OSNews

You say I'm lying? I am willing to make a video for you, but first, answer my question. Are you saying I'm lying in front of 120000 readers?

Whoa, Thom.... nothing personal. But we're all used to the bloatware. You're still on a beta. MS has alot of time to do what it does best.

Agreed. I'm with halfmanhalfamazing on this one. Grab a cup of coffee and settle down.

Additionally, you shouldn't need those hardware requirements just to run a stupid OS.

Edited 2005-12-28 13:30

No. Arrogance is inherent in being Dutch. Comes with the nationality.

Hmmm..
Seems someone has a little stick up their @** today :-)
I guess when you write something that will be read by 120000 readers, you shouldn't take things so personal.
bleh.

"You say I'm lying? I am willing to make a video for you, but first, answer my question. Are you saying I'm lying in front of 120000 readers?"

Dude, that was just plain unprofessional. In front of 120,000 readers, I might add. I mean, essentially, you've just posted a benchmark without explaining your methodology. No wonder people started questioning your results. And stop being so defensive, for crying out loud. Contrary to what you might think, throwing a hissy fit won't improve your credibility. Explaining your methodology, on the other hand, might.

Yes, but where did I say this was a scientifically performed 'benchmark'? All I said was: on MY machine, with the FOLLOWING specs, it works FINE. I never said it was a well-performed benchmark, or that my findings confirms whatever MS says.

And yes, I DO get irritated when people say that I am lying, just to cope with their own cognitive dissonance.

It seems that OS News Staff are also irritated when they are moderated down, so you just disable this feature for yourself.

Do you believe that you hold the truth ?

Mr. Holwerda I remember apologizing.

"Yes, but where did I say this was a scientifically performed 'benchmark'? All I said was: on MY machine, with the FOLLOWING specs, it works FINE. I never said it was a well-performed benchmark, or that my findings confirms whatever MS says."

Hoo boy, judging from your reaction it was almost like your entire life, happiness, well-being, and reputation depended on the veracity of your statement. It was like... like an article of faith your entire world-view is based on had been challenged by some penguinista infidel. Okay, I kid, I kid.

Anyways, I see what you're saying. I'm just surprised you've chosen to react so strongly.

"And yes, I DO get irritated when people say that I am lying, just to cope with their own cognitive dissonance."

Thom, voicing skepticism about a very vague, borderline subjective statement does not constitute calling you a liar. Like you said yourself, this was not meant to be a comprehensive benchmark. What's the big deal, man?

'You say I'm lying? I am willing to make a video for you, but first, answer my question. Are you saying I'm lying in front of 120000 readers?*

yes

That must be the dumbest comment I ever read. He is stating a fact not an opinion. Since it would be trivial for many people to corroborate or falsify this, not sure what you doubt. Or is it just that you have your reality distortion field up?

A benchmark based on an unknown methodology is not a fact. However, since you believe it to be a fact, then perhaps you can answer the following for me: How exactly did he configure the OS? and What workloads were used?

I'm waiting with bated breath.

A benchmark based on an unknown methodology is not a fact. However, since you believe it to be a fact, then perhaps you can answer the following for me: How exactly did he configure the OS? and What workloads were used?

I'm waiting with bated breath.

As I already said-- it is NOT a benchmark. Nowhere did I claim it to be. All I said was, as a general observation, Vista runs fine on my specs. There is no methodology behind it other than installing Vista, turning on Aero Glass, NOT do any service tweaking or similar actions, and USE it.

It is a FACT that on MY machine, with the specs I listed, Vista runs fine. Period. Me thinks you are just not used to someone openly saying something good about MS/Windows.

"Me thinks you are just not used to someone openly saying something good about MS/Windows."

When you assume, Thom, you're making an ass out of u and me, so, please, for your integrity's sake, don't do that in future when addressing me, mmm-kay? Remember: 120,000 people are watching.

MS Windows, especially in its XP incarnation, is a fine piece of software that makes it possible to be productive without having to be an OS guru. I see proof of that everywhere I go -- work, school, home.

