As expected, the software giant on May 18 unveiled its Windows Vista Get Ready Web site, along with a set of minimum PC hardware guidelines for Vista Capable PCs – which call for at least an 800MHz processor, 512MB of RAM and a DirectX 9-capable graphics processor, but ask for more for those who seek to use all of Vista’s features – and a Windows Upgrade Advisor application as part of a campaign to prepare people. on a related note, the WinFS team whetted the appetites of advocates of Microsoft’s next-generation file system by sharing information on plans for a new, Microsoft-developed application for WinFS, code-named “Project Orange“.
Microsoft Tells All on Vista’s Hardware Needs
70 Comments
2006-05-19 10:11 am
2006-05-19 1:43 pm
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2006-05-19 4:43 pm
2006-05-19 2:10 pm
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2006-05-19 7:06 pm
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2006-05-19 5:24 pm
800MHz processor, 512MB of RAM and a DirectX 9-capable graphics processor, but ask for more for those who seek to use all of Vista’s features
fair enough, but what if I actually want to do anything with the OS?
The betas of Vista I have run are dog slow, although I thought that was because of debug code, now I am not so sure.
Microsoft always giva a minimum spec for the OS, but you need to triple the spec for memory and hard disk space before you have something you feel comfortable using.
I dont mean to troll, but http://en.opensuse.org/download
Edited 2006-05-18 22:04
You can’t be serious. Suse is almost unusably slow — far, far slower than Vista — on the 2 GHz Pentium IV machines I’ve tried both on. Not to mention helluva buggy.
Now, now, that is just out and out trolling, you are trying to say an enterprise class OS like Suse 10 is more buggy than Vista which is still in development ?
Come on, try better than that please.
BTW- you will note from my previous posts in various articles about Vista, that I have been beta testing it for a long time. I can assure you, that on a 2Ghz PC, Suse will always outperform Vista
Why should I have to buy a PC with those specs when I can run Mac OS X on a G3 processor…and very minimal specifications…?
http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/requirements.html
Oh, thats right Windows is bulky….
http://www.jmusheneaux.com/index06.htm
I think I’ll just be wierd and stick to FreeBSD and Mac OS X…..^_^
This shouldn’t have been modded down. It’s both a fair comparison and a good diagnosis of Microsoft’s problems with development cycles and security.
A lot of features of Vista have been described by all sides as attempts to catch up with the technology and stability of OS X, and I’ve got that running fine on a 350 MHz G3 with 448M of RAM. (It goes from power on to responsive desktop in under a minute.) The machine itself cost me $25. Checking MacTracker… those came out in 1999. I’ve got today’s most advanced desktop OS running on a seven-year-old, 25-dollar tower, and this is what Microsoft’s next increment will take? It’s a stark contrast to say the least.
we probably have the same machine (blue and white G3 tower? I got mine for free from my work and put in an extra 256MB of RAM (512 total)). I loaded a number of OSes on there, with mixed results (though certainly not all bad) until I decided to do a “why not” and put 10.4 on it. wow. I’m amazed how this (relatively speaking) dinosaur of a computer can still handle, and still be quite usable/funcational, such a heavy weight of a modern OS (with some obvious limitations mind you.) I don’t know if it’s that PPC is really that good, or if OSX is (I suspect it’s a combo).
look at my previous posts and you’ll see I’m hardly an apple fanboy, but I gotta admit when/where I see excellent technology at work.
As one of the most satisfied Suse user from 6.x version, I can say that on a Dothan @600MHz with 512 MB of RAM a Suse 10+KDE or Gnome it’s quite less responsive in some operations, and quite more in other operations, than XP with Luna and all bells’n whistles activated; with those specs the two systems are in the range of perfect usability for compile software, use medium sized and complexity database, use most of productivity and entertainment software, do some videoediting etc…
When used trough an emulator/virtualizator (I used Bochs, Qemu and VMWare) XP seem more responsive than Suse 10+KDE/Gnome.
However for less than 100$ you can have a 1GB memory module (for notebook!) and make the system even better when it comes to do some memory intensive task, so it makes no many sense whining about memory usage of the system, it’s more important that the system is efficient in use high amounts of RAM rather than sparing some MB of footprint, and as I couuld see both Suse and XP has no problem in using high maounts of memory commonly supported by mainstream PCs.
