Preview of Vista On Old Hardware

Grooves writes "According to tests performed by Ars Technica, Windows Vista will need some coddling on old hardware. As a follow-up to their performance review of Vista Beta 2, Ars tested the latest public builds of Vista on hardware spanning from 2001 to a Thinkpad purchased a few months ago. The results show that Vista is extremely RAM hungry, graphical power is less of an issue unless you want eye candy, and hard drive I/O is critical. Also, their experience with 'in-place upgrades' was abysmal, and mirrored my own experiences."

hardly anybody installs Windows, it's preloaded

[Locutus]

Don't know about you people but besides a handful of geeks, nobody installs new versions of MS Windows on old computers. It gets preloaded by OEMs who have financial strings requiring them to do so. So it does not matter if Vista sucks, doesn't work on old hardware or fails when upgrading over previous versions. It'll show up on new machines and those customers will use it no matter how bad or good it really is.

On one way, all these "features" making it difficult on older hardware are probably crumbs thrown to the OEMs so they'll sell more new computers preloaded with the "new" MS Windows. Funny how that works.

Only getting off the treadmill breaks this loop. IMO.

LoB

RAM prices to rise or fall?

[Brit_in_the_USA]

So will RAM prices (DDR and DDR2) fall as Xmas passes or go up as people relaise they need more for Vista?

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Holi]

I still run 2K as there are no games that require XP.

Actually yes there are. Several in fact.

AOE III and Company of Heroes to name 2.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[DerGeist]

Microsoft's worst enemy and toughest competition has always been previous versions of Microsoft products. Word, Excel, and the like haven't changed much in quite some time save for esoteric features 99% of the population doesn't even know about. Same with Windows, lots of people run 2000 and they're just fine. Obviously the adoption of any new Windows OS isn't going to be immediate and overwhelming; it takes time as people purchase new computers with Vista preinstalled and games begin demanding Vista only (just as they began demanding 2000 only, etc.). Windows OSs always creep into popularity rather than gaining overnight ubiquity. I myself didn't like XP and really didn't think I'd ever upgrade (hearing the same "DRM OS" arguments being lobbied today), but eventually I found myself liking it more and more and finally moved over entirely. It's great; I like the stability and performance it provides versus previous versions. It took some time, however, before my PCs were up to the challenge. I feel the same will gradually be true of Vista and the hardware requirements we're all so worried about will, again, fade. Microsoft likely put high requirements on purpose to ensure the operating system has a decent lifecycle. Like buying a shirt that's too big for a child since they'll "grow into it" anyway.

Re:Why should we really upgrade.

[Thansal]

I did not know that.

admitedly, I have no interest in either game.

(quick google tells me that it is simply a lock out and not actualy incompatable)

Re:What's going on here?

[realmolo]

It's not more demanding than contemporary games, really

But remember, the GUI has to work with every other part of the system. It can't be "optimized" in the same way as a game, because it's not really a standalone application.

Or are we all forgetting that OS X's GUI was fairly sluggish until they switched to Intel machines with real graphics cards? The Intel Macs should run Vista pretty well.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[larkost]

While I don't know anything about how Vista actually uses RAM, it may be that Vista is starting to use the same philosophy that *nix does in this regard: unused RAM is wasted RAM. In the *nix philosophy you keep eveything that you could ever use again in RAM and only release it when something else is going to use it. I am over-simplifying it a bit, but that is not far off the mark.

So, it could be that the memeory useage you are seeing is not the OS "hogging" memory, but rather that it is simply trying to use it a bit better. So when you launch that memory-intensive game it will give way for the game.

This is all said without any real knowledge of the inner working of Vista memory management.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[pete6677]

I've been asking this question for months now and have gotten no real response. Vista appears to have not one single feature that I can't get on XP with minimal trouble. Other than being harder to use, I don't see what the difference is. And why would any IT department even consider downgrading to Vista from XP?

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along

[greg1104]

Linux, however, it a lot more likely to actually get the OS installed, detect the hardware, and give you a usable system. I suspect MS probably puts less effort into making sure that quirks in old hardware are taken into account, as seen by the crashing installer of XP and 2K on it.

Yours is anecdotal evidence based on a pretty small sample size; I wouldn't draw such broad conclusions from such little data.

I can easily extrapolate exactly the opposite conclusions with a similarly limited experience. In the last six months, I've done two Linux installs on PCs from that same era (approx 400MHz P2) that were happily running Windows 2000. The theory was that even though they were too slow for Windows use I could recycle them into small servers. The Linux installed locked up hard either during installation or on first boot. In both cases, it turned out there was a problem with enabling DMA on these systems that caused the IDE driver to lock-up hard. I noted that both machines worked perfectly well with the older 2.4 Linux kernel.

I don't think the Linux developers working on the latest 2.6 features are paying any more attention to actually testing compatibility with ancient hardware than Microsoft is with Vista. The fact that the Linux kernel model forces drivers to be rebuilt from source with every new kernel release is different from the way Microsoft provides a stable driver API, and which model is going to get you better results with a random old piece of hardware is very unpredictable. The main advantage for Linux in situations like the one I ran into is that the problem was more transparent, and there are many more workarounds to try and resolve issues when they come up. I would hesitate to generalize on this subject beyond that.