Now, stuff that in your pipe and smoke it.

Edited 2005-12-28 15:37

Whoa, whoa, you don't make an ass of u and me when you assume. I assumed once, and I'm still a full human being! Claiming this as fact is a complete fabrication!!

Thom said he ran some software on his computer and it didn't seem slow. You're claiming that him saying this in a forum constitutes a benchmark. I want what you're smoking!

I rather like this thread! Yeah, it's a peaceless flamefest, but it's based on such small amounts of spilt milk that it's worth the read!

no, actually im happy that youre saying good things about ms windows.

it gives the site a different spin.

I couldn't agree more. It make a change from the ritual Windows bashing that usually goes on every time there's a Windows post.

I'm very disappointed to see Thom throwing his toys out of the pram like this, though. I'd have expected better behaviour from someone who the managing editor of a website with 120,000 "eyes"...

It's a pity we can't change the scores of the editorial staff. It kinda says to me that they've always got something valuable to say. Perhaps we can take a vote on whether the editorial staff should be scored like the rest of us. Anyone else think it's unfair?

I'm very disappointed to see Thom throwing his toys out of the pram like this, though.

So, I should accept being called a liar? Would you accept it if you were called a liar?

It's a pity we can't change the scores of the editorial staff. It kinda says to me that they've always got something valuable to say. Perhaps we can take a vote on whether the editorial staff should be scored like the rest of us. Anyone else think it's unfair?

It ain't gonna happen, for reasons we stated numerous times before. I also have already stated before that I'd personally would like to have voting enabled on the team's comments too. However, there are enough people here who would vote me and esp. Eugenia down just because we are who we are. THAT is why we do not, and never will, allow voting on team's accounts.

Don't blame US for that, blame the trolls.

So, I should accept being called a liar? Would you accept it if you were called a liar?

Thom, he never explicitly called you a liar. He just said "I highly doubt it". In my experience it's a figure of speach and doesn't infer that the other person is a liar. You could argue that it's all down to semantics, but it's not going to bring any clarity, so why bother! You really do need to work on a thicker skin...!

As for the scoring issue, perhaps the solution is to allow us to score you (even if it's negative) but always show editorial team postings regardless of their score. If you're going to take an active part in a discussion then you should have to play by the same rules as the rest of us. At least this way your posts will always be shown, it's just that we'll always see the low score...

Thom, I never called you a liar. Im just saying that I dont think you provided suffice evidence to prove that it runs well. I mean, standalone without any additional apps, yes I agree. but once you start to attempt to get any real work done, its gonna crap out on you.

seriously. calm down. you're not a liar.

Hm... Even though many other beta testers can testify to the same thing?

Listen, Microsoft has proven recently that they do not bloat software during development like they used to. Look at some aspects of Windows Server 2003 - much faster than its predecessor, as well as having a smaller installation footprint. I don't think that Microsoft is even close to making the same development mistakes that "hurt" earlier versions of Windows.

All of you jumping on Thom - shut up. Seriously. His response was actually quite fair, as it seems the above poster did not know what the hell he was talking about. As of right now, Vista is NOT a "giant killer" of your hardware. Sheesh, stop flaming.

seeing as how XP hardly runs on that configuration.

Yes, I want software that uses hardware in that way.

Can I have it for free?

What you are saying is not quite correct. The Linux kernel 2.6 runs faster than kernel 2.2 in almost every plataform (if not in every one). And it is because the mainly objective is not to make a fancy and glimmering OS, but to make it better and faster.

The Vista problem is not that is the natural OS evolution, but is because its aggregate a lot of resources not directly related to OS functionality.

That's what I wanted to hear!

Linux and the GNU software associated with it runs faster on newer versions and is working to be more optimized for less powerful hardware as the development progresses.

Microsoft, on the other hand cannot do that.

Linux is without a doubt a great server and developer OS. I use it at work and there is nothing better than 4 virtual desktops full of terminals and an Eclipse window for coding. That said, Windows, and especially Vista from what I have seen, is leagues ahead of current distros in terms of usability, available software and look and feel.

