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Sure I'd absolutely agree with what you say against a "recommended system" specification, but isn't Microsoft just stating what the minimum are to just "get it running" and thus are accurate?

I do believe though that it would give people a false sense of assurance that their system can run it, but then is the problem that people are just not understanding that the word minimum truly means that?

Also, I don't think this is a Microsoft centric problem.. this stings people in video games as well.

Being an old far that I am, many many many years ago the manufacturers used to never say 'minimum system requirements' based on a generic set of requirements

For example, Lotus would say, "you will need 40mb free disk space, 8mb free memory, and minimum 486 16mhz for optimium performance".

The problem with Microsoft, when they mean minimum/recommended, they mean, bare minimum, it loads, but don't expect to be able to multitask with 'easy and teh snappy'.

Personally, I'd rather the software companies just came clean and say, 'the more memory, the better', then it'd be better for all concerned.

Sure, I understand what you're saying and I'll be honest I haven't picked up a Vista box or even looked online at the requirements. I'll assume that there's a "recommended" column/section. Assuming this holds true, then I don't really see what Microsoft are doing wrong.

From my perspective they're saying, "These (x) are the minimum specifications to run Vista, but really we recommend that you use this (y) hardware for the full experience."

I will still stand by what I said earlier. The question of what people believe when they read "minimum requirements" is the core of the problem. I'd suspect that people expect more from less in many things in life, and this may also apply to software.

It's a fine line I think. You cannot advertise features along with a minimum system specification to run Vista but then some of those features aren't possible on hardware that fits into the minimum category. On the other hand the features that seem to require the higher end equipment are just gloss from what I've seen and when Vista does have benefits other than that which will work fine, albeit slowly on older hardware, why would you not inform people of that lower end hardware support?

Well, I'm not 'dissing' the idea of minimum requirements, but at the same time, they need to define what they mean by minimum - does it mean that it *just* boots or can you do the basics like run a few light applications like word, mediaplayer and notepad, but don't expect to run bit bulky memory consuming things like Matlab.

I see many end users go in, look at the minimum requirements, and assume that they'll get the 'full experience' with their game as long as they have those 'minimum requirements' - when in reality the box should say, 'this game will operate at this specification, BUT if you want the full experience, you must have atleast this [specification] or higher' and many games companies now do that.

Your numbers are far too high, Vista runs fine here on an Athlon XP 2800+, and it runs just as well as XP on the same hardware, and it's only 2Ghz, and 3 generations behind. an 800 Mhz with 512M may be a weak, but you certainly don't need a 2.5Ghz dual core, that's just crazy talk

You make a good point regarding game companies. What MS is doing is saying you can boot Vista on that minimum requirement. They didn't say that it would run well.

Game companies often do the same thing. You can run a game on the minimum spec machine, but you have to shut ever little detail off and even then, it still runs horrible, but it runs.

Ignore minimum requirements and look at the recommended requirements as a minimum for acceptable performance.

"What MS is doing is saying you can boot Vista on that minimum requirement. They didn't say that it would run well."

They even don't say you can use it for any purpose. In most cases, you don't use an operating system (directly), you are using programs. That's more system load than just the GUI effects. If you set "Vista" on load using some application while running on the real minimum hardware, you can welcome every pixel on the screen personally. :-)

(The minimum makes "Vista" surely run as fast as Geoworks Ensemble on a 286/12 with 1 MB RAM...)

"Game companies often do the same thing. You can run a game on the minimum spec machine, but you have to shut ever little detail off and even then, it still runs horrible, but it runs."

Same thing there: "runs basically" vs. "is playabe". The game runs, but you hardly can play it.

(The minimum makes "Vista" surely run as fast as Geoworks Ensemble on a 286/12 with 1 MB RAM...)

That's not fair to Geoworks A neighbour of mine had an old PC and asked me to take a look at it recently - it was an old Laser 286 with 640KB of RAM and PC/GEOS / Geoworks Ensemble installed. It was actually quite fast, considering.

The problem, if anyone's curious, was that the computer had a battery pack with 3 AAs acting as the CMOS battery. The batteries were failing and it would periodically forget that a hard drive was installed (ah, the good 'ol days before IDE auto-detection). It was the first time I've offered "buy a package of AAs" as the solution to a computer problem.

"That's not fair to Geoworks "

Please get me right: I like Geoworks very much and still use it for some purposes on my old laptop designated for amateur radio operations. Even my father uses the text editor of Geoworks Ensemble for data collecting in state or federal archives. And it's installed on his 486 laptop - really fast.

Geoworks even has features "Vista" does not have (but many Gtk+ applications have), such as tear-off menus (the "pin needle").

