Microsoft's Windows Vista will run on just about any PC available today, but it will only show its true colors on about half of them, according to a new report from Gartner. While Microsoft is currently suggesting a minimum of 512MB, the new OS will require at least 1GB of dual-channel memory to provide its full capabilities, Gartner said in the report. However, all recent discrete solutions from major graphics makers such as ATI and Nvidia, for both desktops and notebooks, are expected to be able to support Aero, Gartner said in the report. My take: After toying with Vista myself, it becomes quite clear what you need to run Aero glass: 512 MB of fast RAM, and a DirectX9 compatible videocard with 128MB RAM. I also found that even non-DirectX9 videocards can run Aero Glass comfortably.
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Member since:2005-07-09
Absolutely. I see what you ar esaying. I threw tthat OS X comparison in there because I kind of wanted to give people a sort of reference. The disk was thrashing constatnly. The commit charge showed 700 mb of usage before and then garduallyy upon a half hour of usage it even hit 800 mb because I turned on and off a bunch of apps.
But as soon as I turned off a few services and rebooted the memory usage was a lot better at 450 mb and the disk thrashed a lot less. This was rather amazing to me because I have a gig of memory and it seemed that if it used 450 mb of commit charge, it shouldnt be touching the disk at all. I used my tweaked XP set up as a reference and recalled at boot I use a 140 mb of commit charge with 20 processes running including NOD32.Vista used 700 mb with 45 processes running.
Also I have used intense apps on my XP setup when I am coding and I have Netbeans 5.5 dev build running with an application server and azureus running and that uses up 770 mb of memory approximately on my XP setup yet my computer does not thrash at all! But this is my 7200 rpm hard drive. If I had a similar hard drive and I put Vist on it things could have been a bit better because of the difference in speeds of the hard drives.
Because of all this I decided to extrapolate that Vista is very raw right now with no sort of optimization taking place. I even had to run the diskperf command as I did when I tweaked XP and gave it the -N switch so it would not record statisitics about the hard drive while any apps were running thus slowing the OS down. I hope this helps.
Member since:
2005-07-07
Thanks for your interesting post.
"I have an Inspiron XPS notebook so it has 3.4 ghz P4 HT processor with a measly 1 gig DDR 400 ram and a 60 gig 7200 rpm hard drive with the aforementioned video card. My computer aint no slouch but running Vista, albeit I ran it on my spare 60 gig 5400 rpm hard drive, was a bit too slow for my tastes. It was probably as slow as OS X 10.0 when it first came out...maybe a bit slower but that gives me great hope"
I'm not sure if I share your hope. I mean, at the time of the OS 10.0 release the fastes Mac had, what, an 800MHz G4? (I'm just guessing here). Your laptop on the other hand looks like it tears through anyhing, yet it runs Vista slowly.
Let's just hope it's caused by disk swapping and that MS keeps Vista's memory usage in check for the final release.