"Buy a Mac if you want to see usability and look and feel that is available now and better than Vista will ever be. So what software for Vista have you seen? Do you really think existing software will run? Heh. I've got a bridge to sell you. There's a reason Gartner is telling corporations not to get into Vista for at least two years."

You're kidding, right? You don't think existing software will run? That counters all known history concerning Microsoft! Microsoft practically built its kingdom on being able to tell people that your previously bought software will still run. They've even been known to avoid fixing bugs that old programs rely on.

Look at it this way, were there loads of programs that stopped running with the transistion from 9x to XP? Now contrast that to jumping from OS 9 to OS X. What about our newest Apple transistion from PowerPC to Intel?

The mail reason I won't run linux and gnome as my desktop is that it is too slow. About everything is slower than windows, especially graphics. It's unusable on older hardware.

Cut your color depth to 16. Use only bitmapped 1-byte fonts. Turn off the RENDER X extension.

Define older. Worked fine on a 500MHz K6-2. I'll admit it was a bit slower than XP (on the same machine), but not a whole lot.
Gnome was way slower, it was enlightenment that was bearable.

It does make a difference which distribution you use. Debian distributions are notoriously slow (probably the cost of using an arch that no one has anyway), but something slackware based would likely run significantly faster. I'd been running Ubuntu on the slow box, and yea it was awful.
Arch is running great on this 700 Celeron. Well, as well as anything can run on a 700 Celeron anyway.

"What you are saying is not quite correct. The Linux kernel 2.6 runs faster than kernel 2.2 in almost every plataform (if not in every one). And it is because the mainly objective is not to make a fancy and glimmering OS, but to make it better and faster.

The Vista problem is not that is the natural OS evolution, but is because its aggregate a lot of resources not directly related to OS functionality."

You are very confused, and you confuse others with your weird logic.

If you want to compare OS kernels, do so, but don't compare the Linux KERNEL (2.2, 2.6, etc) to an operating environment (Vista). Not saying that the Linux kernel is faster or slower than the Vista one, but at least make accurate comparisons. Geez...

First of all your are messing up because I did not compare the Vista Kernel with Linux. I compared the same kernel (Linux) between its two different versions.

And comparing Operating Environment, I use the same OSX version (10.4) in two complety diferent machines (one is a iMac 450 and another is a PowerBook 1.5) and it runs very well in both.

And if you use the Vista (the pre-release) you could visualize that its bloated compare with others Windows.
I tried to install it in a Celeron 1.7 with 512 of RAM and it was painfully.

Beside of fact that it was a pre-release version, that thing was really very slow...

"Vista is as big killer of your hardware as Windows 95 was to Windows 3.1"
Well, not always true.
You can tune 98 to use slightly more resouces than 95; XP requirements (real, not the "let's help the PC market so we'll get our OS preinstalled"-fake specs) are like the requirements 2K; OSX 10.x is getting faster and more responsive at each release; for some tasks newer Linux kernel releases or mainstream o.s. apps are faster and/or more efficient than predecessors.
Ok, if you make a big hop in the OS foundation, like OS Classic to OSX you may expect new OS to be clumsy for the hardware of that days; if you do a mayor UI change like between DOS to Win3.x to 95 or between NT4 to NT5.x you may expect a big impact on requirements.
However OS developement is not only targeted to make people buy new hardware (games are for that ), but also to provide you a more robust and powerful environment; maybe running DOS you would free some megs of RAM but you will not have the windows API or the Linux library to use, you could not efficinetly do muliple tasks with a win 3.11 OS and probably i.e. you would incour in severe limitations in many tasks using a lighter Linux 1.x kernel instead of a new 2.6.x.

