Good point about 'in the ESX context'. I was thinking just in general, not purely in the context of ESX. That does limit the situation a bit, very true.
I guess though its just a cost/time tradeoff, like everything else.
In most cases, I'd rather pay a few extra hundred dollars for a machine to have someone else do all the planning, and to have them maintain a warranty stock of parts, etc.
It would have to be a large price difference to be worth it to build my own, or be working in very large quantities.
We've even periodically done price comparisons with white box builds (parts from newegg) and we usually cant match the quality for the price of Dell or HP. We can often beat the price by a little bit, but its always marginal, and its always perceived as not worth the small price diff.
But, if you keep alot of these parts on stock, and do this alot, and have some proven builds, then I could see the value. For us, though, and our clients, its just not really worth the small price diff.
The reason I (and I think many in this industry) categorize them differently is the magnitude of size difference.
While ESX is just some form of slimmed down OS, its an OS that runs in a 32MB total footprint, and is optimized by people who have been doing this for a long time for its purpose.
Compared to running on a full-blown OS, the 'bare metal' approach produces vastly superior results, in my experience. If nothing else, its one less OS instance you have to manage (ie, no Host to explicitly manage).
But I can also see what you're saying. For testing purposes, we use VMWare Server quite a bit (and player on the desktops), and for that purpose, it works quite well and runs on top of a host that is providing significant services to our office.
the place I work which is seriously pro-MS dumped Virtual PC/Server for VMware ESX back when they had to pay for it
These are not equivalent products. If you were evaluating a bare-metal hypervisor against MS Virtual Server (which requires an entire host OS to run underneath) then you werent really understanding the software you were evaluating.
MS Virtual Server is more or less in the same league as VMWare Virtual Server (formerly GSX).
Microsoft's Hyper-V is a closer match to ESX, though the way MS does their 'bare-metal' is a little different.
You're not talking about current gen products on the MS side.
MS' current virtualization product is Hyper-V and its quite nice, especially for a 1st-gen product from MS.
MS Virtual PC and MS Virtual Server are old products that havent been updated in a couple years, and arent really relevant in comparisons with VMWare ESX (maybe with VMWare Server, but not ESX).
Hyper-V is a decent product, with lots of management tools in process.
I dont think (from what I've seen) that there is a bare-metal version of Hyper-V, but you can run a very minimal Windows 2008 Server Core as the host. It wont be as lean as VMWare ESXi, but it will be much, much more lean than running MS Virtual Server on top of Windows 2003 server.
FOSS and MS need to do a bit of catching up to VMWare, especially Microsoft as I've used that floating piece of crap called Virtual PC and Virtual Server. I haven't seen a FOSS product that can do the kind of resource allocation and load sharing that Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) can and MS Virtual Server sure as hell can't.
FYI, the current version of the MS virtualization product is Hyper-V, and its a very very different beast than MS Virtual Server was.
Hyper-V is not bad, and they'll move it pretty fast over the next couple of years.
Mind you, I'd probably still go for VMWare most of the time, as their products are more mature, and the company has more experience.
But my point is you cant compare MS VirtualPC and MS Virtual Server with VMWare ESXi, its not the right comparison. You need to compare those two with VMWare Virtual Server (formerly GSX). Hyper-V is the right product to comapre with ESX and VI3.
It's not always that simple. With a white box (at least all the ones I've seen) you dont get a nice BMC or ILO card, you dont get hot-swappable dual redundant power supplies, you dont get a nice turnkey hardware management software that will alert you if something starts to go (you can do it, but its all home-grown work, with hp/dell its turnkey). You dont get a well-engineered airflow/cooling in a slick 2u rackmount. You generally dont get a mchine that is as maintainable without tools, or as well engineered internally.
What are the motherboards and chipsets your getting with the whitebox? Sometimes they're the same (vanilla intel), sometimes not.
What kind of automated driver/bios/flash update tools do you get with your whitebox?
Yes, you can white box your servers for cheaper, but its not like you dont get anything in return for the premium.
You build whitebox when you have to, due to funds, or when you're building in such volume that the premium really becomes material.
Linux can be stripped down for embedded systems, as can the user space.... Considering you also have a huge library of drivers available for all sorts of hardware, I think Linux makes sense as a hypervisor.
Thats exactly what ESX/ESXi is. It's a home-grown branch of RedHat from years ago (as I understand it, at least), tuned for very small (= 32MB) footprint.