Moreover, most of the memory used by rather complex systems like XP or Linux with KDE or Gnome doesn’t mean the system is bloathed, it means that the system prehemptively allocate as many known to be useful information as it can from the disk to the memory, the theorical point modern systems are aiming is to use almost all free memory and load almost all meaningful information from disk, in order to minimize disk operation.
In that way if a miss happens the overhead is simply of reassigning a memory region, otherwise for each meaningful information the overhead would be to read from disk in the moment the user decide that need that information, so in this sense for a modern desktop system free ram is almost wasted ram.
Sorry I don’t mean to be mean, and I see that your understanding of OS is good. So you know already that it is important for an OS to spare memory for caching, when people usually talk of “free” memory, they, I think implies: amount of memory used without page caching and page buffering.
Your system usually really slows done when either one of the cached pages or buffer pages requires more memory than it is available, and starts to shrink.
So it still makes sense that OS and application spare memory. I see no debate here, but a nice explanation of memory management in an OS.
“So it still makes sense that OS and application spare memory.”
It depends.
i.e. to be as efficient as the machine allow, it make sense the application / the system component load from the disk the largest quantity of data the disk controller / the disk cache / other bottlenecks etc allow, and send it to the CPU in chunks as large as the CPU caches allow.
If I use an obsolete application assuming in some hardcoded manners that a tipical machine is more resource limited than a moder machine, it would probably be a very memory-savvy application but it will bloath system buses repeating operation with amonts smaller than needed, waste CPU cycles and generally use disk and memory ineffectively.
Try i.e. to use an old archiver or an old encryption software, then a new one using the same primitives, you could see that the application written to take in account advantages of the actual machine features and bottlenecks will be dramathically faster (and will not bloath the system with unefficient request to use resources that many other processes will need), but probably will assign larger variables, try to preload more data and to keep more data in ram to reduce disk writing operation, gaining speed and leaving buses free for something other.
Using more memory is not necessarily always a sign of bad programming, however I fully agree that wasting memory is never useful!
“I see no debate here, but a nice explanation of memory management in an OS.”
Thanks! It seems that too may people (I know personally some people that should be competent and still think that way!) simply look the “unused memory” amount (on whatever system) and if it’s low start whining that the given system is bloathwere; I clearly remember some months ago on this forum someone claiming it about… QNX!!!
Those spec’s seem pretty low.
I mean, I can live with XP on 512MB of RAM, but would recommend 1GB.
And 800Mhz is pretty slow. Was thinking it would be more like 2Ghz.
Seems like a bit of a joke really.
it’s pretty much business as usual I’d guess for MS and their “minimum specs”. seriously, look at previous windows releases and compare the official minimum, with what we know to really be the case. for instance (minimum specs):
windows xp pro
233 Mhz
64 MB RAM
1.5 Gigs of hard drive
svga 800×600 res
ok. so it’ll boot I guess. but useful? if that’s a barometer for what the vista min requirements are in comparison (800 Mhz, 512 MB RAM, etc) I only can wonder how much a useable config will require…
XP Pro on 233 MHz ? :O
You can hardly run Win2K on that – and only without firewall and antivirus – and that won’t stay fast for long.
233 MHz can handle NT4 w. SP6a – and nothing newer.
Considering Microsofts past with system requirements you’ll need something around 2 GHz and 2 GB RAM, and probably a PCI-E card with no less than 512 MB RAM, just to get a barely tolerable performance.
I mean XP is barely tolerable on a 1.5 GHz system with 512 MB of RAM.
The same is true for Linux running KDE or Gnome.
Difference being that with betas of previous versions, they were poor performing on those min specs. With Vista, it is not.
A default install would probably be intolerable on a 233…
That said, my sister did not have the cash for a new computer but had an old clunker in her closet. I scrounged up some ram for it, overclocked the CPU to 233mhz (was a 166mmx) and popped a wifi card in it and its happily running XP Pro.. with 192mb of ram.
Runs opera, yahoo messenger, aim etc fine for her needs. The thing is only slowed down by the ram. She normally has winamp streaming audio in the background while surfing. No problems at all….
but you probably won’t believe me.