"Demanding new modern operating systems run on older hardware is slowing the progress. If these demands were respected, we would have been running OS on original 8086."
This is not alwais true too.
A good model in developing a platform is to keep it modular and scalable, for plenty reasons from aspect like security to performance to ease of maintenance and development.
A side effect is that if you can chose in a modular way what to run you have also better odds to run with more severe hardware limitations.
On the other side I must admit that software development usually tend to live in the past rather than looking at the future. There are pleny codelines in Cobol, there are plenty software in VB, software written for DOS, software written with single user environment in mind, software written not thinking to parallelization.
But generally it's not due to the will to kepp things running on obsolete hardware, it's mainly because writing and mantaining code is quite a long and tiring process and times to give updates and support are usually short, so reuse and rely on good old known paradigms is a good short term solution that eventually become a long term issue.

Any overloaded system is slow
Today any mainstream system (with GUI) may be easily overloaded with intensive gaming, multimedia encoding, pervasive eyecandy (even KDE), cuncurrent broadband filesharing etc.
What is interesting is to test the system with realistic workload and see how smart it is in:
switching betw treads and apps;
preventing RAM shortage with subsequent harddisk trashing;
organize cache to forecast disk request;
if it have efficient and stable video dirvers;
In other worlds a fast system is a system smart in avoiding computation bottlenecks, that are:
r/w from/to disk, for any kind of user, with a wise RAM and cache management;
cache miss for CPU intensive tasks (the OS cannot do many things here);
cost of thread switches and ability on schedule works, for parallelizable or multiple CPU intensuive tasks;

"My personal feeling is that the desktop computer basically does no more for me today than it did 7-8 years ago (exept for perhaps the graphics of computer games). E-mailing, web-browsing, word-processing, spreadsheeting, chatting etc is more confusing than ever. The apps are not even more robust; i struggle with crashing software on a daily basis. Usability is not noticeably better. (though hardware integration is better)."
If you are talking of desktop computing I must disagree, 7-8 years ago we had:
- win98: extremely prone to crash, unfriendly net configuration, single user oriented, really bad dll and registry management;
- NT4: quite nice professional OS but lacking some desktop oriented features of 9x series, however more expensive than desktop OSes;
- old linux and BDSs: nice professional OSes for servers and workstations, but modern GUIs were not mature, nearly unusable, too heavy and too buggy for machines of thoise days, older GUIs were simply not meant for average desktop user (accustomed to 9x and Mac), plus scarce (desktop) hardware support, too few desktop applications;
- professional grade *x, like Solaris, AIX etc... seriously, wo would spend so much money for desktop computing? Moreover, they were not meant for desktop computing, for what concern hardware support, software selection and GUIs.
- Mac OS Classic: unstable for today's standards (XP, OSX, Linux and BSD), single user oriented, few support than today to 3d parts hardware and software.
- some niche OSes like late Amiga, BeOS, NeXT and so on, usually plagued by scarce hardware and software support if compared to those days mainstream products like win 9x and MacOS Classic.

Would you really would prefer a pre 2.4 or 2.6 kernel? A non OSX mac? A 9x rather than NT based Windows?
IMHO today we have more robust OSes and many more open source software project nicely usable, I wouldn't like to go back to 7-8 years ago.

"My personal feeling is that the desktop computer basically does no more for me today than it did 7-8 years ago (exept for perhaps the graphics of computer games). E-mailing, web-browsing, word-processing, spreadsheeting, chatting etc is more confusing than ever. The apps are not even more robust; i struggle with crashing software on a daily basis. Usability is not noticeably better. (though hardware integration is better)."
Moreover, in those years for typical daily desktop use we had, as applications:
- IE4 and early Netscape: they were quite unstable! IE7 shold be a long waited worthy upgrade after that long slumber, Mozilla is in a certain sense the new Netscape and is definitely a fine browser, Opera is my favourite one, Safari is good, even Konqueror is nicer than browsers of 7-8 years ago. Talking about mail managers the situation is almost the same, today we have more choice and better alternatives. Not even talk of html authoring tools...
- quite inefficient media player, i won't change back my VLC with old mplayer32!
- crappy Office 97 or things like Lotus SmartSuite, I would not change a modern Office or even Open/Star Office to go back to 7-8 years ago office suite;
- unstable CD recording stuff, I won't go back from free Toast or K3B or CDBurnerXP for a costly product and even if I magically go back in time I would not be soo fool to buy a CD recorder before JustLink or BurnProof technologies are out!
- none (or experimental) p2p and voip software, but now they are quite useful
- early, higly unstable and inefficient and or costly emulators. Now with mature MAME, Qemu and so on emulation of many recent or old platform is no more a mere challange for programmers or something for pro users.
- high speed, free and reliable compression, encryption and checksum tools: would you change from a free high efficient 7-zip to an old propietary compressor? Or to a closed source pre-AES crypto sftware???