So arguing that Linux as a hypervisor is just silly, cause thats exactly what ESX is. It's just that with ESXi, you get someone else who is hugely experienced in this technology to do all the 'trimming & tuning' work for you, and handing you something that 'just works'.
You're implying that there's no value in the ESXi product by itself, without purchasing VI3 as well.
This is absolutely not true.
There is a HUGE potential market of smaller businesses and one-off situations where people dont need to manage more than 1 or 2 of these ESXi installs.
They're not using them for disaster recovery, just to get a bunch of machines running on one set of hardware.
From that target's point of view, this is huge. Because now you dont have to run a full-fledged OS underneat the virtualization (ie, Virtual Server, formerly known as GSX).
I mean, theoretically (drivers and controllers permitting), you could have your desktops or laptops running Windows (no directx, so only good for business ue) AND Linux at the same time, both running on top of the bare-metal ESXi.
This is really a huge thing, and I can see several clients of ours that could use this right now, and the lack of free VI3 doesnt bother me in the least.
For what its worth, the search/indexer is somewhat susceptible to getting 'stuck' or consistently re-searching the same things.
There have been some good blogs about how to fix this showing up the past few months (if I can find one again, I'll come back and link in a response to you... think it was Osterman, but that may be bad memory).
So basically, if the machine is still thrashing your drive after the first couple days, then something is broken.
It's a shame that Vista's indexer is so easy to get broken, but it does seem to happen to many people.
When Vista is running right (which seems to be rare, especially on consumer-level machines with OEM builds, which means lots of trial ware and crappy drivers), then the drive almost never gets hit, assuming you have adequate memory.
I've got a 4GB box (Business x64) and after the first 2 days, the drive hardly ever gets hit. It's an incredibly stable box.
But it seems that Vista is hugely susceptible to shoddy OEM installations (which means just about any consumer model) and driver issues.
Note that this isnt me trying to defend Vista, just telling you that it may be possible for you to do a little googling, and find out how to reset or fix the indexer so it stops doing that. And that if you can get it right, with good drivers, it can be quite stable.
We buy all our laptops nowadays from HP, and they're all the 'Compaq'-branded corporate models, many of which are intended to be engineering workstations in laptop form. These ship clean from trialware, and with Vista Business 32-bit, Vista Business x64, XP Pro, and driver disks for all three. On these machines, Vista has been quite good, and we've been able to see some of the technical improvements they made to things like the new window manager, and the IO scheduler.
But I've seen so many consumer-level machines that are just CRAP.... tons of trialware, very poor drivers, and it makes Vista nearly unusable. But then a nice (but still under $1000) corporate machine that is clean, has good 32-bit and 64-bit drivers in the box, that runs Vista flawlessly and fast with 2GB of memory. I'm hoping the OEMs figure out how to get this stabilized soon.
The fact that Server 2008 is so nice, given that its the same codebase as Vista SP1, gives me hope that it will stabilize.
More to the point, why don't home users get the same consideration that business users get? Does Dell secretly not want to sell to home users? Is this this new thing of trying to get rid of your less profitable customers by deliberately pissing them off?
It's not so much that home users get screwed in this, its that people who dont know any better get screwed in this.
Home users can trivially buy business class equipment from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and get XP right now.
The biggest thing is that the vast majority of home users dont know any better, so they get hit with this.
Now why THAT is, I dont know. There must be some marketing or market-dev folks out there who think that having XP and Vista both offered would confuse home users or something.
Click on the Notebooks & Tablets link in Small & Medium Business tab on their website front page (at least in the US).
Then click on the 'Performance' notebooks links.
Every single one of those supports 8GB of ram, 802.11abgn cards, and Vista/XP both in the box.
Then go back and click on the 'Balanced Mobility Notebooks'. Nearly half of these support 8gb, all support 802.11abgn, and Vista/XP.
HP specializes in 'engineering workstation laptops' for folks running x64 windows and very high-memory-use cad/cam/cae use.
I'm writing this from an HP Compaq 8710w, and its literally the best laptop I've ever owned (C2D2.4, 4GB memory, Nvidia Quadro w/ 512mb, fast hdd, intel 802.11abgn, very nice 17" widescreen). The Dell's are great for vanilla corporate road warrios who spend most of their time in MS Office, Outlook, and the institutional apps. They're a great mid-level vendor for corporate laptops (latitudes).
But HP is the best, IME, in the high-end laptops.
Good luck!