Well, with 192 MB it is a different beast – as long as you stay away from the more modern applications. Visual Studio 2005 would be painful, I’m afraid.
More RAM can do a lot to a system. However, I doubt her needs equal my needs
that is true. hers are far different from yours
That’s true. XP really becomes usable on mid-level PII’s with around 192MB of RAM… Not that the programs written for it these days (Trillian *cough* flash) would be very useful…
I used an XP pro machine like that for a while (abeit with 196mb of ram and 6gb hd) and it was fairly good, not overly slow
I think they were smoking something. I’m using a 450Mhz computer right now and I’m a programmer. Most OS hobbies are done on low end machines because they’re dirt cheap. But this happens all the time. If your developers have high end machines, they’ll create something that requires MORE power than what they are using. 800Mhz may be low for them, but they’re losing one hell of a big market. Just check how many people still use W95. Vista is the joke here, not the requirements.
I doubt the reqs will hurt them much. Microsoft probably doesn’t sell many copies of their new OSes directly to home users and the like, and any new computer on the market when Vista comes out should be able to run it.
I think they were smoking something. I’m using a 450Mhz computer right now and I’m a programmer.
It depends.. what kind of programming are you doing?
For example, both Java and .NET require MUCH better (faster CPU, more RAM) computers. I’d guess that web dev (if it includes animations, Flash, etc) requires better system too.
As we know, Me was nothing short of groundbreaking..
It also reminds me of the Windows 95 hardware requirements of a 486 (or 386 w/ math coprocessor) and 8 MB RAM.
I’ll never forget watching Windows 95 crawl to life on a 386DX – with 16 MB..
I share that sentiment, it was quite bad…
Ah those were times… This was what I used to work with – W95 + Office 97 on a 486DX2-66 with 8 MB RAM.
I’m sorry ;P
My home PCs mobo died a few days ago. had to pull out ol’ faithful until I get a new mobo. It’s a p75 with 24mb ram, 350mb hdd (its a laptop) running windows 95.
Its.. slow..
*come ON motherboard…)
Even WinXP is very slow with these specs, unless you only browse the web, edit Word documents etc.
These specs are one big joke.
Why does an Operating System need so much horse power? What is vista doing that requires so much resources. The minimum specs is without all the glitz so why does it require a 800mhz machine.
Did anyone notice the 15GB of FREE hard drive space as a requirement for the premium version.
Microsoft has probably realized that their previous specifications for XP, 2000, 98, and so on were grossly under-estimated, so they’re probably being more realistic this time around.
Those are pretty much the specs for running any modern OS snappily — yeah, even OS X and various modern Linux distros.
Pretty much.
But don’t expect 80% of the people here to agree with you.
Nevermind the fact that multiple people have run Vista on worse hardware fine, after disabling Glass, which is what some of the lower tier versions of Vista will do.
Considering the rise in official minimum requirements from Win 3.x -> Windows 9x -> Windows NT -> Win2K -> XP -> 2003 I’ve got to say that I’m surprised the official minimum requirements are surprisingly low.
I don’t think they have learned from the past. They usually don’t so why should they do it now? It’s going to be preinstalled on a lot of new pc’s anyway.
No-one with a modicum of sense will buy the latest version of anything just to disable the stuff the main selling points
Maybe there are other things in it besides the “main selling points” that people want.
With the February CTP running, I can not even run Aero. My machine is an AMD 2.4GHZ, 1GB RAM, with an Nvidia GeForce 5900 with 128 MB Video RAM. Without Aero the machine is dog slow, and with Aero, there is no way to do anything but run the OS, as attempting to run an app there are no resources left to use. I can’t even imagine trying to run it on the specs they have posted. Running the MS Vista Ready tool , or whatever it is called, I forgot, shows the machine as being a 2, with the video card rated at 2.5, the processor at a 3. What kind of machines do they think people have? Might have to make an image of my main machine and try to set it up Dual Boot. Does Vista require to install on the first hard drive or can it be installed on a second drive?
The reason why the UI runs slow (you know, the UI is not the whole system) is because nVidia’s drivers are not accelerating the desktop like they do in XP.
