Microsoft Releases Vista Hardware Requirements 591
Digital Inspiration writes "CNet reports that Microsoft has kicked off a 'Get Ready' campaign aimed at helping customers prepare for Windows Vista. The site also includes an Upgrade Advisor tool to help people determine just how Vista-ready an existing PC is." From the article: "The marketing programs and upgrade tool are designed to ease some of the uncertainty around Vista well ahead of the back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons, the two biggest PC selling times of the year. Vista had long been expected to arrive by the 2006 holidays, but Microsoft said in March that it would not arrive on store shelves until January."
Bah! (Score:5, Interesting)
On both, things run perfectly, with all gui features, XGL, aqua effects, etc etc.
(ducks!)
Seriously - 1GB ram (512MB for low end installs) seems like an awful lot to me....
OOHHH!!!! (Score:0, Interesting)
Ummm... (Score:5, Interesting)
not gonna work - should give out coupons instead (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless MS bundle coupons for Vista with Windows XP this buying season, they can forget about people making any effort to do buy it and do the upgrade.
You mean I can't run Vista on my toaster?!?!@!@$ (Score:2, Interesting)
Come on people, Vista was not meant to be run on a wristwatch, toaster, calculator, or anything similar. The minimum requirements are on par with what any person who would want Vista in the first place would have. Seriously, if you're using a PII-350, you're just not using it for anything that would require Vista anyways. Am I nutz?
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]Upgrade Advisor itself requires... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bah! (Score:5, Interesting)
My current Windows folder uses 1.53 GB and is installed in a 6GB partition... Is there such a jump here as to justify so much HDD hunger? What will it be used for? Swap memory? Fonts??
So this thing is gonna drain up my graphic card while it's eating my hard disk? No thanks. I'll stick with XP (If only I could go back to 98....)
Hdd requirements (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bah! (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, you turn off all the new eye candy(which you can do) and I believe Vista outperforms XP in most cases. The TinFoil hat wearing part of me almost wonders if part of this is simply a deal Microsoft has struck with OEMs like Dell. The higher the system requirements appear to be, the more likely a user is to buy a new PC. If the user buys a new PC Microsoft makes another OEM Vista license sale. Win - Win... well except the consumer that is.
Re:Bah! (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly enough I know that Vista works on processors much slower than 800mhz so I imagine there is quite a bit of padding in there. With minimal effort I can setup a responsive Vista box with less than 512megs of ram. MS is just playing it safe here saying that people with these specs will be happy with the performance out of the box. People with less will have to tweak to get themselves where they want to be. Like me running XP on a 400mhz P2 with 64megs of ram. Sucked out of the box, but I got it fairly responsive in short order. System profiling is a good thing, if you have a slow machine automatically shut off the stuff that isn't needed. That is one good feature with Vista. Not perfect since the other stuff shouldn't be running anyways but its a desktop OS so its intended to be as friendly as possible out of the box which means leaving a lot of stuff running.
As for your other examples, let's see you run the latest release of KDE with all the bells and whistles on a Pentium 90. Not gonna happen, not even close. The OS X comparison at least compares OSes with similar graphics capabilities.We'll grant OS X is more efficient though Vista does quite a bit more in terms of management and monitoring so the comparison is still a little off.
Re:Tools Still in Beta (Score:2, Interesting)
New NIC too (Score:2, Interesting)
On a side note, does the spinning hourglass speed up (i.e. rotations, not time...) when it decides to bomb out?
Re:Bah! (Score:4, Interesting)
Note that in 1988ish the common ram chip on the market was still the 256Kb (8 for 256KB) 41256. 1Mb RAM chips were still new and expensive. To get 8MB of ram in one of these systems meant 64 1Mb RAM chips, all of which consumed power. A lot of power. And a lot of money.
You're just spoiled.
Re:Ummm... (Score:3, Interesting)
"This run to shit too is PC my, yeah"
In reverse it says the exact same thing, only with worse grammar!
(Even scarier, I know exactly what you meant.)
For everyone that says Vista is not a hog, riddle me this:
My workstation is an Athlon XP 2500+ w/2GB of RAM and approx 750GB of storage in SATA drives. Not state of the art by anyone's book, but a beefy machine nonetheless that does everything I need fast enough.
I installed Vista build 5365 in VMware WS 5.5 and gave it a 16GB drive and 512MB of RAM. I turned off all the eye candy, nothing else was running on my machine. Opening a My Computer window in Vista Explorer takes roughly 7-15 seconds. Every. Single. Time. Every time you navigate to another folder, it does the same thing, even if there is nothing in the folder. It is using 100% CPU on both the virtual and real machine while doing this. Most 3rd party Windows apps seem to run at the exact same level of performance on Vista as on XP.
I seem to remember the last build I tried doing the same thing, only not quite as bad. Is this a bug in this build/other builds? Is it related to VMware? Should I try it with a larger HD image size (there's at least 4GB free)? Is there something else I'm missing? Is Vista just a total hog?
I think the performance rating control panel gave the virtual machine a 2.8 overall, which isn't good, but for a barebones setup with everything non-essential turned off, one would expect to be able to open a file browser without feeling inclined to go for a coffee break.
Everything from Windows 3.1 through Ubuntu 5.10 runs silky smooth in VMware on my machine. All installations are pretty much the standard install with VMware tools installed.
I'm no Microsoft fan, but Windows XP is pretty damn solid once you've invested the requisite 2 weeks tweaking and hardening it. Still can't multitask for crap, but for one thing at a time it's fast and stable. Vista doesn't seem even remotely as "flexible".
Does anyone else sense that Vista could be the most catastrophic Windows release ever?
Re:Bah! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ummm... (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder where you got 5365, because I seriously doubt that you're a Connect member (Microsoft's beta program).
I have run nearly every Longhorn / Vista build that was released on Connect for over a year, on both my desktop (Athlon 64 2800+ / 1GB DDR / GeForce 6600) and my laptop (Pentium-M 1.73GHz / 768MB DDR / GeForce Go 6400), and I can tell you - My Computer (which doesn't exist in Vista - it's now just "Computer") opens as fast as it does on XP, even with the eyecandy turned on.
You installed what I suspect is a pirated build of a beta-OS on a virtual machine, and you were surprised when something didn't work right. Hell, 5365 isn't even a CTP! Your comment is akin to complaining that a nightly Firefox build is full of bugs - of course it is!
Re:No I think the main reason (Score:2, Interesting)
Then they come over to my place for the evening, poke around my 2.4ghz AMD with 4gb ram and then fail to understand how a 2.4ghz AMD can be faster than the latest and greatest Intel. If their P4 had 4gb of ram, hell even one gig would be comfy, they would probably give my X2-4800 a good run for the money.
There has been too much media emphasis on clock speeds and large hard-disk caches, and too little on achieving a balanced system. Who gives a crap that the latest hard drives sport 16mb of cache if all your PC ever does is swap ?