Things I save are ACDSee that really seem to become more clumsy at each release and that isn't matched, IMHO, from XP or KDE image presentation features, so I would like to keep an older version of it rather than a newer one or a newer alternative; mopreover I would save old graphic oftware like PSP o CorelDraw since i doesn't like Gimp and i feel PaintShop is too professional for me that usally do simple photoediting or graphic for web (or apps), however I think a pro graph would disagree with me and prefer a more modern alternative to those old programs.

Well, those do sound good, but I would check newegg. I got a brand new x850 from PowerColor for only $120. Great deal.

Well, those do sound good, but I would check newegg. I got a brand new x850 from PowerColor for only $120. Great deal.

Well, I got a $100 Circuit City gift card I need to use, so at least the first $100 there is free That being said, do you have a link to the one you got for $120? I need AGP.

Edited 2005-12-28 15:54

My computer won't let me login, but the best CC deal is here: http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/ATI-Radeon-X700-Pro-Video-Card-100-4...

Good luck!

That's a clean lie. All of my gamer friends running things like Battlefield 2 would likely disagree with you and say that the mark to hit is half that.

> "Ok so, 1Gb for the OS. Now what if I want to fire up Battlefield 2? Does that mean I need 3Gb of ram?. 1 for the os and 2 for the game."


Who wrote 1Gb for the OS?
AFAIK Vista's minimum memory requirement is 128/256MB.
512 is recommended for average users (gaming, viewing media, etc) and 1024MB for advanced users (audio/videoediting, dtp, 3D, CAD, etc...).

Yes a video is all good but it don't show just how responsive it is. Like people are saying, run antivirus and all your other apps as normal for months then post usage. A clean install always "runs more than fine" in Windows.

Are you even remotely familiar with benchmarking? Benchmarking is always done in the most ideal circumstances-- which is a clean install. Whether it be Linux, OSX or Windows, a good benchmark eliminates as many variables as possible. Which means, you don't install AV, anti spyware, etc.-- on the other hand, it also means no service tweaks or other optimizations.

The reason for this is simple: what AV do I choose? Which one will impact performace more? What services do I enable/disable? "But AV xyz strains the system less!" "You should disable that service too, this benchmark is now useless!"

That is why you always benchmark under default conditions-- namely, factory settings. Which is what my observation is based on.

Actualy, I have used it on a 300MHz Pentium II with 128MB of RAM. It is fairly snappy if one disables all visual effects (Fisher Price skin, opaque window moving, etc) and doesn't run any apps except MS Word 97 and IE 6. Not that I'd ever do that, but the person who uses it does do that.

Windows XP doesn't have virtual desktops. That's something I miss badly when running Windows. I was hoping Vista would add them but it seems not. And yes, I've tried all those utilities that fake virtual desktops on Windows. None of them work like the real thing.

Download the XP PowerToys for free from Microsoft. It does Virtual Desktops.

If you're running an ATI 9000 which isn't DX9 capable, you will not run the Aero theme properly. The high end eye candies would be disabled and the GUI would run "more than fine".

UseMachineCheck = 0

Add that in the registry at a certain point (just Google) and everything will work on 'unsupported' (non DX9) cards.

That's half-true. Glass won't fully work, but it will have transparency. What it won't have is the "frost" effect that is produced using pixel shaders.