You might as well be using a generic VESA driver.
As for Aero, your card wasn’t meant to handle Aero, it needs a Dx9 card or better.
I run Vista on an XP 2800+, 1.5gb of RAM, and a Geforce 6800. It flies. In game performance is pretty bad though, but I chalk that up to the video drivers.
Vista will actually unload Aero Glass when playing a full screen game, so it’s not Aero taking up GPU cycles, which is why I suspect it is the drivers, among other things.
Also, a decent harddrive makes a huge difference. I did have Vista on an old 12gb drive. Ran like a dog, even though all the other hardware was exactly the same. Now I’ve got it on my main drive (Seagate Barracuda SATA drive). No problems.
Yes, I do know the UI is not the whole system
The video card IS a DX 9 card. It could very well be the drivers. I have moved it to my main system and is running great. That system is a Pentium Extreme 840 dual core, 2 GB RAM and a GeForce 6800 with 256 MB RAM.
Also answered my own question on the booting. For once I can install windows on a second hard drive, and the Vista boot loader lets me boot into XP on the main drive with no problems. This is without any other items like System Commander.
I’ll grant you that the Nvidia drivers are not accelerated, but I’m running Vista on a Duo Core 1.83 laptop (Dell D820) system with 1 GB of RAM, 100 GB 7200 RPM SATA drive, and a Nvidia Quadro NVS120(?) card with 256 MB and my system is also listed as a “2”
I’m sorry, but those are decent specs for a modern machine, and all it rates me at is a 2? Yes I can run Aero, but it’s horribly slow. And it’s not just the debug code from a beta…this thing is really slow.
So far, I’m not impressed.
Edited 2006-05-19 14:42
Have you looked to see what is bringing down your performance rating? It breaks it down by harddrive, RAM, video card, and processor.
I’d say since Quadro is an OpenGL card the UI might run a bit slow.
Also, perhaps the performance rating doesn’t have core duo speeds set in it and it is just seeing the 1.83ghz.
All I can say is, it screams on my 3 rated system.
It shall be interesting how this will stack up to OS X’s requirements in reality.
Apple say they need:
* 256 Mb RAM
* Any G3
Now I will be the first to admit that 10.4 is pretty much unusable with that. However 512Mb is perfectly fine for many casual home users.
Hell my PowerBook has 512Mb at the moment and it performs reasonably well when I use maybe up to 7 programs at once. I just have to wait while the hard disk does its job if I then move to something else.
So, what do Microsoft mean by their 512Mb? Will it be usable, or will I really need 768Mb, 1Gb, more?
What surprises me the most is the need for a DirectX 9 graphics card, the other things I can understand, but this seems unnecessary. In a way it makes me amazed that Apple can get their compositing stuff to work as well as it does on older machines without graphics acceleration.
Oh, and the stupid web site doesn’t work properly with Safari. grrr.
So, what do Microsoft mean by their 512Mb? Will it be usable, or will I really need 768Mb, 1Gb, more?
The minimum spec, including 512MB RAM, constitutes a usable system. However, intensive multimedia applications, like HD Video playback or some 3D games (particularly modern FPS), may require better hardware.
What surprises me the most is the need for a DirectX 9 graphics card, the other things I can understand, but this seems unnecessary. In a way it makes me amazed that Apple can get their compositing stuff to work as well as it does on older machines without graphics acceleration.
The DX9 requirement isn’t for composition. It is in large part for Shader Model 2.0+ support which is used for things like the blurred glass effect and ClearType text rendering acceleration, cross-process sharing of graphics resourcess, and graphics scheduling and graphics virtual memory efficiencies. DX10 GPUs should be most efficient. Among other things, they should accelerate the entire text pipeline in hardware, and those that use the advanced driver model will be able to be preempted on a per-instruction level rather than per-batch.
Edited 2006-05-18 23:57
This all seems fairly useless.
1.) They’re judging this from an new practical-minimum perspective.
OR
2.) They’re judging this from an old absolute-minimum perspective.
Wait and see. I’m leaning towards one though, because I don’t see how it’s even remotely possibly for those system requirements to be considered an absolute minimum (like XP on P2-233 w/ 64mb).
