Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 18th Feb 2009 23:28 UTC

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Member since:
2007-02-17
A minor tweak in the polling routine might have a very significant impact. For example, if the polling routine first up checked if there was ANY HD-capable drvier installed, and exited straight away if not, rather than checking for the physical presence of any of many possible types of HD-capable hardware ... perhaps in the case of low-end machines such a change might hav had a significant impact?
I don't know ... I'm just speculating. The point is though that I can see a possibility that such an optimisation, or some close equivalent, might have indeed been possible. One can't after all put HD video through the machine if one hasn't installed any HD-capable drivers.
Furthermore, it wasn't until after Vista came out, and netbooks became popular, that there was any incentive to try to make Vista work on lower-spec devices. The big-corporation idea for some while up to the release of Vista, after all, seemed to be to persue an endless upgrade cycle ... consuming ever more CPU, RAM, disk and Watts of power on every spiral.
Edited 2009-02-19 01:30 UTC