What it won't have is the "frost" effect that is produced using pixel shaders.

Yup, that is true. Should've mentioned it.

Think about this: If Apple can do it with less resources and less people, why can't Microsoft? The answer is that they can, and they are.

OSX 10.0 was so slow that it could only get faster. Your statement is not exactly true. There is an article on IBM's page which discusses why OS run slower (i.e. require more resources to run faster) than the old OS's. Great read. OS X is still slow (from an end user perspective) - GUI etc.

For a next-generation OS with highly-advanced visual effects, these specs are actually very reasonable. No, you can't run it on your PII-266/128 MB RAM running Linux in the closet, but that's not the damned target platform, so quit complaining. By the time Vista is released, 1 GB of RAM will be quite standard, and a good thing at that -- more RAM is always good. I would say that 512 MB seems to be what most computers are selling with nowadays, so again, those requirements are met.

The best thing about all this is that everything can be tunrned off. You can still make Vista look like the beloved Windows 2000 GUI and it will, of course, run faster. But still need to bitch about something. Actually, I think Thom posted once about how he managed to run Windows XP on a Pentium 90.

And how many of you are NOT running with at least 512 MB of RAM? Come on guys. Since any processor from 2002 and up will run Vista nicely, and the RAM is accounted for, the only possible upgrade some of us will have to do if they want to run Vista with all of its fancy effects will be a video card -- and you can pick up a Radeon 9250 with 128 MB of RAM for something like $60 CAD now. Waaah, big deal. People have spent more "upgrading" their video cards just so that they could get X running on Linux.

I actually don't know a person who has less than 512 MB RAM. And I also don't know a person who hasn't got a DirectX 9 compatible gfx card. FFS Radeon 9500/9700 is DX 9 compatible and it was released in mid 2002.

Windows and OS X are both raising the bar considerably for the next releases. The fight between desktop OSes is getting much more fierce.

I'm actually very interested what Apple plans to do with Leopard. I think the desktop OS race in the next 5 years will be mostly a Windows vs OS X battle.

No, I don't mean that. I may be a happy Mac user, but I'm no Mac zealot fag. Apple innovates to some extent, Microsoft innovates to some extent, IBM innovates, Sun innovates, Linux innovates somewhat ... but you know what? They all copy each other a lot more.

Deal with it. It's how the industry works.

Copying each other isn't innovation, its what's slowing things down in terms of bringing in something completely new to the table. This is what everyone is looking for, something new.

And the industry should change with someone leading the way. Simply saying this is how things work and to "deal with it", isn't right.

Its like saying, this is how we ass-rape customers for their money with our products, and expecting no one to react. People will start to react by seeking alternative solutions, no matter what they be.


Bringing something new and different is innovation.

What MS is doing so far is showing everyone that their primary competitor for 2006 is Apple. Any real innovation there? Hardly.

Their actions clearly define it, by emulating their looks and droping application support on a competiting product. The feel of Vista's GUI is reminiscent of OSX, the canned support for IE on Mac, etc.


To "deal with it" and accept "copying ideas" is merely to act like sheep. To do something bold that no one has done is innovation.

To really stand out of the crowd, and bring something new to the user is what excites people about technology. (Not some pointless new widget, but something that has practical use to the average person).

... What has Apple innovated with OS X?

Aero is NOTHING like Aqua. Anyone who says it is even remotely similar needs to be burned at the stake, as you are too STUPID to realize your own zealotry.

Also, Avalon goes MUCH MUCH further than Quartz. It allows developers to do a whole lot more, and much more easily.

If by a "whole lot more" you mean it allows any size for widgets, then yes.
I've seen the presentation on this. And yes, there are some very cool things you can do with WPF: Turn a list into a scrolling set of images that look more like a wheel than a list.
These sorts of things are neat, they make great shows. They make our imagination peak! But they're not all that useful for desktop software. They'll be great for things like media center software though!

