This is about software and the user interface being useful on a device of the target size and purpose. Android's target is smartphones not things that resemble the offspring of a PDA and ultra-portable laptop and the UI simple doesn't scale to anything bigger than a phone. WinCE's target has always been embedded systems, which do actually resemble these little PC-like devices, especially in the core hardware.
And just for the record, Windows CE and Windows Mobile are not the same. WM is based on the CE core, but they are no more the same than WinXP and the first gen x86 based XBox are.
...for not dating stuff on their site. I'm constantly running across information that is certainly authoritative, but since there is no indication of when the page content was updated there's no way to know whether or not it's accurate. With today's product life cycles in the tech industry a date is crucial for accuracy of information.
they don't have to write a new one, they just have to take the EULA off the standard page template for google product and service downloads. as was already mentioned, chrome is BSD licensed and the the EULA is redundant and unenforceable since the license grants unrestricted use of the program including using it without a EULA.
the ISP will have records of which of their email addresses belong to which business clients, and probably at least know the owner's address for each account so it's reasonable that they knew that the address you asked to forward to was in fact the "owner" of the other address and thus also had no moral objection. now, whether or not they actually bothered to look this up, I don't know. I know that I would have. now would I have also added my own forward so I could see what was so interesting? hm... yeah that's why I run my own mail server, I've worked for ISP's in the past, I know what goes on there.
he simply wants his box to do what he expects and wants it to do
Funny, that's exactly why i use linux! When I use Windows I feel like I have to massage and trick it into doing what I want, like open URLs from emails in Firefox without asking me what program to open the URL with (search it, it's a really ignorant problem and Windows won't permanently keep the "fix").
A matter of branding rather than suer needs
Lawyers LOVE Microsoft office!
Open Office does its job perfectly well.
I'd say it does acceptably well, or is a good value, but it's certainly not perfect. There are a few things that OOo does better such as formated text importing in Calc via paste instead of Excel requiring an input text file, but there are things users really like that are missing, like adjusting margins and columns in the print preview without opening a dialog box and using a trial and error process.
one does not have to modify, reverse engineer, disassemble or decompile the firmware image to see that it's linux and busybox based. one merely needs to download the image off the device and look at the strings in it. I haven't read the whole eula so I don't know if there is a clause that covers this, but the quoted clause certainly doesn't cover it.
It's the parents responsibility to explain to the kids how the calling plans work and what the charges are. Would these same parents give their kid a credit card without explaining how that works? With most cell phone plans, you pay for these services on credit, it's the same things as using a credit card.
Instead of a government mandate to change the clocks, why not use the same mandate to make it so that the 8-5 be changed to 7-4? I don't really see the difference except that no one has to fuck with all their clocks.
I want to work my 40-45 hours a week, then go home and forget about work completely.
That attitude might be fine for a factory job where you push a button a couple hundred times a day and just make sure the machine you operate keeps doing its thing, but in the tech field employers want your brain. They want you to love working for them, to love what you do, to think about it as much as possible. Your boss wants to hear things like "when I was trying to go to sleep last night I had a great idea for the project" and they at least want to think they are giving you something more than just a paycheck so that you won't leave for some other slightly larger paycheck. They want you to like being there and to look forward to coming back. Even if you do an adequate job, if you are a clock puncher then you are first to go when times get tough.
I wonder in what way they can justify preventing a newcomer in the field under the guise "maximize consumer choice". Wouldn't "maximize" imply that the more the better?
And also saying: "We promote competition therefore you are not allowed to be competitive". wtf.
Re:Impressive, but .... usefull!
on
LinuxBIOS Gets GUI
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Given that is for a BIOS project, the primary goal is to load another OS off larger storage medium. So why an GUI? Easy, what do you do when your main OS fails? You reach for a bootable recovery CD or USB drive. Oh, but you aren't at home and didn't bring it with you! Gah! Oh wait, you can boot the BIOS in GUI mode and get on the internet and use a web browser and all sorts of stuff!