It takes something around those specs for something like Ubuntu to be useful I’d say. Maybe not graphics card wise, but that’s just a matter of time (or now) until something like Xgl or AIGLX start to catch on
Some people complain OSX is running slow on a Mac Mini with 512megs of memory. So I don’t think windows Vista Specs arn’t to unreasonable for 2007
. Computer hardware is so cheap these days that you should be able to run windows. As for the post above:
———————————
I think they were smoking something. I’m using a 450Mhz computer right now and I’m a programmer. Most OS hobbies are done on low end machines because they’re dirt cheap. But this happens all the time. If your developers have high end machines, they’ll create something that requires MORE power than what they are using. 800Mhz may be low for them, but they’re losing one hell of a big market. Just check how many people still use W95. Vista is the joke here, not the requirements.
————————————
If you don’t have the money for upgrading your CPU / Ram or for that matter a cheap PC, you probably shouldn’t go out and buy Vista. I don’t think Vista is a Joke since you are running a 7 Year old CPU.
Clearly you have no idea what goes on in the corporate world. There are possible hundreds of millions of PCs around the world with processors less powerful than 800Mhz.
These machines usually run Win95/98/NT4 in call centres and accounting or law shops. They have no need for faster machines and the software works fine.
Why should they have to go out and buy a new OS and new hardware to run the new OS ?
Is it because Microsoft says you need to for protection against malware ?
Is it because Micrsoft says you need it for new software to work ?
Is it because Microsft says you need to upgrade to get support from them ?
Is it because you are a sheep and feel the need to fit in with everyone else ?
Try, all of the above
I don’t see what is wrong with the specs. Filemaker needs a 500 MHZ computer and 256 megs of memory. Dreamweaver requirements are 800 MHz Intel Pentium III processor (or equivalent) and later. Flash requires 800 MHz Intel Pentium III processor and later. And those are just applications.
So, I don’t know what kind of corporate world you are coming from. But in my company I make sure my employees have at least a reasonable fast machine to get the work done on time.
The people still running Win95/98/NT4 haven’t upgraded to Win 2000 or XP yet. Unlikly they will upgrade to Vista soon. If they do they can afford an Emachine for $449.99 which comes with an 1.8ghz processor.
We don’t run Windows, however it doesn’t mean every time you see microsoft it means “BAD”. Those specs are very reasonable for early 2007.
The minimum hardware specs don’t mean a thing to me, ’cause I’m not planning on upgrading to Vista. I’m already running the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distro. It does everything I need at a much lower cost.
The fly in the ointment is graphics cards. Onboard graphics, even those of modern portables will not cope with The New graphics engine.
There is a crippled version without it, but who the hell would want that.
Apart from that, computers for some time are sooo fast. Its not surprising the specs seem low.
The fly in the ointment is graphics cards. Onboard graphics, even those of modern portables will not cope with The New graphics engine.
Aero Glass shold have no problem running on most integrated desktop and mobile GPUs NVIDIA and ATI have been shipping for the past 2+ years. It should also have no problem on the Intel GMA950 series.
but ask for more for those who seek to use all of Vista’s features
What features? Micosoft is cutting out features left and right.
Sure, the OS might be a bit of a pig, but I think the new APIs and windowing toolkit will make future apps (made specifically for Vista) more demanding of resources.
They cut WinFS and will be shipping it separately, and the same for PowerShell.
What else? That’s hardly “cutting features left and right”.
I astonished that you call them features. Microsoft calls them Pillars. http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/downloads/developerstory/
There is a big difference between a piller and a feature.
Others.
Next-Generation Secure Computing Base
Suppoet for Trusted Platform Module chips
Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface
Scaleable install
what about those those still in “There may be specific features within those subsystems that will be scaled back,” lead product manager Greg Sullivan
Oh in case you forgot The two pillers remaining are only in Vista Gold
I read the comment on SUSE vs Vista. It told me nothing, not a thing. Other than start up times I couldn’t see what might be slower or faster.
Computers are so dammed fast, even old computers are soo fast. The only time I have a computer run slow in the past couple of years is due to not enough memory, and its a cheap fix.
