Rendering files was painfully slow, but i could do that at night while i slept.
I never had any problems actually being productive with such an underpowered system.
what specs does vista require to reach the same level of productivity?
-I only code in BASIC.-
Check out page 47 of the full pdf. Its a table showing the percentage of crashes reported by graphics card vendor and Nvidia is way out in front, with 25% compared to less than 10% for ATI.
Search first, ask questions later.
its not like someone at M$, or Intel for that matter, spec'd that machine for Toshiba.
Intel had nothing to do with it, but the Vista capable designation DID come from MS. They set the requirements and Toshiba and others designed to that requirement.
Apparently you don't run Firefox.
I am running XP and I currently I have 2 applications running (Firefox and Pidgin), and I am using 579MB (of 2GB) of memory. Top offenders: Firefox (53MB with two tabs open) and, Symantec AntiVirus Corporate (67MB). Infact, even explorer.exe is using 51MB of RAM.
If you have less then 512MB, sure it may "run", but you have to be some kind of masochist.
"Flee at once, all is discovered."
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
It works great on XP too.
Gets rid of the annoying menu fades, slides, shadows and other unnecessary stuff in the gui.
You can keep themes on, but most of the checkboxes there are useless.
Helps with speed if doing remote access over RDP, VNC, etc and also helps a wee bit with battery life on portables if you have power management enabled.
You'll probably want to leave the "use drop shadows..." option if you don't like windows 98 style icon labels.
Why isn't it default? For the same reason that Microsoft feels that you need a 8 gig "temporary internet file" folder (that, incidentally, tends to fragment the hell out of your hard drive), System Restore thinks using 60 GB is perfectly fine (default is 12% of drive space), the page file config is pretty much guaranteed to fragment the PF by resizing the damn thing over and over, and font smoothing is set by default to "Standard" (completely worthless) instead of "Cleartype" (which actually is an improvement)
Apparently nobody at Microsoft cares enough to stand up and say, "Maybe we should think about this for a minute."
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Maybe he thought MS actually created a MORE efficient OS than it's predecessor. It's sad that we tend to assume new versions will have higher system requirements.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
Hardware vendors were told to sell Vista-only. XP would have cost me $100 extra ona new laptop a year ago. I bought another GB of RAM for the laptop for a total of 1.5GB....and it runs pretty much the same as XP or Linux in 512MB. My issue is the HUGE range of apps and hardware for which there is no Vista support......though the hardware support is increasing steadily as time passes. But it seems to me that roughly 75% of time when I want to install a Win32 app that is says "XP and 2k only" . I have learned to heed that warning as meaning don't even tr it. I've alreadyhad to completely re-install Vista once for having ignored that and installed the software anyway (Motorola bluetooth USB dongle and software).
Only boring people are ever bored.
Why is this modded "Troll"? Is someone who advocates personal responsibility really such a painful thing for you guys to hear? Knowing what you are buying before you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a machine is simply good sense. It's the prudent thing to do. If you yourself are not knowledgable about computers, it's not difficult to ask someone who is, to do a Google search, or to pick up a publication like PC Magazine or Consumer Reports and see whether the item you had in mind is highly rated. Honestly I can't believe people think that blindly trusting labels, packaging, or other advertising is the best way to make a good purchase.
... well, I don't think this is a rational belief at all, but if you feel that way then how about posting a reply to explain your reasoning? Modding someone "troll" because you strongly disagree with them is the kind of cheap, childish shit that makes Slashdot a worse place.
If you disagree with the parent poster, implying that you really believe that looking out for your own best interests is a task that shouldn't involve you, a task that should only be up to the government or honest advertising
And no, I am not saying that Microsoft should blatently lie, or that government regulators should do nothing about it if they do (save the strawman arguments, please). I am saying that depending on politicians or corporations to look out for you is naive at best, blatently stupid at worst. What is "troll" about pointing out that there is no substitute for due diligence? Or, what's "troll" about pointing out that uninformed decisions tend to get bad results?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Yeah, I finally did that. I actually discovered the BIOS update after slipstreaming my new XP install disk after finding the drivers on that site I mentioned.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Why would your computer manufacturer want to 'keep you from abandoning Vi$ta'?
If you have an XP disc & license, then use it.
If what you're saying is that you bought a machine that the manufacturer doesnt provide XP drivers for, then it sounds like you have an issue with the manufacturer.