PS, you're going to get financially pwned to put 8GB of ram in your laptop. Nearly every laptop on the planet only has 2 memory slots, so you're forced to buy 2x4GB chips, which is going to be very expensive.
May be better off to get 1x4GB now, or better yet, 2x2GB, and just be prepared to put bigger sticks in there 2-3 years from now when the 4gb sticks are much cheaper.
I bought a new HP Pavilion with Vista on it for my business and tried for weeks to get a downgrade to XP Pro.
There's your first problem. You bought a consumer level POC for your business.
It didn't matter that this was a business system for a business and a business use.
An HP Pavilion system is NOT a business system. It's the same garbage you buy at best buy. Business sytems from HP are all numbers, or labelled with the Compaq brand.
Since so much of our software is "incompatible" with Vista, we will have buy all new anyway. This makes the cost of hardware or OS trivial and inconsequential. The application suites are what cost the most -- not the box and OS. Mac may just win out because of this.
If your software is incompatible with Vista, then why are you buying Vista? Didnt you do any research at all before buying Vista equipment?
Why didnt you buy a piece of equipment that comes with XP? Before 2.5 weeks ago, the only systems on the planet that you couldnt get XP on were consumer level systems. Nearly ALL business class systems come with XP, either only before June 30th, or with Vista included after....
It sounds to me like you werent doing your research before buying IT equipment. Is this your business (ie, an owner) or are you an employee?
Did you consult with your IT folks (either in-house or consultants) before doing this to get their experienced and expert opinions?
It's one thing for consumers to get caught in this crap, but if its for a business, you need to do your due diligence and not just buy the first random thing you see at Best Buy. If you dont have the knowledge to do so, then find a local IT consultancy that will help you out.
The vast majority of the latter will give you quick guidance over the phone for free on this kind of thing, in the hope of future service contracts or project work....
There's just alot of self-righteous rage there for a business user. Consumers are okay to get all pissed off when they got duped by the local Best Buy. But in a business capacity, you need to do your due diligence, and figure out what the right thing is before spending the time and money.
This is only doable for generic desktop systems, and for people with more time than money.
If you need a quality laptop, or dont have the time to go futzing around with that stuff, then the tier-1's (hp, dell, lenovo) are quite good, as long as you stick to corporate class equipment.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with building your own, but dont assume everyone's life is like yours. For many of us, taking the time to do this would be a collosal expense, and not even remotely worth it.
For example, I've got a beautiful HP Compaq 8710w laptop here. It's super thin, light (for a 17"), and an order of magnitude higher quality than I would ever have the time to build by hand.
This is only good when you're young, in school, in a very junior technical position at work, or havent been doing this stuff for 10+ years.
Or if gaming is the primary use you make of your computer.
It doesnt take long for the value of your time to be worth sooo much more than the value of your dollars.
At that point, you just buy high quality equipment (ie, corporate class equipment), and let someone else worry about it. You've got more important things in your life to worry about than building your own white box.
Not to mention the relative level of crappiness of white box laptops.
Building computers are something thats fun while you're still new enough that its powerful and exciting, and when you can still take pride in your craftmanship, but not old enough to have done it so many hundreds of thousands of times over that its so boring and pointless.
The indexing service in Vista thrashes the disk at all times, even though it's supposed to do it only during idle times, my drive is constantly thrashing about and distinctively impacting performance of opening applications.
This is a known bug that affects some portion of people, but its not typical.
My indexing service thrashed the drive for about a day after setup, since then the drive is silent 80% of the time.
By definition, if the indexing service is constantly running, but your files arent constantly changing, then something is wrong.
The OS has a bigger overhead, it can NOT be faster than XP unless your XP was configured incorrectly, PERIOD.
Depends what you mean.
If the XP was on low-end equipment, and the Vista is on high end equipment, then its easy for that to be true.
My Vista Business x64 box is much faster than many low-end XP boxes.
But I think what most folk mean is the snappiness and robustness of the desktop.
Unlike XP, where every little network blip would hang the shell, which would block and hange the entire desktop, Vista's desktop is smooth, NEVER hangs, never tears, and never slows down.
Its noticeably more performant under high disk load than XP was.
High disk activity on XP would bring the shell of a dual-core system to a halt on XP. Not so on Vista, even under very high load its barely noticeable.
I think thats what most people mean when they say Vista is faster.
(Mind you, my laptop is a C2D2.4, 4GB of memory, with a fast drive subsystem, and an Nvidia Quadro mobility with 512MB of real onboard memory, so its pretty leading edge power for a laptop, and of course Vista will be fast on this box.)