Edited 2006-12-09 00:08

(The minimum makes "Vista" surely run as fast as Geoworks Ensemble on a 286/12 with 1 MB RAM...)

My 286 ran Geoworks really damn fast. Fast enough that when I got a Pentium 75mhz / 8 MB with Windows 3.1, I thought something was wrong. The two machines were set up side by side, so I would do the same task on each machine, in its respective OS. The 286/GEOS combo would always beat out the Pentium. Putting Win95 on the Pentium just magnified the difference.

That experience began my hatred of Windows (which got magnified drastically when I got copies of the GEOS SDK and Visual C++). I just don't consider Windows usable unless the specs are much higher than most people seem to tolerate.

So what exactly is the point then of publishing minimum requirements?

Microsoft and everyone else should offer minimum requirements for what they expect will offer an *acceptable* user experience. Any less than that is dishonest.

The problem is in Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility. Windows has to support about two decades worth of bugs.

I seriously doubt backwards compatibility is contributing much to this level of bloat.

XP pro runs fine on a 133 p1 with 256mb of ram. I know, I've done it. 'course I had to turn off all kinds of stuff and tweak it. (I've actually had it usable on a pentium 75mhz with 64mb of ram, but noone here will believe me)

I imagine a 450 p3 with 1gb of ram would run vista fine. the last RC ran on my p3-1ghz wit h1gb of ram and a fx5500 256mb pci card with aero glass fine.

for most people touting 2ghz + and such are those that install windows and then dont do anything to it. If that is what you do, then yeah, a really specced out machine is what you need.

Edited 2006-12-09 00:34

>>I've actually had it usable on a pentium 75mhz with 64mb of ram, but noone here will believe me

I believe you. I can't comment on Vista because I'm never used it, but it sounds like Microsoft just lost its advantage. I say that because Windows XP and earlier are truly resource efficient. I hate Microsoft products for their pricing schemes, but every time I use Linux I am jealous of Microsoft's snappy GUI and minimal system requirements. Windows 2000 is still a very capable OS, capable of running almost every modern software, and I used it extensively and found that it runs VERY well on a 233 Mhz beige box with 64 MB of RAM. It will work OK with 32 MB of RAM. It flies with 128 MB of RAM. Windows XP with the classic interface will also run great with 64 MB of RAM, as long as you don't run antivirus software or install bloated junk like RealPlayer that keeps things running in the systray.

Where Windows XP does lie at a disadvantage is the huge amount of disk space used by a default install. I think it's 6 GB if I remember correctly. A well equipped desktop Linux system hardly takes 2 GB. Fortunately, hard disk space is usually not as scarce as RAM on old systems.

I'm still curious though, is Windows Vista really that much more resource intensive compared to Windows XP if you turn off all the Aero junk? I can't believe Microsoft would be dumb enough to alienate so many customers with older computers. Try as you may to forget about them, probably the majority of personal and business users are using computers that are underspec'ed by Vista standards.

Edited 2006-12-09 03:03

well, I used the last rc and even with everything turned off, it was using ~300mb of ram. i dunno how well the release version is doing ram-wise though.

I'm still curious though, is Windows Vista really that much more resource intensive compared to Windows XP if you turn off all the Aero junk? I can't believe Microsoft would be dumb enough to alienate so many customers with older computers.

I daresay that not many users would be upgrading their turn-of-the-century boxes to Vista in any case. If they don't have to money to upgrade to a circa 2002 computer (Pentium IV 2.x GHz/Athlon XP 2x00+, 512 MB), they certainly don't have the money to purchase Vista.

I've got a Pentium 2 366mhz / 256 MB ram laptop that I recently installed XP on. It takes forever to do anything on it. Its barely usable once you start loading things like an antivirus program on it.

One thing I found with XP at least, RAM and a decent GPU usually matter more than the CPU speed. I ran XP for a while on a P3 450 - having 512MB of RAM and a cheap Radeon in it seemed to make all the difference.

I was wondering, suddenly, if this is a trend that will forever continue? Vista may be the champion, but other popular OS'es (OpenSuse, Fedora Core, Mac OS X, Gentoo) like their share of heavy hardware to run nicely too.

I don't know about the others, but even my old P3 450mhz with 128mb RAM could run Gentoo just fine. Compiling stuff is a different matter, but well, compiling apps is Gentoo's thing. Win2K runs just fine on the same hardware, but when it comes to running applications, Gentoo beats pants off of Win2K.

>>What I mean is, for example it's possible to use a "single tasking" Windows XP on a 64M machine without problems. However when you try to multitask, say Office 2003 with Firefox you'll immediately see a crawling system.