The Class Action Lawsuit was over misleading 'Vista Capable' stickers, not over other companies (hp, dell, etc) not providing drivers.
For future reference, the way to avoid this situation is to not buy consumer targeted computers, especially never at a Retail Store like BestBuy or the like.
Buy corporate class equipment from HP, Dell, or Lenovo. Then you'll have not only better/more-stable drivers, but for all the commonly used operating systems as well, including often a couple linux versions.
Why not just use grub?
.... a simple push-button solution that 'just works' or a bunch of work, both to produce exactly the same outcome.
Let's see. Bootcamp installs at basically the push of a button. Grub? Nope, have to do your own partitioning, then manually configure grub, after reading up on it to figure out how it works.
Bootcamp also has the windows drivers for the hardware, so even if you do use grub, you're going to have to use the resources from Bootcamp.
So lets recap
Is it any wonder why more people dont just use grub?
I notice you didn't even try to defend the other three points regarding embrace-extend-extinguish, refusal to interoperate, or reluctance to follow US or EU law (as convicted monopolists).
And while we're at it, let's try and go for at least a Fox style "fair and balanced" view of Microsoft: we can start with the patent threats against Linux, move on to Balmer calling Open Source a "cancer", and then dig into all of the stuff that's behind them now like "cutting off Netscape's air supply" and flat out stealing technology from Stac, Inc. back in the DOS days.
Tell you what: we Slashdot drones will clean up and play nice with Microsoft and the warchest in billions of USD worth of ill-gotten monopoly money it has to spread FUD er.. I mean "marketing" as soon as they stop attacking Open Source and Linux to perhaps do a little more of that "cutting off air supply" style behavior. Until then, I say we SlashTrolls simply FUD away for the pure enjoyment and Google cache filling satisfaction of it all in our miserable little lives.
P.S. I hear with all the chairs Balmer is throwing these days in Redmond, that it's starting to get old hat for him.
Rumor is, the local humane society is being cleaned out so he can have some puppies and kitten to use as
"chair targets". Now that could be all made up FUD, but we're talking Microsoft and Balmer here so... well, you never know...
There. I feel better already.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
The tagline is 'News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters'. Nothing about Free and Open Source there.
The closest thing that I can find is in the FAQ:
http://slashdot.org/faq/slashmeta.shtml#sm1100 I thought everyone on Slashdot hated the RIAA, the MPAA, and Microsoft. Why do you keep hyping CDs, movies, and Windows games?
Big corporations are what they are. They sell us cool stuff with one hand and tighten the screws on our freedoms with the other. We hate them every morning and love them every afternoon, and vice versa. This is part of living in the modern world: you take your yin with your yang and try to figure out how to do what's right the best you can. If you think it has to be all one way or the other, that's cool, share your opinions, but don't expect everyone else to think the same.
I have seen exactly that, numerous times. Usually it ends up in a BSoD at bootup. It only happens when system files are corrupted due to the harddisk. If it's "only" your data that is corrupted, the system will run sweet as ever.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Robin Leonard, a Microsoft employee, wrote that Wal-Mart is "extremely disappointed in the fact that the standards were lowered and feel like customer confusion will ensue.
If Walmart is complaining about quality, then you've really dumped a steaming turd into the marketplace.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
"The market clearly wasn't ready for it" It clearly wasn't ready for the market. There, fixed that for you.
Home fucking is killing prostitution.
Partitioning? Yes. Bootcamp wins there. Though if you've set up partitions before, it's no big deal.
Configuring. Nope, or not always. Installed Kubuntu + OS X dual boot on a macbook pro and grub works like a charm there and installed and configured automatically. Can't say the same though for Debian Etch and Debian Lenny. I'm really itching to get back to Debian on the notebook, but because of grub, I have to deal with Kubuntu a while longer.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Some of the BSD's are quite small as well.
.iso for NetBSD/i386 (one of the most bloated archs) is 247MB.
The size of the Base Install
So you get a complete Windowing System and full networking in a 500 MB footprint. And much smaller if you don't need X11.
Granted, you don't get a fully cocked and loaded DRM mechanism aimed at locking you away from your own hardware....