OK, we now know what you lost when going to Vista: about 1 GB of memory, 30 seconds when waking up from sleep, some patience to click those 'Are You Really Sure That You Want...' buttons...
Not sure what you're referring to here. Sleep & Hibernate are much faster and more reliable than they ever were in XP Pro.
And I'm not sure how the UAC prompts are any worse than constantly using RunAS in XP. Of course, maybe you're referring to running Vista w/ UAC and as a non-admin being slightly more inconvenient than running XP as an admin. Of course, that would mean that you're just comparing random unrelated things and wasting all of our time.
Now, for general interest and in the name of sanity please tell us what you *gained* from paying your tithe to Microsoft to step on the bandwagon called Vista.
Well, not sure what you mean about this 'tithe', but the windows cost on a machine is pretty much the same, rather it be vista or xp.
I cant speak for everybody, but what I got out of it was... a much more reliable system, where the desktop is much more unstoppable to network events, and a machine that can go 2-3 times as long without rebooting than XP could.
I'm familiar with the DRM involved with Vista and the potential performance hits (try being on a domain, unplug the network connection, and attempt an admin task...you'll kill 60 seconds each time waiting for Vista to figure out how to authenticate you).
Nothing in that sentence has anything whatsoever to do with DRM, though you seem to imply that it does.
There was a bug in RTM Vista that made UAC escalations (of the user/pass variety, not the confirm/deny kind) take much longer than they should for domain machines that couldnt contact a DC. This was one of the major things noted as fixed in SP1.
In the early days of Gutmans' ranting (ie, before Vista hit RTM), he was quite clear that he had never actually tested any of his theories.
I cant find anything in his page to support the idea that this has changed.
The closest thing I can find is him quoting some anonymous third parties that showed some task manager screenshots. None of this is Gutman's research, or actually research at all.
Gutman's entire setup consists of him making a hypothesis about how he thinks the DRM _might_ be implemented in Vista based on some very early documents about the systems. He then goes on to assume that his blue-sky hypothesis are correct, and makes further (second order) predictions on how the system might be affected by his hypothetical implementations.
None of this is based on any sort of scientific method, like, you know, TESTING your hypothesis. It's all just speculation built on speculation.
Anyone running Vista on a machine can see in about 30 seconds how full of crap Gutman is, based on the machine's behavior.
Dell, HP, and Lenovo all make it quite easy to get machines with XP. Trivial in fact, just click the little box.
But keep in mind that by the rules MS hands down, they're technically only supposed to do that for business clients. The reality is though that it means you have to buy a business class machine (ie, from Dell that means latitude, optiplex, and precision (Vostro's are rebadged consumer crap, but qualifies as business too)).
This is a good thing though, because the business class machines are pretty much universally better. Higher quality, less garbage pre-installed, more stable driver images, etc etc.
Thats an extraordinarily odd definition of a 'home user'.
I think you'll find that a large chunk of people on/. are actually professionals in this field, either in general IT support, web, software development, etc. I would say that makes them very distinctly NOT home users.
By your definition, the only way you could not be a home user is if you were posting to slashdot in an official business capacity. Thats a little much.
And I really dont know what this means:
Are you employed to make decisions on hardware purchases (and if you do it obviously shouldn't be used privately)?
Are you really trying to say that if you make purchasing decisions for a business, that you shouldnt use your power of decision making for private purposes? LOL Really?
Just pick a business class machine (from Dell that means Latitude, OptiPlex and Precision, or Vostro if you really want the consumer level garbage in a business boring case).
You generally want to do that anyway, from any vendor, as the business class stuff is always a step up in quality, longevity, and stability anyway.
The corporate class machines are often a little bit (ie, ~10%) more expensive than consumer class equipment, but thats money worth paying, due to the difference in quality.
Basically, if you can buy a machine in a physical store, then its garbage and you dont want it. The only equipment worth buying is Dell or HP, or maybe Lenovo for laptops.
For desktops you can also build your own, and you can still buy XP OEM discs for system builders, for a little while longer anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, to pay for a house and food and lifestyle?
Free Software != Free House
Good point about 'in the ESX context'. I was thinking just in general, not purely in the context of ESX. That does limit the situation a bit, very true.
I guess though its just a cost/time tradeoff, like everything else.
In most cases, I'd rather pay a few extra hundred dollars for a machine to have someone else do all the planning, and to have them maintain a warranty stock of parts, etc.
