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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.
I think the reason the specs aren't increasing much is because the pace of hardware improvements isn't moving as fast as it used to. Nowadays, you pick up an i7 and 16Gb of RAM, your favorite video card, toss an SSD in there and you've basically hit the limit.
All we're getting these days is more cores as the whole gigahertz wars ended 10 years ago.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Windows is an operating system. It's job is to allow other applications to be executed simultaneously. All of the resources windows consumes are resources denied to other applications. I'm not saying that we need to be stingy like in the bad old days when programmers where more concerned about saving clock cycles than writing scalable, maintainable, and reusable code. But now that we are passed all that, there is no sense in wasting cycles frivolously. Let the applications do that.
Since when is having a light-weight OS a bad thing? Haven't people been harping on MS enough for having bloated OSes?
Sure, make allowances for multiple-core and multiple CPUs on the not-so-low end, but making the minimum requirement a single CPU was definitely smart on their end.
Before we go any further, I think it'd be good to provide an example of what feature you believe Microsoft has failed to implement in order to keep the requirements low. I can't think of what that would be. Because failing the need to meet some specific requirement, I don't know why system requirements should need to keep going up, especially when you consider that we use our desktop/laptop computers for the same things as we did 10 years ago. Web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets. For games, you can support weaker/older systems and just scale the graphics down.
So unless there's a specific feature that would suck up resources, I'd actually kind of expect that an OS system requirements might go down. As code continues to be optimized, you'd get better performance on the same hardware. Of course, there's a limit to that. But why complain that the OS isn't an ever-bloating resource hog?
I am working for a company with 6000+ desktops. I do not understand why our client engineering is rolling out faster hardware every year. 95% of all office workers need MS office, a browser and email. Most of the home users just need a browser these days. Those core i7 are just idling around heating office space.
I have now started rolling out 200 dollar desktop hardware (zotac). Which could really become a problem for microsoft. The windows licence price tag looks really expensive with these hardware prices.
Office problems are solved, we do not need faster hardware. And microsoft is manly making money from, *drumbeat*, office workers.
Best
-S
You're not really "giving up" anything. You don't turn on the computer to play Operating System. You do it to run applications. So Windows requires a low overhead? Well that's great, an operating system SHOULD have a low overhead because it's supposed to get out of the way, not use resources. Your computer is a zero-sum game, memory and CPU that is taken by the OS is usually unavailable to your apps, the things that are actually important (barring, of course, apps that don't multi-thread and can only use part of the CPU, etc).
I suppose we have this fantasy of rotating windows, whiz-bang effects, SFX on the window borders on the desktop.. what do you really get from that? Anything beyond saying "oh that's cool" when you see a demo on the store shelf or a flashy yet impractical interface on a TV show? I know what I got from that -- an annoyance with Gnome 3, GPU memory reserved by the f*%^ing interface, and a lot of time spent figuring out how to turn that nonsense off (thank God Gnome's extensions make that easier to do that now than it was a few years ago!).
Maybe a simpler interface is better. Maybe an interface that doesn't try to do too much visually results in a more USABLE experience. More bells and whistles are not better.
There's no reason why an OS needs to be any larger than it is. Let the market add value to a cornerstone product. There's no reason that the Linux kernel should ever take up a gig of ram because, hey lets throw more boiler plate into it.
Microsoft has one job with Windows, and that's to make the best application shell possible for almost every possible desktop need. I think they've done a pretty good job at it, though they've fucked their UI core so badly time and time again, it feels like they're just re-arranging chairs to justify the upgrade cost.
Bye!
I think this minimum spec idea misses the point. We're talking about an operating system, not an application. The OS should provide a platform (and, to a certain extent, services) upon which users will run the applications that actually get things done. The OS shouldn't have huge minimum specs because it's supposed to be relatively unobtrusive. When we start trying to load the OS down with all kinds of things that ought to be done with apps, we end up with a bloated mess, a one-size-fits-none concept that inconveniences everyone equally. I'd much rather they kept the specs low and pared some of the fluff from the OS instead.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Just to run the OS requires 1GB of ram? ...and I'm meant to be impressed with how "small" this is?