I agree with this. Firefox is a bloated pig. But if you were to use Internet Explorer concurrently with MS Word, Excel, Outlook, and maybe Windows Media Player, there would be no major problem. (That is, not until your system gets compromised due to a Windows security vulnerability...)

All of the native MS programs make good use of shared components that are already loaded into memory. Linux/Open Source could learn a lesson from that. Things like OpenOffice and Firefox might as well include their own graphics drivers, printer drivers, and a kernel if they like bloat so much.

Same can be said for *NIX as well; all the GNOME components share parts with each other same with KDE as well.

There is a *REASON* for the way Firefox and OpenOffice.org were designed; they were *DESIGNED* to be multiplatform from day one - in the case of Firefox, you have XUL and its wrapper around native widgets, in the case of OpenOffice.org, you have the Software Abstration Layer (SAL) which allows one to simply port SAL and voila, the whole office suite is now running on the said operating system!

Before maeking such *STUPID* rants in future, maybe its best you put your brain into gear, closed the mouth and researched the reasons as to why such decisions were made rather than making clueless posts on osnews.com.

Yes, of course Firefox and OpenOffice were designed to be multi-platform. But that doesn't negate the fact that they are drastically more resource intensive than their single-platform integrated counterparts. The question here is performance on old hardware, not code portability.

Edited 2006-12-10 03:11

Which again, you completely neglect to take into account; they're more resource hungry because they're designed to be multi-platform; when you make something multiplatform, you have additional overhead than if you were to use the default shared components that come with the operating system itself.

If you load GNOME and run GNOME based applications (only) then the amount of resources used will be no higher than Windows XP - if you were to load a KDE application whilst running GNOME, then SURE there will be a spike in resource use because a whole new LAYER of libraries have to be loaded to support the KDE application running on a foreign desktop!

What should I start doing? bitching to Microsoft because their copy of Microsoft Office 2003 uses more resources when running on Linux under wine? of corse it'll require MORE resources, its not using the already loaded shared resources which the default desktop provides!

Edited 2006-12-10 04:07

Is 800 Mhz/512 MB recommended? No
Does it run Vista? Yes

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Hence, MINIMUM requirements.

Well paper is patient.Personally i perceive XP prof is running slow on my AMD64 2.2GHz 1GB RAM raid0 station much less Vista.All those resident programs such as antivirus firewall and so on are a real drag on resources.Disabling the stupid unwelcome system restore feature constant monitoring the HD's does give a slight relieve.So does disbling the Toys R Us theme.

Running a native 64-bit linux OS with running only that what i have choosen to run comes more closely to my expected perception.Even with all bells and whistles turned on the system is more responsive,day in day out.

Quite frankly the minimum Vista specs are rediculous.
The above mentioned system would be a more realistic minimum spec and any dual-core regardless Intel or AMD and 2GB of RAM is recommended.Unless a lot possible experience goes down the drain.

Edited 2006-12-09 12:42

Running a native 64-bit linux OS with running only that what i have choosen to run comes more closely to my expected perception.Even with all bells and whistles turned on the system is more responsive,day in day out.


I have made the move to 64-bit XP, and there is no going back. Try for instance to press Windows+E (opens explorer). In XP64 it's instant, in XP32 there's a noticable delay.

Two years from now, 32 bit versions of Vista won't be around - simply because of the memory limitations.

I have made the move to 64-bit XP, and there is no going back. Try for instance to press Windows+E (opens explorer). In XP64 it's instant, in XP32 there's a noticable delay.

True

Or better yet, if Trolltech, or some noble ecentric millionaire bought Trolltech, licenced the whole stack via the LGPL, the reason for GNOME existing would become a non-issue.

The free software treehuggers would have what they wanted; and software vendors hanking to create proprietary software without needing to pay a licence fee could do so.

Personally, I find KDE a more 'complete' environment; one only needs to look at Amarok compared to the joke that is Rhythm box which seems to be absolutely clueless to the needs of the average ipod/mtp syncing, heading banging end user who wants minimum fuss and bother.

That's taking things a little too far, methinks. The reason for Gnome's birth may no longer exist, but as a desktop environment, KDE is not across-the-board superior to Gnome. In fact, while I'm a fan of neither DE, I find the look and feel of Gnome to be much nicer than that of KDE. Admittedly, there's very little else about Gnome I care for, but is not that alone a reason for its existence even if QT was LGPL-licensed?

I'm not sure businesses will be upgrading to Vista quickly enough for this to be a factor, but I wouldn't mind seeing this happen, either. (My organization also does some similar charity work.)