It would have to be a large price difference to be worth it to build my own, or be working in very large quantities.
We've even periodically done price comparisons with white box builds (parts from newegg) and we usually cant match the quality for the price of Dell or HP. We can often beat the price by a little bit, but its always marginal, and its always perceived as not worth the small price diff.
But, if you keep alot of these parts on stock, and do this alot, and have some proven builds, then I could see the value. For us, though, and our clients, its just not really worth the small price diff.
I can see what you're saying.
The reason I (and I think many in this industry) categorize them differently is the magnitude of size difference.
While ESX is just some form of slimmed down OS, its an OS that runs in a 32MB total footprint, and is optimized by people who have been doing this for a long time for its purpose.
Compared to running on a full-blown OS, the 'bare metal' approach produces vastly superior results, in my experience. If nothing else, its one less OS instance you have to manage (ie, no Host to explicitly manage).
But I can also see what you're saying. For testing purposes, we use VMWare Server quite a bit (and player on the desktops), and for that purpose, it works quite well and runs on top of a host that is providing significant services to our office.
the place I work which is seriously pro-MS dumped Virtual PC/Server for VMware ESX back when they had to pay for it
These are not equivalent products. If you were evaluating a bare-metal hypervisor against MS Virtual Server (which requires an entire host OS to run underneath) then you werent really understanding the software you were evaluating.
MS Virtual Server is more or less in the same league as VMWare Virtual Server (formerly GSX).
Microsoft's Hyper-V is a closer match to ESX, though the way MS does their 'bare-metal' is a little different.
You're not talking about current gen products on the MS side.
MS' current virtualization product is Hyper-V and its quite nice, especially for a 1st-gen product from MS.
MS Virtual PC and MS Virtual Server are old products that havent been updated in a couple years, and arent really relevant in comparisons with VMWare ESX (maybe with VMWare Server, but not ESX).
Hyper-V is a decent product, with lots of management tools in process.
I dont think (from what I've seen) that there is a bare-metal version of Hyper-V, but you can run a very minimal Windows 2008 Server Core as the host. It wont be as lean as VMWare ESXi, but it will be much, much more lean than running MS Virtual Server on top of Windows 2003 server.
FOSS and MS need to do a bit of catching up to VMWare, especially Microsoft as I've used that floating piece of crap called Virtual PC and Virtual Server. I haven't seen a FOSS product that can do the kind of resource allocation and load sharing that Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) can and MS Virtual Server sure as hell can't.
FYI, the current version of the MS virtualization product is Hyper-V, and its a very very different beast than MS Virtual Server was.
Hyper-V is not bad, and they'll move it pretty fast over the next couple of years.
Mind you, I'd probably still go for VMWare most of the time, as their products are more mature, and the company has more experience.
But my point is you cant compare MS VirtualPC and MS Virtual Server with VMWare ESXi, its not the right comparison. You need to compare those two with VMWare Virtual Server (formerly GSX). Hyper-V is the right product to comapre with ESX and VI3.
It's not always that simple. With a white box (at least all the ones I've seen) you dont get a nice BMC or ILO card, you dont get hot-swappable dual redundant power supplies, you dont get a nice turnkey hardware management software that will alert you if something starts to go (you can do it, but its all home-grown work, with hp/dell its turnkey). You dont get a well-engineered airflow/cooling in a slick 2u rackmount. You generally dont get a mchine that is as maintainable without tools, or as well engineered internally.
What are the motherboards and chipsets your getting with the whitebox? Sometimes they're the same (vanilla intel), sometimes not.
What kind of automated driver/bios/flash update tools do you get with your whitebox?
Yes, you can white box your servers for cheaper, but its not like you dont get anything in return for the premium.
You build whitebox when you have to, due to funds, or when you're building in such volume that the premium really becomes material.
Linux can be stripped down for embedded systems, as can the user space. ...
Considering you also have a huge library of drivers available for all sorts of hardware, I think Linux makes sense as a hypervisor.
Thats exactly what ESX/ESXi is. It's a home-grown branch of RedHat from years ago (as I understand it, at least), tuned for very small (= 32MB) footprint.
So arguing that Linux as a hypervisor is just silly, cause thats exactly what ESX is. It's just that with ESXi, you get someone else who is hugely experienced in this technology to do all the 'trimming & tuning' work for you, and handing you something that 'just works'.
You're implying that there's no value in the ESXi product by itself, without purchasing VI3 as well.