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.
Why don't you get it fixed and install Windows 10 :-)
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.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I think you misunderstood Ron024's comment, or maybe I did. He is saying newer versions of OSX are NOT compatible with older machines. You can get mostly any linux distro to run on any computer since like a Pentium 2 (dependent on DE/WM).
Somebody forgot to tell my Mac that, because more than six years after purchase it's still running the latest OS. I just ran an update this morning, in fact. I think we spent $35 on an upgrade once.
Wrong answer. OS X is a much nicer operating system than Windows. Nice to see that Win8 is finally catching up to OS X. So much so that the next version of Windows is WinX!
My Mac is no longer supported (hasn't been for a couple of releases) by OS-X because the CPU doesn't do 64-bits. It's not even 10 years old yet, and it isn't supported by OS-X.
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It was the first Apple computer I bought. It will be the last Apple computer I ever buy.
Apple is a hardware seller. They make money on leaving old hardware behind in their software. Microsoft does not make money on making hardware obsolete, on the contrary, as long as it doesn't take them too long to support something, they make MORE money on supporting old hardware.
Someone on Slashdot is actually complaining that Windows runs well on older hardware? We're through the looking glass here, people.
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.
16 bit applications were just an example. DOS is pretty much free as is Microsoft's visualization environment if you run 64-bit windows. There still are quite a few legacy 16 bit DOS applications out there, btw. You pay millions of dollars to code a solution back in the 1980's or 1990's and upgrading the software is not always the best option. Heck, there is still a lot of legacy code out there from before the introduction of the MS-DOS PC in the early 80's.
The point is, MS cares a lot about compatibility. A lot of times, "run in XP mode" is good enough to get most problems fixed and 64 bit windows supports compatibility modes going all the way back to the first 32 bit OS, which is Windows 95.
While a program written for Windows 10 probably won't run on Windows 95, a business program written for Windows 95 probably will run on Windows 10, and corporations care a lot about that compatibility.
OS-X has penetrated into the market for highly sophisticated technical and scientific users forr easons which have nothing to do with security, but rather because such end users generally have their own choice of machines and often prefer OS-X for the reasons you listed.
Of course, in my own experience, getting open-source UNIX scientific software to work correctly on OS-X is often just as difficult as getting it to work under Windows with a UNIX emulator and SSHing into or virtualizing a Linux machine is my preferred solution, at least for a desktop computer.
More obscure programs not in standard Linux repositories tend to be equally painful to get set up on Cygwin, Linux, and OS-X, although at least commercial software like Matlab and Mathematica are much more easily set up on Windows or OS-X than Linux.
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.
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.
Overall, 64 bit has a 20% [or better] performance increase for most workloads. There are other factors other than just size of pointers.
Size of pointers is not the major factor in cache flush since most of the cache is taken up by data items and not pointers. These data items are more or less invariant across compilation mode.
64 bit compilers only use 64 bit fetch for non-pointers if you actually request them (e.g. long long). MS is the odd ball and defines a "long" to be 32 bits even in 64 bit mode [contrary to the compilation models used by everyone else]. "int" suffices for most data. Where it doesn't, one will [have to] code "long long" and that is invariant across 32/64, except that the 32 bit code will be slower [generating 2-3 instructions for each 64 bit one].
With x86_64, the first 6 arguments to a function are passed in registers and not on the stack (i.e. no wasteful push/pops for argument passing on entry/exit).
For a function that has a lot of automatic [stack] variables, in 32 bit, any non-trivial loop could spend a lot of time dumping a register to its stack frame solely for the purpose of making room for another variable that needs the register. This is register pressure and is considerably higher in 32 bit mode.
Once an address has been loaded in a register, access relative to that base register is identical speedwise between 64 and 32 bit.
64 bit has RIP-relative addressing which allows data to be addressed as small offset from the RIP [instruction pointer/program counter] register. Since it's relative to the RIP, two consecutive instructions that address the same data location will have slightly different offsets within each instruction.
You want a study? Try a google search on "performance 32 bit vs 64 bit".
Or, the easy reader version:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there