That's because in my experience (anecdotal, I know) Vista runs better virtualized than it does bare metal.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
As much as I'd like to see M$oft go down in flams (I'll be having a HUGE party when it does finally happen), the fact is, we can't let it happen now. M$ needs to die off slowly. Were they to be slammed out of existance by a massive legal hit, or a product recall (which due to core technologies would also crippte server 2008) then millions of firms would be stuck with out of date and insecure software, and patches would cease to be released.
Firms simple don't have the money, resources, or time to outright replace microsoft. billions of lines of code for proprietary business systems run today, and without trillions of dollars in investment, can't simple be recompiled to run on linux or Mac OS X.
If M$ goes belly up, we're all going to have to pay a whole lot more than what it costs to slowly migrate away from them. They are a sinking ship, and I expect that in 5 years, they won't be the most popolar server OS anymore, they might even get booted off desktops in this timeframe too, but it's not as realistic of a number.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
I'm not; I don't typically buy latest generation, usually one or two behind. Only recently am I thinking of getting latest generation for my new server.
we are talking about the 64MB wonders that they claimed it would run on.
Huh? Can you provide evidence of this? Here's the system requirements for home basic:
Personally, its been quite a few years since most machines started being sold with 512MB. Only walmart brand PCs are / were shipping with 64MB. I don't recall Vista ready stickers until only about six months before the release. If you can show me such an ad that was selling a 64MB machine with a Vista Ready logo, I'll believe you, but somehow I doubt this was the case.
Two stickers could have been different, hell making one Black and White would have been enough to grab someones attention.
That would be quite confusing; it'd be easy to get the meanings backwards. Also, you have to know what Home Basic provides and what the other editions provide. Likely, most people wouldn't (and don't) bother checking. That's not MS' fault either. People in general should be doing more research before a purchase than they are.
So, what are the specs of this 'Older Computer'? Unless you are a time travel, all computers are older. Even then it would be older to your frame of reference. Being a reasonable person I assume you meant a few years old.
Well, it would have been simple enough to find the post to which I refered. But if you're not willing.. 1GB PC3200 RAM, AMD 3800+ X2, Asus MB, 120GB drive, Audigy 2 sound card, ChainTech GF 5700 FX.
Well, we have had many tests with Vista, and the end result is we won't be getting Vista for our organization any time soon.
Are you looking at recommended / minimum specs? I see no reason to avoid it if it comes pre-installed on a computer. We have some computers running Vista at my workplace and no complaints thus far.
The problem is most firm DID do that, 10-15 years ago when the decided on Windows or DOS over IBM's offerings. Then they spent millions of dollars writing code that isn't portable because it wasn't possible to make it so. Now they've got legacy apps and millions of database records, or millions in assembly line equipment, let alone the investment systems, users, training, security.
You don't plan on microsoft not being there tomorrow. Your too entrentched with them to even considder the possibility. It will take 5-10 years for the majority of firms to get out from under them. With open source databases and programs that are finally now taking over and porting data Microsoft has kept sacred for so long, the migration can finally begin, but it can't happen overnight.
Most firms can at best replace 1/4 of their systems each year, and this is assuming a direct and simple upgrade path. You can't just drop microsoft exchange and swith to something else. It requires changes for users, web sites, legacy applications, CRM and IP telephone systems. It's a death spiral.
On even the rumor that a judge might shut down RIM, the US government stepped in and basically said "hell no" and proposed their costs for the change. It would have cost taxpayers more than a billion to get rid of RIM. Can you imaging the military cost to drop microsoft? With the Vista fiasco, the military is well on its way to transitioning to open source solutions, but it's going to take a decade or more to complete. In the meantime, we simple NEED microsoft...
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
pre-sales support is not the requirement of the vendor, but of the distributor. end users don't get pre-sales support direct from microsoft (except through the website), only partners and distributors get that level of support. End users go to the Microsoft partner (Dell) for pre-sales. BestBuy, Dell, and others knew full well what the limitations were of the OS, and what hardware would/would not run different vista versions. If you walkked into a store and asked someone, they had been internally trained to provide you with specific answers. those answeres were created by upper management and technical exports within the vendor chain, not with in microsoft. If you were misled, it's the salesman's fault for not knowing his product.
You can't tell me that BestBuy's geeks didn't know that machine was not going to be able to run Aero. They had the product specs in nice pretty color brocures detaining every version of Vista, and every machine that they had in stock, and they're trainined to "ask questions about how a product will be used, then from their knowledge of product specifications, find the right product for the customer". The question is, Mr. Customer, did you actually 1) ask for help and 2) take their advice? If the answer to either is no, then it's the buyer's fault, and you get to sue noone. If you said yes to both, then you got bad advice from the sales rep, and you should sue BestBuy, not Microsoft.