Even better, what happens when your grandmothers primary OS fails? Think she can use CLI tools and fsck the disk and other such things? What about a GUI where she can point and click through a diagnostic wizard? Maybe even click something to let you ssh in and fix it remotely?
Realistically, I don't think the setup will stay at 2Meg, but I don't think it will need to be more than 32Meg since you can have a fully useful PDA in 32Meg. And if more storage is needed, it can always be extended by using the "recovery partition" concept.
I'll admit that it's arguable that all this is necessary, but I'd argue that enabling the public to know if the issue is RAM or HDD or some other easily swapable part is necessary in taking the frustration out of owning a computer, as well as in reducing waste. There are too many people that don't know that memory can go bad and be replaced easily and that the computer itself is still quite useful. A diag wizard in the bios can fix this problem.
We really do need to agree on a standard codec as well as container format so that anything that claims to read.foo files can indeed read all your.foo files.
The way i read this, you're problem isn't the codec it's the file extension and on that front you have quite an uphill battle. I once suggested different extensions for different codecs and, well, you can read the reply.
I agree with the basic principles of having a standard codec: people don't care about extensions or codecs, they just want to see the media. However, how do we choose one? We don't have a standard document format, or a standard HTML or javascript, or a standard tire and wheel, or even a standard gas filler cap! How can we possibly have a standard codec when we can't even have a standard memory card format?
The only way to have a standard is to involve government to impose a standard. This is how we got the telephone standard, and like it or not, ethernet, tcp/ip, and many things ISO or IEEE were all developed using government money and guidance. It's very rare that industry will define a standard and almost always only happens when interoperability and manufacturing costs are key to any single company succeeding, such as PCIe and USB. A media codec is easy to install therefor "manufacturing costs" are simply not there to motivate. A standard codec will simply never happen in a free (as in speech, not beer) world.
If this is a successful campaign then I don't think it take long until they offer the same kind of discounts high school students, then just home users, until all your spreadsheets are belong to Microsoft.
A lot of shareware programs are $20 for home/non-profit use and $50 for commercial use so this concept certainly isn't new, and MS has offered discounts for students forever, though it's usually not lower than 20% of the retail price.
I mean, if this was the policy on the file servers then that would be pretty bad. However, SMTP is not a "guaranteed delivery" system so it seems to me that the backup policy should treat it accordingly. Here we used to have a 30Meg limit on our exchange server accounts for ALL content. For many people this basically meant that they had to delete some things at least once a month or they wouldn't have room for new email, and now that the limit is a Gig this is still true for a few people. Unlike IBM we have few enough people that we can afford to keep 3 months of a full Exchange backup, but I dread the day that ever have to get anything off that tape since you can't just restore a message or even just a mailbox, but you have to restore the WHOLE DAMNED information store! If I ever am told that I need to remove the limit on the mailboxes due to storage being cheap, I will only do it if I can keep less backups of it, such as just enough for a complete recovery, much like IBM has here.
MythTV and "just browsing" sure, you load an app once and you are done. But when you are loading things like OOo HDD speed makes a difference. Even something as simple as upgrading a laptop drive from 5400 to 7200 RPM makes a notable difference. The difference is most certainly not negligible, unimportant to personal goals maybe, but it is most definitely notable.
"i don't care if it's slower because it still works fine" is different than "a negligible differnce". The HDD is STILL the slowest part of the system after all.
you left out the time it takes to gut the Dell of all the spyware and 3rd party crap that you didn't want installed in the first place. Last one I did took 4 hours to clean up and the last clean install I did, including drivers and a basic toolset like PDF reader, Flash, and media codecs took about 3 hours.
As far as compatibility goes, that's what reviewers are for. Buy stuff that you can verify works together.