WPF is extremely elegant (at least as it's presented). And Microsoft should be commended for it. But, as it stands, it's not that far ahead of Quartz 2d Extreme.
I don't think Apple will catch up on these things for a long time either. I don't think they see a good use in fully scalable ui and prefer to use precached sizes.

But Apple isn't hoping to get their machines into your living room and control your tv (TMK). Microsoft most definitely is, and probably in a big way.

Desktop OS's are practically a commodity now, but media center system's aren't; and even when they are there will be good ways to keep a stranglehold on media to make it keep bringing money long after the software lost its value.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/14

Too bad Apple can't even get Q2DE working.

You know, a favorite high school teacher of mine had a term he used for viewpoints like this: Everybody does this and that to some extent, they're not all that different, it's somewhere in the middle (blah blah blah).
He called them wet-noodle views. And he'd then refer to the person saying them as a wet noodle.

Of course, he was joking. But I somehow doubt that people with strongly pro-Apple views are all gay (or cigarettes for that matter).

Calm down; this is how discussion boards work.


Some people don't agree with your moderate world view. And that's their perogative. You don't get to call them fags for disagreeing with you.

Normally I'd just vote you down. But since this thread is pretty much destined for nowhere from the start, I decided to go ahead and be nice.

Nah, I didn't call him a fag ... I just said I wasn't one of those raging Mac fags that hate everything non-Apple, claim Apple invented everything, and would take a facial from Steve Jobs any day of the week.

Lawl.

cachris@brittney:/home/chris$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Celeron (Coppermine)
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 697.580
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat p
se36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 1397.06

chris@brittney:/home/chris$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 180332 167944 12388 0 14808 65344
-/+ buffers/cache: 87792 92540
Swap: 289160 43780 245380


Now, I don't honestly plan to run vista on this machine (my laptop). And I don't expect Microsoft to target it as a optimal machine. I do, however, expect it to run modern applications of the sort it's run in the past for some time to come.
Now, Microsft hasn't been violating this (not since Office XP), but some people have gotten the idea that since machines are faster they don't have to use any sense while designing their programs. And they think they can just write things quick and dirty and let the hardware chug through: Some people don't buy new hardware often.

There is a very large, real, group of people out there who don't have much of a machine. And they're not going to upgrade for a while. Now, while most of them won't upgrade to Vista until they build a new machine; Microsoft would really like to find a way to get them to (that is afterall their best way to make money).
Microsoft doesn't have to spend 3 years working to appeal to them, but it'd better not fully write them off.

And so, you can turn glass off. I imagine this won't change until Vista's successor.

Most people with laptops are largely stuck with the graphics they have. And alot of those people are the types who would pay for an OS upgrade. (the ones with 1 year old high end Dell's and such)

Well, I'm sorry, but you're out of luck. The world has left old hardware behind. Fortunately, many old OSes are still supported, and 99% of programs will still run on old OSes like 98/2000.

In the meantime (as I know some of you just want the video to see Vista), I don't know about you guys, but I can't get enough of these videos:

http://channel9.msdn.com/showforum.aspx?forumid=14

Okay folks, here's the video. There's also a screenshot, because the specs were difficult to read in that low resolution. The quality is awfull, I'm sorry, it's all I can do. I .zip'd the .avi movie file, because of bandwith issues. If someone would be so kind as to set up a mirror, then post the links here.

http://www.denux.org/thom/Stuff/vista/

Update: The shot transfer failed-- hold on a sec....Done.

Edited 2005-12-28 22:25

I've mirrored it here. I'll pull this in 2 days (to avoid google traffic):
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~chris129/mir/

Thanks for keeping the smoothing down on the screenshot. That's the first vista screenshot that didn't give me this reaction:
What the hell are they doing? Why does it look so awful? Oh, it's a low quality jpeg.

Screenshots belong in lossless formats though .

If you have an extra video card lying around I'd be interested in seeing how it runs with, say, a 9600Pro. I'm just curious about how the DX9 effects will run on a low end setup.

I'm not too surprised at the RAM and CPU requirements. They seem pretty reasonable, about what I would recommend for a linux desktop.