Even still: the sticker may have been misleading, but how much info can you put on a 1/2" by 1" sticker, half of which is a logo? Microsoft made freely available a WEALTH of information about their offerings and specs. The hardware vendors did the same. It was up to you to connect the dots. if you cound't do that, you should have requested a professional to assist you. People just simply paid it no attention. They bought product without researching it. They claim it sais "Vista Capable" that must mean they can do everything, paying no attention to the fact that there are MAJOR differences between the $400 and $1400 computers on the shelf even under XP, and not considdering that might effect Vista?
If you bought a Honda 4-banger with a tow hitch on the back and expected it to tow a horse trailer, and you didn't read the owners guide (freeley availabe online and at the dealerships before you bought it), can you really sue them because it can only tow up to 1500lbs? NO! Same goes here. Buyer Beware.
Heck, My home theatre stereo has an "XM ready" sticker on it. Can I get XM on it? NO! I have to buy a $200 adapter that, oh by the way, can be used with ANY stereo. Another model that sais "XM ready" may just need an anteanna. My car has the same issue... I can use XM, but the radio doesn't directly support it (have to have a seperate screen and controller, so really, XM is just an analog input no different that an iPod, but the sticker is there just the same. did Chrystler get sued for that?)
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
btw: I hate defending microsoft as much if not more based on how much i already despise their products. Fact is, if this legal precedent was set, we'd all suffer. A thousand companies would fall like dominoes in the storm that followed. We simply can't allow that to happen.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Xebian (Debian for XBox) works fine on my 64Meg Xbox - plays live TV with MythTV very well too thanks...
I never said MS and MS alone lied by representing systems as being appropriate for Vista when they weren't actually. All I said is that MS sure did! Are you trying to tell me that it's OK to be a lying weasel as long as you're not the only one?
If the truth won't fit on a 1/2 by 1 inch sticker, they should have used a bigger sticker or none at all. Nobody held a gun to THGEIR heads and said "advertise Vista Capable on a small sticker or else".
Simple fact. MS said a machine that has at least X, Y, and Z is suitable for Vista. It turns out that X,Y, and Z do NOT add up to suitability for Vista. That is, the original statement was knowingly deceptive.
btw: I hate defending microsoft as much if not more based on how much i already despise their products. Fact is, if this legal precedent was set, we'd all suffer. A thousand companies would fall like dominoes in the storm that followed. We simply can't allow that to happen.
Why not? There's a thousand more honest companies just waiting for the opportunity to compete fairly in an appropriately regulated market. Pervasive lying creates pervasive mistrust. Pervasive mistrust unravels society.
Because it also raises barriers to entry into the market, it harms the economy. It's much easier for large multi-nationals to get away with the (currently small) consequences of deceptive sales than it is for newcomers. Essentially, that means that newcomers to the market simply can't afford to LOOK as good as the multi-nationals even when their products are measurably better. That is not a situation that leads to a healthy market.
you're not taking very good care of your computers
No, I'm not. They're less trouble to build and repair than to maintain.
If you don't believe me that your RAM is going that's fine, just trying to offer some helpful advice
And I thank you for it, as well as the link.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Thanks for the info, sorry the mods are MS shills. The only missing pice of the puzzle is where to get a legal copy of Apple's OS without buying a mac? I mean, I already smoke pot and hire hookers, I don't want to become even more of a criminal by using illegal software!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Absolute FUD....
I had an install of XP with 128 MB of ram on a 700mhz PIII that had no re-installs for over 2 years. The actual machine gave way before the software did (it was a dell, and the power connector prongs had become loose, and more importantly the metal bracket that held the monitor in place fatigued and snapped!). No noticeable slowdown at all. I have problems running some apps, like itunes, and "reskinned" apps like the new aim, Winamp, etc, but that has little to do with XP and more to do with the wimpy graphics card and bloated UI's.
It is still in use as my development server.