However, when people that don't game and just need basic PC functions ask me what to buy, I say get an off-lease system. You can find 2 year old "re-certified" systems with a COA with decent specs for well under $300. about a year ago got my wife a new pc, HP DeskPro SFF with a p4 2.8Ghz/HT 60GB 512M for $275 w/o COA, put linux on it and it's been a great PC. And just to make this fully on topic, my wife perfers Ubuntu to Windows and she is not a "techie", in fact she's a program director at a botanical garden. Oddly, one of her favorite features is xkill, so when an app does mess up she can easily kill it.
I also only have linux on my kids pc, it's been a while since either complained about it, except when they complain that they don't have rights to install stuff. initially i did this because they had a bad habit of installing things like bonsai buddy and spyware ridden crap on windows. OOo has been useful enough, and my daughter has even asked her teacher if she could install open office at school or take the work home because the weird stuff Word does was frustrating her.
Yeah, linux is ready for the desktop. Has been for some time now.
Dell - 80GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache(TM) You - Western Digital Caviar WD800BB 80GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive
Dell drive is MUCH faster, might even be SATA2, and that makes a HUGE difference. ATA100 is way slow these days.
Dell - NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE Integrated Graphics GPU You - SiS 761 GX integrated video
While the 6150 isn't a great card, it's worlds better than the SiS. The 6150 will nicely play most any game released 2004 and earier. I had a SiS integrated not all that long ago and it wasn't even very good for desktop use, the S3 is even better.
If you shop around though, I bet the savings on parts could allow getting better parts and even beat the Dell in performance and price.
the 15+ seconds it takes to load any application, including IE, says otherwise. the "cache" and "free" values in task manager also say otherwise. I can deal with cache, but this is not JUST cache. I'm also talking about initial load times from a cold boot, before non-essential stuff is moved to swap and the cache is filled only with the system services and utility crap that lives in the system tray. Also, cache is important, it speeds things up a lot if you have enough of it, but if you don't and you are constantly having to flush more than 50% of the cache, then this makes things slower than not having a cache at all.
2nd part is easy: it was on sale in a store and 1GB version was not offered there, an additional 512 was ordered the same day. My point was that someone who doesn't know better would use this and feel like their old P3 with 256Meg was so much more responsive, and they would be right. Why would HP even offer such a slug? Their preload just barely fits in the 512MB, it's pointless.
As for the "processor socket", there are people selling computers that go into passive backplanes. If you put the CPU and memory in a card, there is little reason why you would have to upgrade the rest of the computer when you change the CPU (you would have to scrap the card, anyway, but processors are intimately related to chipsets, so, it is to be expected.
you mean like the G3 macs, but add memory? This is actually a pretty good idea, put the cpu/ram/chipsets on a card that would plug into the pci/ata/legacy chipsets using a standard interface. Many chipsets do this anyway with these things having their own chipsets and all connecting to the northbridge. Make the interface standard, like ATX/pci/memory/ata are standards, and then upgradability is a no-brainer! How much could Dell and HP lower their costs if the case and backplane didn't need changed to upgrade the core? At the very most the PSU would need upgraded, but if the platform was designed right you'd only need to do that every 4-6 years (assuming the 2 years cycle), and even sell a cpu/HDD combo upgrade combo preinstalled with that new OS too. Shipping and storing cases and all the other crap is the expensive part of the industry, they could save millions here.
Last night I had my first long session with Vista on my sister-in-law's new laptop, a Compaq with a Celeron M and 512M ram. Without disabling "user" functionality (the things that non-tech users like about windows) I was only able to get it down to using about 350MB ram at boot up. I didn't check how much ram the Theme service uses but I doubt that it is significant. The default config used over 400MB on bootup and I find this appalling for 2 reasons: 1) Why do so many tray icons need to use so much ram? With the amount of ram used, startup time was SLOWER than if these icons were just launchers! 2) How does it make sense to sell a product that just by turning it on the system resources are maxed out and so everything else you do runs super slow? These leaves a very "oh my this pc is slower than my old one" feeling, how does HP think the $50 they shave off the price for that extra 512M is worth this? To [ab]use the car analogy, this is like selling a car where the engine can only handle pushing the car with one passenger and the radio, fan/heat/air, and lights off. Even though it has seating for 5, adding just one more person or turning on the radio causes it to take so long to get up to highway speed that you'd just rather not drive it at all, but for a $50 upgrade it'll do anything you want!