This is absolutely not true.
There is a HUGE potential market of smaller businesses and one-off situations where people dont need to manage more than 1 or 2 of these ESXi installs.
They're not using them for disaster recovery, just to get a bunch of machines running on one set of hardware.
From that target's point of view, this is huge. Because now you dont have to run a full-fledged OS underneat the virtualization (ie, Virtual Server, formerly known as GSX).
I mean, theoretically (drivers and controllers permitting), you could have your desktops or laptops running Windows (no directx, so only good for business ue) AND Linux at the same time, both running on top of the bare-metal ESXi.
This is really a huge thing, and I can see several clients of ours that could use this right now, and the lack of free VI3 doesnt bother me in the least.
For what its worth, the search/indexer is somewhat susceptible to getting 'stuck' or consistently re-searching the same things.
There have been some good blogs about how to fix this showing up the past few months (if I can find one again, I'll come back and link in a response to you ... think it was Osterman, but that may be bad memory).
So basically, if the machine is still thrashing your drive after the first couple days, then something is broken.
It's a shame that Vista's indexer is so easy to get broken, but it does seem to happen to many people.
When Vista is running right (which seems to be rare, especially on consumer-level machines with OEM builds, which means lots of trial ware and crappy drivers), then the drive almost never gets hit, assuming you have adequate memory.
I've got a 4GB box (Business x64) and after the first 2 days, the drive hardly ever gets hit. It's an incredibly stable box.
But it seems that Vista is hugely susceptible to shoddy OEM installations (which means just about any consumer model) and driver issues.
Note that this isnt me trying to defend Vista, just telling you that it may be possible for you to do a little googling, and find out how to reset or fix the indexer so it stops doing that. And that if you can get it right, with good drivers, it can be quite stable.
We buy all our laptops nowadays from HP, and they're all the 'Compaq'-branded corporate models, many of which are intended to be engineering workstations in laptop form. These ship clean from trialware, and with Vista Business 32-bit, Vista Business x64, XP Pro, and driver disks for all three. On these machines, Vista has been quite good, and we've been able to see some of the technical improvements they made to things like the new window manager, and the IO scheduler.
But I've seen so many consumer-level machines that are just CRAP .... tons of trialware, very poor drivers, and it makes Vista nearly unusable. But then a nice (but still under $1000) corporate machine that is clean, has good 32-bit and 64-bit drivers in the box, that runs Vista flawlessly and fast with 2GB of memory. I'm hoping the OEMs figure out how to get this stabilized soon.
The fact that Server 2008 is so nice, given that its the same codebase as Vista SP1, gives me hope that it will stabilize.
An even more interesting question is, what would it take to get them delivered with Server 2008 (64bit)?
Dell probably wont ship it with Server 2008 ... but you can buy your own for the same price. Dell charges ~$700 for Server 2008 standard.
You can also get it here for $680.
More to the point, why don't home users get the same consideration that business users get? Does Dell secretly not want to sell to home users? Is this this new thing of trying to get rid of your less profitable customers by deliberately pissing them off?
It's not so much that home users get screwed in this, its that people who dont know any better get screwed in this.
Home users can trivially buy business class equipment from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and get XP right now.
The biggest thing is that the vast majority of home users dont know any better, so they get hit with this.
Now why THAT is, I dont know. There must be some marketing or market-dev folks out there who think that having XP and Vista both offered would confuse home users or something.
Dont buy Dell for that class of Laptops. They dont serve that specific market well.
But HP does.
Go to http://www.hp.com/
Click on the Notebooks & Tablets link in Small & Medium Business tab on their website front page (at least in the US).
Then click on the 'Performance' notebooks links.
Every single one of those supports 8GB of ram, 802.11abgn cards, and Vista/XP both in the box.
Then go back and click on the 'Balanced Mobility Notebooks'. Nearly half of these support 8gb, all support 802.11abgn, and Vista/XP.
HP specializes in 'engineering workstation laptops' for folks running x64 windows and very high-memory-use cad/cam/cae use.
I'm writing this from an HP Compaq 8710w, and its literally the best laptop I've ever owned (C2D2.4, 4GB memory, Nvidia Quadro w/ 512mb, fast hdd, intel 802.11abgn, very nice 17" widescreen). The Dell's are great for vanilla corporate road warrios who spend most of their time in MS Office, Outlook, and the institutional apps. They're a great mid-level vendor for corporate laptops (latitudes).
But HP is the best, IME, in the high-end laptops.
