Windows Vista Beta 2 now freely available but be warned

IT Wire ^ | June 8, 2006 | Stan Beer

[MadIvan]

Ouch!

Regards, Ivan

[MadIvan]

Tech ping.

[ShadowAce]

[js1138]

Your pricing is full of it. Windows XP retails for nearly $300, but no one pays that. Newegg sells XP Pro for $150, and it's about half that when purchased preinstalled on a computer.

Your analysis also sucks. By offloading the video processing to the video GPU, you reduce the load on the CPU. Vista will be no more demanding than a low-end video game. Which is to say, it will require a good 3d card. There are many cards in the under $100 range that will do just fine.

Business users will not require the fancy video effects and can turn them off.

[MadIvan]

I suggest you take it up with the author rather than with the fellow who posted it. It is certainly true that Windows has required increasingly powerful machines to run it as time goes on.

Ivan

[roaddog727]

Vista=
RAM Hog
Processor Hog
Cache Hog
Storage Hog...........

[MadIvan]

The machine I'm using at the moment was running XP a week ago. I got fed up after McAfee demanded that I pay another £30 to protect it from viruses. I also was getting annoyed because every single bloody time I switched it on, there was yet another Windows update to download, which seemed to make the system groan.

I had a Linux laptop, and was happy with that, so I put the same distribution on this desktop machine. It runs beautifully now.

Regards, Ivan

[roaddog727]

Microsoft=self-distributing memoryleak.......

[js1138]

I suggest you take it up with the author rather than with the fellow who posted it.

You are correct. It is a truism that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

[Spktyr]

What this tells me is that the business community is going to greet Vista with a great big yawn. Just looking at the requirements tells me that every single one of those low-end Dell Dimensions that business is so fond of buying is going to have to be replaced (since many of them don't have an AGP or PCIe/X slot) in order to run Vista acceptably.

[MadIvan]

I know plenty of companies that greeted XP with a yawn...and are still running Windows 2000.

Regards, Ivan

[Spktyr]

Many of them over here eventually upgraded to XP for various reasons, but that usually didn't involve a new hardware investment.

Vista will, and I think its going to go over about as well as ME did.

On top of that, a lot of stuff isn't going to be Vista-compatible, or so I understand. Since this is essentially a platform change anyway (new machine, new OS, new software), a lot of people at large companies are wondering if now is a good time to switch to *nix or Mac OS X - since they're going to have a high initial cost, might as well save on the ongoing maintenance and upkeep costs (TCO).

[antiRepublicrat]

This, with a more advanced OS, runs all the OS's eye candy just fine with 512 MB RAM and onboard shared-memory graphics.

[Still Thinking]

Modern business grade machines without an AGP slot?? You're kidding me.

[GodBlessRonaldReagan]

I got a Mini last September to replace my aging G3 - what a great little machine! Blazing fast.

[Spruce]

No way anyone will ever need more than 640k of RAM.

[Dumpster Baby]

I recently got a new Dell Dimension 1100 series box through a corporate purchasing agent. It's got a P4-2.8 Ghz, 1 gig ram, etc, etc. I thought I had a real winner as it runs XP really well. Then, I tried to install SuSE 9.2 Linux on a second hard drive - crash and burn due to video hardware incompatibility. I immediately think of turning off the built in Intel video chipset and plugging in a substitute AGP or even a PCI video card - no go. No jumpers or bios settings to disable the on board video, and no AGP slot. My 1995 vintage H-P Pavilion pc, now retired, has an AGP slot, and I used it for years. My new Dell is actually a dumbed down utility box aimed at the corporate office environment, which doesn't need superior graphics capabilities.

:o(

[Still Thinking]

Well, "doesn't need" a thing is a far sight from "we'll be damned if we allow you to install" that thing. Seems like an AGP slot would be a pretty minimal expense to Dell, even if you don't get a card with it on the low end machines.

[Still Thinking]

What wasteful Assembler programmer could use up more than 64K? Let alone 640K.

[Dumpster Baby]

Wouldn't it be cool to have a time machine so you could go back and grab expert byte-counting assembly programmers from the old days and show him this modern stuff? Their eyes would roll back in their heads and down they would go. I started out with Z80 and 6502 stuff, and have even written chained Basic programs to run on a 5K Vic-20 with a 3.5K TPA after the OS loaded. "hmmm, I need to shave 500 bytes off ... where, how???"