The things in Vista I like are the Windows Explorer interface and the new start menu. Yeah that's about it, Well, at least I like them initially, after only a few hours with it. Plus most users don't understand file system usage concepts (and I don't think the new interface will make the concept any easier to follow) and they don't really care how the start menu looks as long as they can start their apps (or drag the icons they use most to the desktop), so this is not a significant improvement over XP. Of course, I said the same kinds of things about XP compared to Win2k when it first came out too, but then SP2 was released with the better-than-nothing-firewall and better wifi tools and that made it enough better that XP is a must on laptops. MS needs to find the same type of "must" features for Vista, and I wish them luck.
So guess what? the office pc's I manage will stay at P3's with 512Meg and Win2k for a while longer. What can the old, slow pc's do? AutoCAD Lite, Adobe Illustrator, ACT, all office apps, any all the custom stuff I've got for CRM and order management. They are not maxed out on RAM, ever, and a faster CPU does not significantly increase performance.
Plenty of papers have been written on the 2 basic ways to tackle upgrades. You can upgrade everything ever 2 years, probably with it all leased and support contracts, and have an affordable monkey to handle all that, or you can have a high paid sysadmin that can fix anything quickly. The costs overall are about the same, but the monkey will spend time on the phone with the jokers in tech support and wait for parts to ship, where the sysadmin will have it working in no time with the spare parts from old systems he keeps around. Since I can pick up the P3's for well under $150, including a COA, the CFO is happy too, he can just "expense" them and not have to make a lease payment or deal with depreciation.
Slashdot Mirror
This is about software and the user interface being useful on a device of the target size and purpose. Android's target is smartphones not things that resemble the offspring of a PDA and ultra-portable laptop and the UI simple doesn't scale to anything bigger than a phone. WinCE's target has always been embedded systems, which do actually resemble these little PC-like devices, especially in the core hardware.
And just for the record, Windows CE and Windows Mobile are not the same. WM is based on the CE core, but they are no more the same than WinXP and the first gen x86 based XBox are.
not sure what "us" you are talking about, but the "us" I'm in has 3, STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR...
...for not dating stuff on their site. I'm constantly running across information that is certainly authoritative, but since there is no indication of when the page content was updated there's no way to know whether or not it's accurate. With today's product life cycles in the tech industry a date is crucial for accuracy of information.
they don't have to write a new one, they just have to take the EULA off the standard page template for google product and service downloads. as was already mentioned, chrome is BSD licensed and the the EULA is redundant and unenforceable since the license grants unrestricted use of the program including using it without a EULA.
the ISP will have records of which of their email addresses belong to which business clients, and probably at least know the owner's address for each account so it's reasonable that they knew that the address you asked to forward to was in fact the "owner" of the other address and thus also had no moral objection. now, whether or not they actually bothered to look this up, I don't know. I know that I would have. now would I have also added my own forward so I could see what was so interesting? hm... yeah that's why I run my own mail server, I've worked for ISP's in the past, I know what goes on there.
he simply wants his box to do what he expects and wants it to do
Funny, that's exactly why i use linux! When I use Windows I feel like I have to massage and trick it into doing what I want, like open URLs from emails in Firefox without asking me what program to open the URL with (search it, it's a really ignorant problem and Windows won't permanently keep the "fix").
...that you state it as your own opinion. Prefixing your claims with "I believe" let you say pretty much anything you want, fact or not.
... but how's the tequila?
A matter of branding rather than suer needs
Lawyers LOVE Microsoft office!
Open Office does its job perfectly well.
