"'What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away'. Such has been the conventional wisdom surrounding the Windows/Intel duopoly since the early days of Windows 95. In practical terms, it means that performance advancements on the hardware side are quickly consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the Windows/Office code base. Case in point: Microsoft Office 2007 which, when deployed on Windows Vista, consumes over 12x as much memory and nearly 3x as much processing power as the version that graced PCs just 7 short years ago (Office 2000). But despite years of real-world experience with both sides of the duopoly, few organizations have taken the time to directly quantify what my colleagues and I at Intel used to call 'The Great Moore's Law Compensator'. In fact, the hard numbers below represent what is perhaps the first ever attempt to accurately measure the evolution of the Windows/Office platform in terms of real-world hardware system requirements and resource consumption."
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Member since:2006-06-21
Member since:2006-06-19
Yeah, underpowered machines will work fine with Windows for a bit. They used to ship XP on machines with 128mb to begin with, and after a fresh install they would run fine. But leave it a couple of months for "Windows Rot" to set in and you will see a different story.....
Member since:2007-10-09
I had a Pentium 166 with 192MB of RAM - ran Windows 2000 and Office 97 just fine.
For non-CPU bound tasks, it was faster and more responsive than my current Core 2 Duo Vista desktop with 4GB of RAM.
If even the lofty Core 2 Duo w/ 4 GB of RAM isn't good enough, the entire software industry should hang its head in shame. It is just not reasonable to need that much. (Heck, I still think 1 GB is too much for most anything.)
Yes, apps (even the OS itself) can always be greatly optimized, but it's a lost art. It's just not the #1 priority to the developers (except uber geeks).
Member since:2006-03-18
"If even the lofty Core 2 Duo w/ 4 GB of RAM isn't good enough, the entire software industry should hang its head in shame. It is just not reasonable to need that much. (Heck, I still think 1 GB is too much for most anything.) "
As another poster pointed out - that power is put to good use, just not all the time. For example, that P166 couldn't do video encoding/decoding for crap. It could barely handle MP3s, and forget about 3D games. Stitching together the 100MB panoramic images I am fond of creating would have taken weeks, instead of dozens of minutes. Editing RAW images from my camera would have been painfully slow, if not impossible. And forget about anything like Adobe Lightroom.
My point was that for office apps, and things that aren't CPU intensive, all that power appears to be going to waste. There are applications today that do take advantage of all this power - but depending on your needs, you might use them very infrequently, or not at all.
Sometimes I think it would be nice to make a PC with modern hardware, but install an old version of Linux or windows on it, with the applications of the era - think Windows 3.11, or possibly Windows NT 3.51. You could run the thing on 4GB of flash for persistent storage, and CPU cache would probably be all the memory you'd need - but what the hell, put 256MB of DDR in there just for kicks.
Such a computer would be blazingly fast for most office and productivity apps and would have more memory than you could ever think of using.
Member since:
2006-03-18
I had a Pentium 166 with 192MB of RAM - ran Windows 2000 and Office 97 just fine.
For non-CPU bound tasks, it was faster and more responsive than my current Core 2 Duo Vista desktop with 4GB of RAM.
I know all that RAM and CPU is being used for something, but whatever that "something" is, it's utility is lost on me when I am editing a Word document.