Oddly the last time I remember an OS feeling fast, was when I replaced XP with Windows95 on a portable with an early pentium M chip.
I think all OS’s are at that stage where they are fast enough, and Vista’s specs show nothing new has become part of the OS landscape to change that.
By the time vista really comes into its own (maybe a year or two after initial release) these requirements will be standard on most any new pc and will be common on 2 year old pc’s.
I really don’t like windows at all and I avoid it as much as possible, but these specs are not unreasonable. you need to understand that it will be maybe 5 years or more until vista will be required for most software with a few exceptions on some high end software.
It has only been in the last year or so that we have started to see software and games that only say Windows XP on the requirements listing, it was almost always 2000, XP, or maybe 98 prior to the last year or so……. how long had XP been around?
Anyway, by the time people really need to upgrade, these specs will be of ancient relics that have been long forsaken.
on a side note, even with all of that having been said….. XGL distros have very minimal requirements, my 500 mhz p3 with a geforce 4 mx440 is smooth as butter with 384 mb ram
I can run windows XP just fine on a p3 450mhz with 64mb of ram. It isn’t the fastest thing in the world but it is useable. It really comes down to what other applications you are running however. I wouldn’t run Photoshop on a p3 450mhz. But I will run Firefox (until it eats all the ram) or Thunderbird to surf the web and check email.
It is funny how people use hypothetical reasons to bash an operating system. Seeing how I can go to Costco or Bestbuy and get a machine over 2ghz with 1gb of ram and tons of other goodies for fewer than $500 USD. I don’t see how upgrading is such a big deal.
I’m also going to guess a lot of home users buy new computers with a new release of windows, seeing as hardware is so cheap these days. Furthermore if you are a power user I am quite sure your machine will is up to spec if not bleeding edge.
I guess the real demographic that would be worried about an upgrade in specs would be the business sector, and I am quite sure MS worked closely with many large and small companies to ease the pain. Although in my experience most businesses easily meet these min specs and would have no problem upgrading if they choose to.
What are you people smoking and where can I aquire some?
“800mhz is pretty slow”
“XP on these specs is dog slow”
what…in…the..FSCK?
Vista running on the 2k theme is plenty speedy. And im sure by actual release time it will have been sped up some more. And you can tweak it to run even better after the initial install. I had the latest CTP on my 1ghz p3 tower that has 1gb of pc133 with a nvidia fx5500 256mb and it ran fine.
XP runs 100% useably on a 350p3 with 512mb of ram. once you hit 500mhz, its basically RAM that does most speed changes with the basic OS.
And ALL OSes love ram. The more the better.
People complaining about XP being dog slow on ~800mhz with 512mb of ram are either flat out trolling or haven’t a clue as to how to administer a computer.
</rant>
btw, I’m not MS nut. So don’t even start on me.
Edited 2006-05-19 00:14
What are you people smoking and where can I aquire some?
“800mhz is pretty slow”
“XP on these specs is dog slow”
what…in…the..FSCK?
Vista running on the 2k theme is plenty speedy. And im sure by actual release time it will have been sped up some more. And you can tweak it to run even better after the initial install. I had the latest CTP on my 1ghz p3 tower that has 1gb of pc133 with a nvidia fx5500 256mb and it ran fine.
XP runs 100% useably on a 350p3 with 512mb of ram. once you hit 500mhz, its basically RAM that does most speed changes with the basic OS.
And ALL OSes love ram. The more the better.
People complaining about XP being dog slow on ~800mhz with 512mb of ram are either flat out trolling or haven’t a clue as to how to administer a computer.
</rant>
btw, I’m not MS nut. So don’t even start on me.
Word.
I’ve ditched XP as my day to day system for the most part, and am certainly no MS apologist, but the ranting is getting out of hand.
I’ve had XP running on a P3 450 with 256MB and a 6Gb HDD (!!!) just fine, that was our corporate desktop for a couple of years. It worked fine for browsing, Lotus Notes (which is a pig in itself) and MS Office. Boot time was a little, er, longish (meaning to useable desktop, *not* login window) and switching between apps if there were a lot of open windows could take a couple of seconds. But then again, it was no worse than my gf’s powerbook with that bouncing beachball she frequently saw before upgrading from 512 to 1GB.