I'd say it does acceptably well, or is a good value, but it's certainly not perfect. There are a few things that OOo does better such as formated text importing in Calc via paste instead of Excel requiring an input text file, but there are things users really like that are missing, like adjusting margins and columns in the print preview without opening a dialog box and using a trial and error process.
one does not have to modify, reverse engineer, disassemble or decompile the firmware image to see that it's linux and busybox based. one merely needs to download the image off the device and look at the strings in it. I haven't read the whole eula so I don't know if there is a clause that covers this, but the quoted clause certainly doesn't cover it.
It's the parents responsibility to explain to the kids how the calling plans work and what the charges are. Would these same parents give their kid a credit card without explaining how that works? With most cell phone plans, you pay for these services on credit, it's the same things as using a credit card.
Instead of a government mandate to change the clocks, why not use the same mandate to make it so that the 8-5 be changed to 7-4? I don't really see the difference except that no one has to fuck with all their clocks.
I want to work my 40-45 hours a week, then go home and forget about work completely.
That attitude might be fine for a factory job where you push a button a couple hundred times a day and just make sure the machine you operate keeps doing its thing, but in the tech field employers want your brain. They want you to love working for them, to love what you do, to think about it as much as possible. Your boss wants to hear things like "when I was trying to go to sleep last night I had a great idea for the project" and they at least want to think they are giving you something more than just a paycheck so that you won't leave for some other slightly larger paycheck. They want you to like being there and to look forward to coming back. Even if you do an adequate job, if you are a clock puncher then you are first to go when times get tough.
I wonder in what way they can justify preventing a newcomer in the field under the guise "maximize consumer choice". Wouldn't "maximize" imply that the more the better?
And also saying: "We promote competition therefore you are not allowed to be competitive". wtf.
Given that is for a BIOS project, the primary goal is to load another OS off larger storage medium. So why an GUI? Easy, what do you do when your main OS fails? You reach for a bootable recovery CD or USB drive. Oh, but you aren't at home and didn't bring it with you! Gah! Oh wait, you can boot the BIOS in GUI mode and get on the internet and use a web browser and all sorts of stuff!
Even better, what happens when your grandmothers primary OS fails? Think she can use CLI tools and fsck the disk and other such things? What about a GUI where she can point and click through a diagnostic wizard? Maybe even click something to let you ssh in and fix it remotely?
Realistically, I don't think the setup will stay at 2Meg, but I don't think it will need to be more than 32Meg since you can have a fully useful PDA in 32Meg. And if more storage is needed, it can always be extended by using the "recovery partition" concept.
I'll admit that it's arguable that all this is necessary, but I'd argue that enabling the public to know if the issue is RAM or HDD or some other easily swapable part is necessary in taking the frustration out of owning a computer, as well as in reducing waste. There are too many people that don't know that memory can go bad and be replaced easily and that the computer itself is still quite useful. A diag wizard in the bios can fix this problem.
We really do need to agree on a standard codec as well as container format so that anything that claims to read .foo files can indeed read all your .foo files.
The way i read this, you're problem isn't the codec it's the file extension and on that front you have quite an uphill battle. I once suggested different extensions for different codecs and, well, you can read the reply.
I agree with the basic principles of having a standard codec: people don't care about extensions or codecs, they just want to see the media. However, how do we choose one? We don't have a standard document format, or a standard HTML or javascript, or a standard tire and wheel, or even a standard gas filler cap! How can we possibly have a standard codec when we can't even have a standard memory card format?
The only way to have a standard is to involve government to impose a standard. This is how we got the telephone standard, and like it or not, ethernet, tcp/ip, and many things ISO or IEEE were all developed using government money and guidance. It's very rare that industry will define a standard and almost always only happens when interoperability and manufacturing costs are key to any single company succeeding, such as PCIe and USB. A media codec is easy to install therefor "manufacturing costs" are simply not there to motivate. A standard codec will simply never happen in a free (as in speech, not beer) world.
If this is a successful campaign then I don't think it take long until they offer the same kind of discounts high school students, then just home users, until all your spreadsheets are belong to Microsoft.