Good luck!
PS, you're going to get financially pwned to put 8GB of ram in your laptop. Nearly every laptop on the planet only has 2 memory slots, so you're forced to buy 2x4GB chips, which is going to be very expensive.
May be better off to get 1x4GB now, or better yet, 2x2GB, and just be prepared to put bigger sticks in there 2-3 years from now when the 4gb sticks are much cheaper.
I bought a new HP Pavilion with Vista on it for my business and tried for weeks to get a downgrade to XP Pro.
There's your first problem. You bought a consumer level POC for your business.
It didn't matter that this was a business system for a business and a business use.
An HP Pavilion system is NOT a business system. It's the same garbage you buy at best buy. Business sytems from HP are all numbers, or labelled with the Compaq brand.
Since so much of our software is "incompatible" with Vista, we will have buy all new anyway. This makes the cost of hardware or OS trivial and inconsequential. The application suites are what cost the most -- not the box and OS. Mac may just win out because of this.
If your software is incompatible with Vista, then why are you buying Vista? Didnt you do any research at all before buying Vista equipment?
Why didnt you buy a piece of equipment that comes with XP? Before 2.5 weeks ago, the only systems on the planet that you couldnt get XP on were consumer level systems. Nearly ALL business class systems come with XP, either only before June 30th, or with Vista included after. ...
It sounds to me like you werent doing your research before buying IT equipment. Is this your business (ie, an owner) or are you an employee?
Did you consult with your IT folks (either in-house or consultants) before doing this to get their experienced and expert opinions?
It's one thing for consumers to get caught in this crap, but if its for a business, you need to do your due diligence and not just buy the first random thing you see at Best Buy. If you dont have the knowledge to do so, then find a local IT consultancy that will help you out.
The vast majority of the latter will give you quick guidance over the phone for free on this kind of thing, in the hope of future service contracts or project work. ...
There's just alot of self-righteous rage there for a business user. Consumers are okay to get all pissed off when they got duped by the local Best Buy. But in a business capacity, you need to do your due diligence, and figure out what the right thing is before spending the time and money.
This is only doable for generic desktop systems, and for people with more time than money.
If you need a quality laptop, or dont have the time to go futzing around with that stuff, then the tier-1's (hp, dell, lenovo) are quite good, as long as you stick to corporate class equipment.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with building your own, but dont assume everyone's life is like yours. For many of us, taking the time to do this would be a collosal expense, and not even remotely worth it.
For example, I've got a beautiful HP Compaq 8710w laptop here. It's super thin, light (for a 17"), and an order of magnitude higher quality than I would ever have the time to build by hand.
I had to install VMWare Workstation (had to pay for this because 64-bit vista requires signed drivers)
Not sure what this means. Free VMWare server and player install just fine on Vista Business x64, no need to pay for VMWare workstation.
This is only good when you're young, in school, in a very junior technical position at work, or havent been doing this stuff for 10+ years.
Or if gaming is the primary use you make of your computer.
It doesnt take long for the value of your time to be worth sooo much more than the value of your dollars.
At that point, you just buy high quality equipment (ie, corporate class equipment), and let someone else worry about it. You've got more important things in your life to worry about than building your own white box.
Not to mention the relative level of crappiness of white box laptops.
Building computers are something thats fun while you're still new enough that its powerful and exciting, and when you can still take pride in your craftmanship, but not old enough to have done it so many hundreds of thousands of times over that its so boring and pointless.
The indexing service in Vista thrashes the disk at all times, even though it's supposed to do it only during idle times, my drive is constantly thrashing about and distinctively impacting performance of opening applications.
This is a known bug that affects some portion of people, but its not typical.
My indexing service thrashed the drive for about a day after setup, since then the drive is silent 80% of the time.
By definition, if the indexing service is constantly running, but your files arent constantly changing, then something is wrong.
The OS has a bigger overhead, it can NOT be faster than XP unless your XP was configured incorrectly, PERIOD.
Depends what you mean.
If the XP was on low-end equipment, and the Vista is on high end equipment, then its easy for that to be true.
My Vista Business x64 box is much faster than many low-end XP boxes.
But I think what most folk mean is the snappiness and robustness of the desktop.
Unlike XP, where every little network blip would hang the shell, which would block and hange the entire desktop, Vista's desktop is smooth, NEVER hangs, never tears, and never slows down.
Its noticeably more performant under high disk load than XP was.
