"Bill Laing, a General Manager in the Microsoft Windows Server Division, has been quoted as saying that Windows Server 2008 will be the last 32-bit operating system. Bill is a server guy and indeed Windows Server 2008 is the last 32-bit server operating system - all future operating systems for server hardware from Microsoft beyond Windows Server 2008 will be 64-bit. A few folks took Bill's comments on Windows Server and applied them to Windows Client deriving that Windows Vista would be the last 32-bit operating system. That is an incorrect extension. While Windows Vista includes both 32-bit and 64-bit and there is a growing community of drivers for 64-bit Windows Vista we have not decided when Windows Client will follow Windows Server and become 64-bit only."
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Member since:2006-01-10
That's pretty much bull-crap. Sure, maybe the minimum specs are less for XP, but that's because they lie. Their idea of minimum specs is what is required to actually INSTALL XP, not to run it decently.
Here's a perfect real-life example. A friend of mine had an eMachine (don't ask, her mother bought it as a gift. Though I think even if I was given an eMachine I'd try to sell it or give it away myself). Well, it did the inevitable thing and the on-board video died. Well, it didn't have an AGP slot, and PCI video cards aren't very common anymore (well now even AGP card are getting pretty rare.) So I ended up ordering her a new motherboard along with a video card. Well, unfortunately I wasn't exactly aware of any pentium 4 motherboards that actually supported PC133 Ram!! The new one I bought did. Fortunately I happened to have a 128mb stick laying around. I popped that in, had to re-install XP on her computer, and it ran slower than snot. First XP itself took about 10 minutes to get to a semi-usable desktop. And of course being a computer illiterate person, she needed an anti-virus, so I installed avast home edition.... well, long story short, it'd take another 10 minutes to load up OO.o and pretty much anything else. Even Solitaire would take upwards of 2 minutes to start!
So I also installed Ubuntu on her PC. Since she didn't use the built in modem (she has DSL) and was using OpenOffice for her school work, it was ideal. It also loaded much faster, though admittedly not exactly speedy. But it was far more usable than XP was. Mind you this was a 2.6ghz Celeron with 128mb of PC133 Memory. XP in my experience requires a MINIMUM of 256mb of ram. I know, I ran it on a Pentium2 @ 266mhz with 256mb of ram and it was usable (though I wouldn't multi-task on it all that much.
XP's memory management (along with Vista's) is simply crap. I'm sorry, but when I have 3gb of Ram, I want applications to actually USE IT, instead of leaving almost 2gb of it free, and using about 1.5gb of page file. I know you can stop it from using the page file all together, or shrink it, but come on, this is supposed to be the easy operating system. Most users aren't going to know how to change that. Most users will at least know that 3gb of ram is a lot, though they may not know why anyone would need / want it.
Linux on the other hand is far better. Unless I'm loading up large videos that need to be decompressed, then it never hits the swap. In fact I don't think I've seen it hit my swap since I've upgraded past 1gb.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Funny how XP is less demanding than Ubuntu. Vista without Aero shouldn't need much more than XP.