A lot of shareware programs are $20 for home/non-profit use and $50 for commercial use so this concept certainly isn't new, and MS has offered discounts for students forever, though it's usually not lower than 20% of the retail price.
I mean, if this was the policy on the file servers then that would be pretty bad. However, SMTP is not a "guaranteed delivery" system so it seems to me that the backup policy should treat it accordingly. Here we used to have a 30Meg limit on our exchange server accounts for ALL content. For many people this basically meant that they had to delete some things at least once a month or they wouldn't have room for new email, and now that the limit is a Gig this is still true for a few people. Unlike IBM we have few enough people that we can afford to keep 3 months of a full Exchange backup, but I dread the day that ever have to get anything off that tape since you can't just restore a message or even just a mailbox, but you have to restore the WHOLE DAMNED information store! If I ever am told that I need to remove the limit on the mailboxes due to storage being cheap, I will only do it if I can keep less backups of it, such as just enough for a complete recovery, much like IBM has here.
MythTV and "just browsing" sure, you load an app once and you are done. But when you are loading things like OOo HDD speed makes a difference. Even something as simple as upgrading a laptop drive from 5400 to 7200 RPM makes a notable difference. The difference is most certainly not negligible, unimportant to personal goals maybe, but it is most definitely notable.
"i don't care if it's slower because it still works fine" is different than "a negligible differnce". The HDD is STILL the slowest part of the system after all.
you left out the time it takes to gut the Dell of all the spyware and 3rd party crap that you didn't want installed in the first place. Last one I did took 4 hours to clean up and the last clean install I did, including drivers and a basic toolset like PDF reader, Flash, and media codecs took about 3 hours.
As far as compatibility goes, that's what reviewers are for. Buy stuff that you can verify works together.
However, when people that don't game and just need basic PC functions ask me what to buy, I say get an off-lease system. You can find 2 year old "re-certified" systems with a COA with decent specs for well under $300. about a year ago got my wife a new pc, HP DeskPro SFF with a p4 2.8Ghz/HT 60GB 512M for $275 w/o COA, put linux on it and it's been a great PC. And just to make this fully on topic, my wife perfers Ubuntu to Windows and she is not a "techie", in fact she's a program director at a botanical garden. Oddly, one of her favorite features is xkill, so when an app does mess up she can easily kill it.
I also only have linux on my kids pc, it's been a while since either complained about it, except when they complain that they don't have rights to install stuff. initially i did this because they had a bad habit of installing things like bonsai buddy and spyware ridden crap on windows. OOo has been useful enough, and my daughter has even asked her teacher if she could install open office at school or take the work home because the weird stuff Word does was frustrating her.
Yeah, linux is ready for the desktop. Has been for some time now.
... you have some built in differences.
Dell - 80GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache(TM)
You - Western Digital Caviar WD800BB 80GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive
Dell drive is MUCH faster, might even be SATA2, and that makes a HUGE difference. ATA100 is way slow these days.
Dell - NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE Integrated Graphics GPU
You - SiS 761 GX integrated video
While the 6150 isn't a great card, it's worlds better than the SiS. The 6150 will nicely play most any game released 2004 and earier. I had a SiS integrated not all that long ago and it wasn't even very good for desktop use, the S3 is even better.
If you shop around though, I bet the savings on parts could allow getting better parts and even beat the Dell in performance and price.
the 15+ seconds it takes to load any application, including IE, says otherwise. the "cache" and "free" values in task manager also say otherwise. I can deal with cache, but this is not JUST cache. I'm also talking about initial load times from a cold boot, before non-essential stuff is moved to swap and the cache is filled only with the system services and utility crap that lives in the system tray. Also, cache is important, it speeds things up a lot if you have enough of it, but if you don't and you are constantly having to flush more than 50% of the cache, then this makes things slower than not having a cache at all.