Thanks a lot Thom!

Vista in action... Well, the UI looks good for me (it's not visually overbloated and is very fast) and I think hardware support don't gonna be a big problem too. So if Microsoft can _really_ avoid security issues with Vista - back to the roots! It sounds like "Goodbye Mandriva, helo again Windows!" for me. :-)

Thanks again for the video!

Dude, buy a tripod ;-). In all seriousness, looks good...though IE7's performance is a bit odd.

I'll be installing it later on tonight myself, looks very promising. IIS7 is also included in this CTP from what I've read, which is what I'm really interested in moreso than eye candy.

Thom,
I'm curious. Since you've used Vista, I'll ask you. Has Microsoft made any additions as far as adjustment of the window manager? Can you move the buttons? Are there more than 3? Is there horizontal and vertical only maximizations? Anything along these lines, or is this pretty much status quo Windows UI?

This video is a mess. Completely unusable and sucks ass beyond recognition. Just awful, totally awful. Just look at it, it's unusable. And it's slow.

Oh, God, this video is so slow. Awful.

btw, thanks for the video.

You've made it utterly clear that you don't understand the purpose of what Microsoft is doing here:
1.) They're freeing your CPU and main memory from wasting space on graphical layouts.
The system Microsoft has designed renders the graphical interface with the GPU, in graphics RAM. In the current setup, it is rendered with the CPU in main RAM, then copied over to a buffer on your graphics card for final display.
They're actually freeing up your CPU and memory here.
Once again: Your CPU and memory will be better able to focus on useful tasks.
The GPU will be taxed to do these jobs. Since it's highly capable at it, and has a lot of extra time; they add on tasks.
2.) Not all eye candy is just candy. Things like expose are a great example of where a complex graphics system can increase usability.
3.) You're right, translucent menus suck and are quite silly. I also get a headache from OS X's scheme. Especially the old pin-stripe one. The current scheme isn't too bad, but it's a lil bit too bright for my eyes. I also get headaches from too many wallpaper changes, so maybe I'm just prone to them?

Oh I understand what they are doing, they are making more crap that has to be loaded from disk (the REAL bottleneck inside a modern computer) and shoved back to disk when you change applications. If a 386/40 running Win 3.1 can do a GUI with little or no noticeable CPU load, there is NO reason it should even be a concern on a P4 at ANY clock speed other than goofy eye-candy that doesn't make the computer any more useful.

It'll be so much fun as game load times are doubled by the need to get all the OS crap out of video memory (if they even ALLOW you to)... and what type of performance hit are we going to be seeing in programs like Maya or 3d Max, which already are sluggish in either DX or OpenGL modes. (Which I still don't get - if a game can render HUNDREDS of these items in realtime, why does 3DSMAX struggle on simple rotations on just one item?)

Which is why all that graphical nonsense is the first thing I'll be turning off on Vista boxes... Just like I turn off LUNA on XP and wish I could deskin OS X (and no, loading a plain skin OVER quartz is NOT the answer I'm looking for... I'd go back to OS9 if Opera was available and it supported my wireless card.)

Yes. IT's called the internet. There is much much more than 17,000 applications for Windows out there. Even free.

Whether or not it's easier to install apps on linux or not is a whole nother argument.

But you can't seriously think there is more software available for linux than Windows.

i said thanks for the video, you eyeless &@!k

Are you saying im lying in front of 120,000 readers?

Sorry, just "cross-innovating" with words...sounds familiar with MS doesnt it?

Advanced users who run a lot of programs at once, like myself.

Photoshop CS2, multiple instances of vs2005, irc, opera, foobar (music), torrent client, Office, etcetc


It's mostly apps like photoshop and visual studio who use TONS of memory when you really get down and dirty with them. They can run with 512mb just fine, but 1gb gives it that extra boost.

Also, it's mostly Gamers they're talking about. Modern games actually need that much memory to run more smoothly, and not just because of bad coding.

If you don't use your computer for heavy gaming or for production work (developer, designer), then 1gb is more than you need.