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Lost Opportunity? Windows 10 Has the Same Minimum PC Requirements As Vista
MojoKid writes Buried in the details of Microsoft's technical preview for Windows 10 is a bit of a footnote concerning the operating system's requirements. Windows 10 will have exactly the same requirements as Windows 8.1, which had the same requirements as Windows 8, which stuck to Windows 7 specs, which was the same as Windows Vista. At this point, it's something we take for granted with future Windows release. As the years roll by, you can't help wondering what we're actually giving up in exchange for holding the minimum system spec at a single-core 1GHz, 32-bit chip with just 1GB of RAM. The average smartphone is more powerful than this these days. For decades, the standard argument has been that Microsoft had to continue supporting ancient operating systems and old configurations, ignoring the fact that the company did its most cutting-edge work when it was willing to kill off its previous products in fairly short order. what would Windows look like if Microsoft at least mandated a dual-core product? What if DX10 — a feature set that virtually every video card today supports, according to Valve's Steam Hardware Survey, became the minimum standard, at least on the x86 side of the equation? How much better might the final product be if Microsoft put less effort into validating ancient hardware and kicked those specs upwards, just a notch or two? If Microsoft did raise the specs a notch or two with each release, I think there'd be some justified complaints about failing to leave well enough alone, at least on the low end.
As the years roll by, you can't help wondering what we're actually giving up in exchange for holding the minimum system spec at a single-core 1GHz, 32-bit chip with just 1GB of RAM. The average smartphone is more powerful than this these days
They're forgetting that Vista ran like shite on those specs :) and NO smartphones are not more powerful, although they are close to atoms at similar speeds now.
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I have worked IT in Banking (twice) and Healthcare (once), in both neither company wanted to spend money on a desktop pc. They wanted the cheapest they could get. Businesses buy Windows. It is hopelessly annoying, but a fact of life.
The reason the specs have not changed is because CPUs and systems in general have been capable of doing most common tasks for at least 10 years. Are the use cases for extreme power? Yes. The submitter, however, makes it sound like it's a bad thing to be able to run on a wide range of hardware, including older slower machines. Are the minimum spec machines going to be able to run Crysis? Nope. Will they run Outlook, Work, and a browser? Yep. This is a non-story.
It has nothing to do with what is being run on these diminutive machines, it has to do with the needless complexity of supporting two architectures. The end user wouldn't know the difference, but it would lighten the burden for all software developers whether writing Windows, or software targeting Windows.
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You do realize that Windows uses free RAM for filesystem cache since Vista, right (just like Linux has been doing for many years before)? The amount of RAM "used", as reported in Task Manager, is basically meaningless.
Many 16 bit applications from the 1980's will run fine on Windows 10 32 bit edition.
Microsoft, more than any other company, has spent money ensuring that old software runs smoothly on newer operating systems. It is not perfect, and it has a lot of downsides, but it is also whey the corporate world and government has embraced MS as the desktop operating system of choice.
They are not going to get rid of Windows 32 on the desktop until there are almost no desktops out there that will run it. 2014 was the first year that Intel fully embraced x64 bit architecture for all of its chips. Most computers more than 10 years old are x32. There are a ton of netbooks and netbook tablets manufactured up until 2013, many that shipped with the EOL OS XP that need to be upgraded to Windows 10.
We have electrochemistry kit that is chugging along on a PC running Dos 6.2 and Win 3.11.
Getting your data off requires a floppy disk as an intermediate step. I have no idea what we'll do if that machine ever craps out - it would be a shame to have to retire the potentiostat because the computers that it was designed to talk to have effectively ascended to godhood in the meantime.
It's certainly not the only piece of analytical kit that is tied to legacy hardware. We have a couple of FTIR machines that look like props from Fallout: New Vegas but work just fine and I'm pretty sure the EPR computer is running Win95.
I shudder at the thought of using a floppy. I like the software FastLynx Kind of like Interlink, but it can easily drag and drop files from DOS to a Win95/98/ME/NT4/2K/XP/Vista/7/8 (32 or 64 bit) using Serial or parallel null modem cables. Cheap $2 USB-serial adapter can be had on eBay. To get faster Parallel transfers requires a real LPT port on your modern PC, not a USB adapter. You can get the bundle from them that includes the software, and cables.
If you have a PC with a broken floppy drive, it can even send the software using MODE and CTTY commands.
It also comes for licenses of Windows versions of Interlnk and Intersvr. The way I had it set up, I created an up to 2GB FAT16 Truecrypt image on my modern "Server" PC (you can use some other image software as well). This gets mapped to a drive on the legacy client machine so now you have a massive disk drive expansion. When the drive is mapped, FastLynx has exclusive use of it, and you can't access files on the host OS it until you disconnect from the legacy PC. Alternatively you can map the drives on the DOS PC onto your modern PC.