You're safe
where did the leak come from on these e-mails- class action was just granted and these docs haven't been made public yet- this could actually skew the case since as far as I know there has been no full admission of discovery in this case yet and the doc that has been posted could now be ruled inadmissible
These e-mail's don't paint a picture of a company that's dismayed with their own product, what they're obviously sad about is that they feel they have a good product but that they've screwed themselves over by caving to Intel. They *knew* that Vista required a certain level of GPU / memory performance and they pushed for that for 18 months, and then threw it all away when they let Intel convince them to lower the standards for "Vista Capable". Which went from meaning "Runs Vista ok - similar to XP" to meaning "Runs Vista, but don't plan on doing anything else".
It's like saying Crysis is "capable" of running on 5 year old hardware... yeah, sure, at 640x480 and 15 fps... If everyone ran it like that they'd say it's the biggest pile of crap ever made - and that's what happened to the Vista boys. They let outside vendors / OEMs define the requirements rather than them and then people got pissed when it ran like crap.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
I didn't know it was the same thing in the same place. I remembered once seeing the tab in XP but couldn't tell you how to get to it. And the one in Vista might be new or different... you know, being an 'upgrade' and all... IIRC, the one in XP, while handy, didn't make a night-and-day difference, but the GP made it sound like a big deal. XP with the Classic theme on my 2.8 GHz/1GB P4 here at work still has little hitches and lags compared to the 933 MHz PIII with 512 MB and W2K that it replaced. I thought "performance" might actually have a BIG impact on, you know... performance. Like how laptops let you tweak settings between performance and power conservation.
A couple more notes:
- I've never paid that much attention to the "performance" tab because as far as I can tell you can pretty much accomplish the same thing in Desktop -> Appearance -> Effects.
- I've always turned off all the effects anyway, not for performance reasons, but because they're just stupid and ugly. I'd turn off half the crap in OS X if I could, too, but at least Apple's are generally more nicely done. (The big exception being all the new crap in 10.5.) The 'performance boost' I see isn't that a menu draws in 0.01 seconds instead of 0.02 because there's no drop shadow--rather, it's faster because it spends ZERO seconds doing a little fade-in or slide effect. (I remember going into the registry in Win95 and setting MenuShowDelay to 0ms instead of the default of 400ms. And turning off 'menu blinking' in Mac OS 7-9.) So it doesn't quite count. Yeah, it's a little boost, but it's doing less... not especially impressive. You want to see impressive, put BeOS R5 for Intel onto a 300 MHz AMD K6-2. Watch it boot in 15 seconds after POST, then watch it play six movies at the same time without dropping any frames.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I'm not talking about dishonest companies. I'm talking about good firms that most americans trust. However, by allowing Microsoft to loose this case opens the door for every idiot consumer who fails to research stuff before they buy it to sue people.
If this goes through, we'll be filling out fucking contracts to buy a DVD player, or a video game.
Microsoft may have a monoply, and they may have gooten there using underhanded tactics, pressure, and refusal to cooperate with others, but most every other firm out there didn't. A win for the class action case here is a loose for all other consumers.
I also think that people who bought "vista capable" systems are idiots who should be seperated fro their money anyway. Why? Rule 1: never buy a new OS until Service plack plu 3 months. Rule 2: never buy bottom of the line crap, and never buy systems that can't be upgraded to at least twice their current capabiltiy. Rule 3: Research before you by. Rule 4: you didn't then, and still don't, need and function of Vista except HD playback and DX10, both of which require a dedicated video card anyway. 100% of all other vista functionality exists or can be added to XP. If you violated any of these rules, you're an idiot, and deserve to be punished through loss of money.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Why does this evil link persist?
1: Actually, Intel, Dell and others were the ones who insisted on the Vista Capable campaign, Microsoft just went along because it actually was a good idea, at heart, it was just poorly implemented. They refused to support rollout of the OS unless something was done in this regards.
2: nobody lied (except maybe a few underqualified, undertrained retail associates). The specs were freely available, including the limits of the OS and the hardware. All you had to do was read about it or ask questions for a "qualified" representative or expert.
3: If we skipped the sticker, that would have left too much up to interpretation. Manufacturers wanted a way to make sure their new hardware was being recognized as futureproof. There's not enough room on a notebook or desktop to put much bigger of a sticker without removing the other product information stickers, like features of the hardware itself... (have you looked at a display model recently? There's about 2 square inches available for labels from microsoft, intel, ATI, and others. If there wasn't a program many more people would have been clueless, and underhanded vendors could have pushed product into the hands of ignorants much easier, and without the program, there would have been no legal vehicle for consumers at all. This program was to put the blame in the distributors hands, not microsofts, as they openly admitted in the press that vista's options may be confusing, and their marketing encouraged you to ask a professional which version was right for you, and what to run it on.