My nearly 4 year old laptop with 1.1G and 384MB RAM ran XP very well, including Photoshop when I used to futz around with that, and Suse 10.1 with KDE flies. My 32MB nVidia card still works well enough, and there’s no useability difference between my KDE (composite enabled) and XP desktop. Upgrading to a 7200rpm HDD after the original 5400rpm one died did boost performance a smidge for both OSes back when I dual-booted, which indicates where the real bottlenecks are.
Learning to fine tune your system makes a world of difference, and it isn’t that complicated. Disable services you don’t need and eliminate useless startup programs. It’s that easy.
Crikey, we bought a (ridiculously cheap) new system on a whim during a Boxing Day sale for something to play around on, HP Pavillion with an AMD64 3800, 1GB RAM and a 250GB SATA HDD, pre-installed with Win MCE 2005. Freaking thing took longer to boot and load than the old 450 I used. Took half an hour of scrubbing out the crap that HP preloaded, which can’t be pinned on MS, and tweaking the services, which can be pinned on MS. Boots up much faster and launches apps much faster, but when it comes to actually using apps, can’t really see much of a difference with the older, less powerful systems I have.
I call BS on people claiming that 2GHz systems with 1GB RAM and PCIe video cards is the minimum for XP, unless you’re a) a hardcore gamer or b) a digital media specialist; in either case you should be using the proper tool for the job anyways, not a general purpose machine.
And the specs for Vista, well, yes, I’ll probably call BS to that as well. This is a game MS has played since Win 95. But really, I don’t think it matters. 3 years from now when Vista is finally released, those hardware specs would be considered obsolete anyways.
They’re talking about Vista, a 5 year newer OS than XP which emphasizes use of a second processor and the graphics card for better UI not to mention heavy use of search and meta-data indexing…
Vs an XP with _none_ of those features (the way I presume you set it up, indexing is the first service you usually cut for speedups).
It’s good that Microsoft is looking forward and not crippling Vista for the lowest common denominator.
When Windows 95 came out, the same set of “beefy” requirements were also there.
Even recommended specs (1 GHz, 1 GB RAM, DX9 w/ 128MB) are not something “big”, not even today. I mean, I bought my PC almost two years ago and it is still better than that (I have 2 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM and I’ve purchased DX9 card with 256 MB recently).
And don’t forget that Vista won’t be out until next year. Even then, MANY people/business won’t upgrade until later, as someone already said.
It surprises me how many people here think this is going to need a top of the line brand new box to run based on absurde claims. Most of those claims build on the idea put fourth by their respective authors that Windows XP requires at least 512 MB of ram and that Linux needs a 1.5 Ghz processor and 512 MB of ram.
Those who said that are damn spoilt, as a student with very little spare cash I’m on resource constrained machines. My desktop is pretty good thanks to my parents, but my laptop is only a 1.5 Ghz Celeron with 256 MB ram that’s shared with the integrated video card. If everyone had the same standards I’m seeing here then my laptop would have been obsolete the day I bought it, and yet it handles Windows XP fine and Linux just as well as long as I stay away from heavyweights like SUSE (YaST itself uses more ram than my laptop has).
That’s not to say Vista is going to be as fast as XP on the same hardware, but I doubt it’s going to be that much slower otherwise it would be a serious kick in the sacks for commodity hardware manufacturers. I think people also fail to realize that the speed they percieve is always relative, and largely affected by how fast other computers are; ie: your friend gets a new faster computer, and all of a sudden yours which was great 24 hours ago all of a sudden needs an upgrade or replacement. If cost wasn’t an issue people could have machines maxed out on ram, with as many of the fastest processors as possible and the fastest solid state storage media instead of hard drives, and they could look at what we consider blazingly fast computers now with contempt, ie: “it’s so slow, it’s unusable!”.
It’s all very relative, and to some extent there is a point where a machine gets so slow it’s unusable, I wasn’t arguing against that; however, I do think people are calling reasonable speed what is actually excellent speed for a computer: Fast 2.5Ghz+ dual core processor, 1GB+ of DDR ram, WD Raptor HD, etc… all to get Windows XP to a “reasonable” speed when I can get “reasonable” speed out of Windows XP on a machine that isn’t a third as powerful as that.