2nd part is easy: it was on sale in a store and 1GB version was not offered there, an additional 512 was ordered the same day. My point was that someone who doesn't know better would use this and feel like their old P3 with 256Meg was so much more responsive, and they would be right. Why would HP even offer such a slug? Their preload just barely fits in the 512MB, it's pointless.
no kidding, for $50 I'll take 2, but only if they have 32Meg (pushing it for a 486, I know) ram or more and actually boot up
As for the "processor socket", there are people selling computers that go into passive backplanes. If you put the CPU and memory in a card, there is little reason why you would have to upgrade the rest of the computer when you change the CPU (you would have to scrap the card, anyway, but processors are intimately related to chipsets, so, it is to be expected.
you mean like the G3 macs, but add memory? This is actually a pretty good idea, put the cpu/ram/chipsets on a card that would plug into the pci/ata/legacy chipsets using a standard interface. Many chipsets do this anyway with these things having their own chipsets and all connecting to the northbridge. Make the interface standard, like ATX/pci/memory/ata are standards, and then upgradability is a no-brainer! How much could Dell and HP lower their costs if the case and backplane didn't need changed to upgrade the core? At the very most the PSU would need upgraded, but if the platform was designed right you'd only need to do that every 4-6 years (assuming the 2 years cycle), and even sell a cpu/HDD combo upgrade combo preinstalled with that new OS too. Shipping and storing cases and all the other crap is the expensive part of the industry, they could save millions here.
Last night I had my first long session with Vista on my sister-in-law's new laptop, a Compaq with a Celeron M and 512M ram. Without disabling "user" functionality (the things that non-tech users like about windows) I was only able to get it down to using about 350MB ram at boot up. I didn't check how much ram the Theme service uses but I doubt that it is significant. The default config used over 400MB on bootup and I find this appalling for 2 reasons: 1) Why do so many tray icons need to use so much ram? With the amount of ram used, startup time was SLOWER than if these icons were just launchers! 2) How does it make sense to sell a product that just by turning it on the system resources are maxed out and so everything else you do runs super slow? These leaves a very "oh my this pc is slower than my old one" feeling, how does HP think the $50 they shave off the price for that extra 512M is worth this? To [ab]use the car analogy, this is like selling a car where the engine can only handle pushing the car with one passenger and the radio, fan/heat/air, and lights off. Even though it has seating for 5, adding just one more person or turning on the radio causes it to take so long to get up to highway speed that you'd just rather not drive it at all, but for a $50 upgrade it'll do anything you want!
The things in Vista I like are the Windows Explorer interface and the new start menu. Yeah that's about it, Well, at least I like them initially, after only a few hours with it. Plus most users don't understand file system usage concepts (and I don't think the new interface will make the concept any easier to follow) and they don't really care how the start menu looks as long as they can start their apps (or drag the icons they use most to the desktop), so this is not a significant improvement over XP. Of course, I said the same kinds of things about XP compared to Win2k when it first came out too, but then SP2 was released with the better-than-nothing-firewall and better wifi tools and that made it enough better that XP is a must on laptops. MS needs to find the same type of "must" features for Vista, and I wish them luck.
So guess what? the office pc's I manage will stay at P3's with 512Meg and Win2k for a while longer. What can the old, slow pc's do? AutoCAD Lite, Adobe Illustrator, ACT, all office apps, any all the custom stuff I've got for CRM and order management. They are not maxed out on RAM, ever, and a faster CPU does not significantly increase performance.
Plenty of papers have been written on the 2 basic ways to tackle upgrades. You can upgrade everything ever 2 years, probably with it all leased and support contracts, and have an affordable monkey to handle all that, or you can have a high paid sysadmin that can fix anything quickly. The costs overall are about the same, but the monkey will spend time on the phone with the jokers in tech support and wait for parts to ship, where the sysadmin will have it working in no time with the spare parts from old systems he keeps around. Since I can pick up the P3's for well under $150, including a COA, the CFO is happy too, he can just "expense" them and not have to make a lease payment or deal with depreciation.