4: MINIMUM system requirements have NOTHING to do with RECCOMENDED system requirements. These WERE all posted online, including system benchmarking and ratings using their performance index process. Vista index numbers were available online from the manufacturers of every system listed as "vista capable" This was a required part of the process for getting the sticker on a machine. Your failure to look it up is not their problem. Vista DOES run on every machine they indicated it would They did not say it would run faster or smoother than XP, just that it would run. Premium and Ultimate even will run on low end ssytems, just some features won't, including aero, which they made VERY CLEAR required hardware based video. Nothing in their marketing made you expect otherwise. It was so vague you almost HAD to ask questions. Minimum and reccomedned specs have been available on every software package for more than 10 years. if you don't understand this buy now, you shouldn't be buying your own computer equipment without a professional to assist you.
If BestBuy, Dell and other vendors provided incorrect information or used misleading tactics, it is NOT micrisoft's fault, as much as you want it to be. Agencies exists for consumer protection. they reviewed after complaints Microsofts practices and issued NO FINES and NO TAKEDOWN orders.
there was no FALSE advertising. There was no MISLEADING advertising. Confusing advertising is not only not illegal, it's completely supported under Supreme Court upheld rulings in dozens of "buyer beware" cases.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
So you don't believe that MS was in any way culpable by saying "Yeah, ur, uhm, 512M is plenty for Vista" with fingers crossed behind it's back?
Did Intel put Ballmer's head in a vice and make him give the order to approve such an anemic spec as "capable" for Vista?
As for point 2, since the machine in question CANNOT run Vista in a usable manner but says on the sticker it CAN, yes, somebody lied. Specifically whoever set the standards that allowed that sticker to be placed on that machine.
Keep in mind, I have an ancient '386 that is "Fedora core 8" capable in the sense that if I don't mind re-compiling everything for i386 and then making the boot-up through login in X a weekend project, it WILL do it (sorta). But no reasonable person (A frequent legal standard) would call that 'capable'.
If I sell you an 'off-road capable' vehicle and the doors drop off when you try it on gravel, how will you feel about it? How about when I tell you it did, in fact, go off-road so I can't imagine why you're complaining?
there was no FALSE advertising. There was no MISLEADING advertising. Confusing advertising is not only not illegal, it's completely supported under Supreme Court upheld rulings in dozens of "buyer beware" cases.
So, MS said it was capable and it takes 10 minutes to boot and another ten to start office. If you believe that to be 'capable', I can't help you and we will never agree.
Thank you!
The other 99% of people who have never heard of Slashdot, which is why Microsoft, Cisco, and the like are worth a hundred billion dollars, shouldn't have to deal with this.
Real engineers realize that selling products by the millions leads to 1 in 100 problems, 1 in 1000 problems, etc. For that many on a worldwide scale, 1 in 1,000,000 problems add up to hundreds of complaints. Real engineering addresses the competency level of your customers to reduce headaches for your corporation.
"PEBKAC" isn't something you can blow off in the real world of mass production -- you have to address the issues and prevent them or you'll lose customers.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The champ chimp chump chomped chemporaneously.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Me and my brother both had pretty much the same spec PCs a few months ago, both just about enough to run supreme commander reasonably well. He has since upgraded to vista, making his Nvidia drivers not work with the game. There's been a fix since, but even now it manages a grand 1 to 3fps on the lowest imaginable spec, glad I'm still on XP. Wish they'd just cut their losses, scrap Vista and give us all an XP DX10 patch.
I'm not talking about dishonest companies. I'm talking about good firms that most americans trust. However, by allowing Microsoft to loose this case opens the door for every idiot consumer who fails to research stuff before they buy it to sue people.
Unfortunatly, we are already in a situation where anyone can sue anyone else for absolutely anything at all. I could theoretically sue you claiming that your nick brought back traumatic childhood memories of a really bad day on the playground. Winning such a suit is, of course, another matter. The big elephant in the room is that simply being sued is a damage in itself. The courts and law have yet to acknowledge that adequatly.
As far as any sort of prescident, all the MS class action will do is put other companies on notice that they should be truthful in their claims. *HONEST* companies have nothing more to be worried about.