Those who said that are damn spoilt, as a student with very little spare cash I’m on resource constrained machines. My desktop is pretty good thanks to my parents, but my laptop is only a 1.5 Ghz Celeron with 256 MB ram that’s shared with the integrated video card.
hmm.. you call that resource constrained machines? I think you are spoilt… you have a desktop and a laptop. And then you call a laptop with a 1.5Ghz cpu and 256Mb ram a resource constrained machine. Oh well. If you’d really be concerned about the cash, you probably wouldn’t have the luxury to buy 2 machines.
I think anything below 500Mhz and with less than 128mbyte ram is really resource constrained. Any machine with 500Mhz and 128mbyte ram is for most computer usage still perfectly fine, as long as you install a good combination of os and software. I know someone who has a Pentium 166Mhz MMX with 160Mb ram. It has Win2k on it and is used daily. Yeah, it is kinda slow, but that person does not have the cash to buy a new computer. He also doesn’t want to spend any money on better secondhand parts, because he’s saving to buy a new one. And for now, it’s good enough to run an old version of ms office, to read/write email, to surf the web. From that point of view, you are damn spoilt with a recent desktop and a laptop.
And I agree, it’s all relative. One of the problems is that when computers become faster, developers seem to hurry to get their programs slower, so that in the end a new version of the same program on faster hardware is at same speed, or even a bit slower, than an older version of that program on older, slower hardware. That’s in fact a bit sad. Sometimes there are good programs, but with every new release, the developers have the urge to add new features (probably only useful for 0.01% of their user base), which in the end make their program a slow and bloated memory hog. And on the other hand, when the developers do not add extra useless features, then people think the program is not maintained anymore.
“hmm.. you call that resource constrained machines? I think you are spoilt… you have a desktop and a laptop. And then you call a laptop with a 1.5Ghz cpu and 256Mb ram a resource constrained machine. Oh well. If you’d really be concerned about the cash, you probably wouldn’t have the luxury to buy 2 machines. “
Yes, I’m spoilt, so are you. Neither of the two of us are living in a third world country where our next meal could be a week or more away.
I got the desktop from my parents because I needed it for school. Before then I was using a Celeron 466 with 128 MB of ram long after everyone else was running 1 and 2 Ghz machines, and it couldn’t run the software I needed for school.
As for the laptop, I worked for three months behind a cash register with a co-worker who wanted to put my head through a wall to afford it. Even after that I could only afford a bottom line model.
You may think I’m spoilt, it’s probably only fair since I think people with 2-3Ghz machines with 1GB of ram and then claim their machines are average are spoilt, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with you. If anything your comment only served to show me how calling those people spoilt was a mistake in my judgement, it’s very possible they’ve worked hard for their machines just like I feel I have.
Alright… I get your point. It’s all relative.
Anyways, I also worked in several shops to get money to buy my first computer and I do respect people who do that. So, I see it was wrong to call you ‘spoilt’. Sorry about that.
I guess I sometimes get a bit annoyed by people whining about their machine being outdated, while for many it’d be a dream machine. But that also depends on what someone needs his computer for, maybe for him it’s really outdated, while for someone else it’s not.
” So, I see it was wrong to call you ‘spoilt’. Sorry about that. “
Don’t apologize, I made the same statement about people who had way better machines than I did and considered theirs to be average. I didn’t realize how unfair my statement was until I read yours, the truth is that I started by setting a bad example.
I got moderated +4 for my original comment, so someone must have been in agreement with me; but, I suspect that was because there was a general agreement that Windows and Linux can run on older hardware than 1.5Ghz processors with 512 MB of ram, and for many people that is the only thing they’ll have to run it on for a while yet.
Having people with faster computers saying that anything slower than theirs is too old is kicking those of us who can’t afford new hardware while we’re already down, and I probably unintentionally did the same to you.
Microsoft always giva a minimum spec for the OS, but you need to triple the spec for memory and hard disk space before you have something you feel comfortable using.
Meh, the old rule of thumb used to be ‘double the requirements for usability’ – it sad that we’re need to triple that number.
I dont mean to troll, but