High disk activity on XP would bring the shell of a dual-core system to a halt on XP. Not so on Vista, even under very high load its barely noticeable.
I think thats what most people mean when they say Vista is faster.
(Mind you, my laptop is a C2D2.4, 4GB of memory, with a fast drive subsystem, and an Nvidia Quadro mobility with 512MB of real onboard memory, so its pretty leading edge power for a laptop, and of course Vista will be fast on this box.)
OK, we now know what you lost when going to Vista: about 1 GB of memory, 30 seconds when waking up from sleep, some patience to click those 'Are You Really Sure That You Want ...' buttons...
Not sure what you're referring to here. Sleep & Hibernate are much faster and more reliable than they ever were in XP Pro.
And I'm not sure how the UAC prompts are any worse than constantly using RunAS in XP. Of course, maybe you're referring to running Vista w/ UAC and as a non-admin being slightly more inconvenient than running XP as an admin. Of course, that would mean that you're just comparing random unrelated things and wasting all of our time.
Now, for general interest and in the name of sanity please tell us what you *gained* from paying your tithe to Microsoft to step on the bandwagon called Vista.
Well, not sure what you mean about this 'tithe', but the windows cost on a machine is pretty much the same, rather it be vista or xp.
I cant speak for everybody, but what I got out of it was ... a much more reliable system, where the desktop is much more unstoppable to network events, and a machine that can go 2-3 times as long without rebooting than XP could.
I'm familiar with the DRM involved with Vista and the potential performance hits (try being on a domain, unplug the network connection, and attempt an admin task...you'll kill 60 seconds each time waiting for Vista to figure out how to authenticate you).
Nothing in that sentence has anything whatsoever to do with DRM, though you seem to imply that it does.
There was a bug in RTM Vista that made UAC escalations (of the user/pass variety, not the confirm/deny kind) take much longer than they should for domain machines that couldnt contact a DC. This was one of the major things noted as fixed in SP1.
Can you support that?
In the early days of Gutmans' ranting (ie, before Vista hit RTM), he was quite clear that he had never actually tested any of his theories.
I cant find anything in his page to support the idea that this has changed.
The closest thing I can find is him quoting some anonymous third parties that showed some task manager screenshots. None of this is Gutman's research, or actually research at all.
Gutman's entire setup consists of him making a hypothesis about how he thinks the DRM _might_ be implemented in Vista based on some very early documents about the systems. He then goes on to assume that his blue-sky hypothesis are correct, and makes further (second order) predictions on how the system might be affected by his hypothetical implementations.
None of this is based on any sort of scientific method, like, you know, TESTING your hypothesis. It's all just speculation built on speculation.
Anyone running Vista on a machine can see in about 30 seconds how full of crap Gutman is, based on the machine's behavior.
Dell, HP, and Lenovo all make it quite easy to get machines with XP. Trivial in fact, just click the little box.
But keep in mind that by the rules MS hands down, they're technically only supposed to do that for business clients. The reality is though that it means you have to buy a business class machine (ie, from Dell that means latitude, optiplex, and precision (Vostro's are rebadged consumer crap, but qualifies as business too)).
This is a good thing though, because the business class machines are pretty much universally better. Higher quality, less garbage pre-installed, more stable driver images, etc etc.
Thats an extraordinarily odd definition of a 'home user'.
I think you'll find that a large chunk of people on /. are actually professionals in this field, either in general IT support, web, software development, etc. I would say that makes them very distinctly NOT home users.
By your definition, the only way you could not be a home user is if you were posting to slashdot in an official business capacity. Thats a little much.
And I really dont know what this means:
Are you employed to make decisions on hardware purchases (and if you do it obviously shouldn't be used privately)?
Are you really trying to say that if you make purchasing decisions for a business, that you shouldnt use your power of decision making for private purposes? LOL Really?
Just pick a business class machine (from Dell that means Latitude, OptiPlex and Precision, or Vostro if you really want the consumer level garbage in a business boring case).
You generally want to do that anyway, from any vendor, as the business class stuff is always a step up in quality, longevity, and stability anyway.
Depends what you mean.
The corporate class machines are often a little bit (ie, ~10%) more expensive than consumer class equipment, but thats money worth paying, due to the difference in quality.
Basically, if you can buy a machine in a physical store, then its garbage and you dont want it. The only equipment worth buying is Dell or HP, or maybe Lenovo for laptops.
For desktops you can also build your own, and you can still buy XP OEM discs for system builders, for a little while longer anyway.