Although Microsoft is recommending that computers be pretty modern to fully run the next version of Windows, Longhorn will probably also run on a good number of older machines. My Take: Actually, for those who have read the PPTs last year, this info was already there: Longhorn will have three levels of requirements, depending how much hardware acceleration/features you need.
Longhorn will run on older PCs too
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Yikes! 3GHz and 512M of RAM? That’s a bit too much for a word processor and a web surfing machine. The upside is that `MS-Longhorn’ will be able to run on older hardware as well, which is good I guess. Good news for MS users.
Still I can’t but feel that other OSes would be better suited for the older hardware. I’m still getting good use out of my old 700 MHz celery processor and 250M of RAM, with FreeBSD and GNOME 2.10. I’m able to watch DVD’s and other such videos, able to play lots of games and emulators, able to surf the web (sans spyware/adware/popups), lots of free programming tools, lots of networking tools, and various editors suited for office settings or at least to edit your CV.
Well, I’ve got a P4 2.8ghz w/512 MB RAN, so I guess I’m alright. What I really need is a new video card though … wanted to get one a DVI output so I could hook it to my HDTV. But assuming I spend $200+ on one now, would I be sure it would fully supported Longhorn ?
As a user, I wouldn’t be in a big hurry to rush out and buy Longhorn, but my career is in IT, so I like to have the ‘latest and greatest’ … even old Linux distros won’t do
Longhorn will be able to run on a 1 GHz PC, 256 MB RAM and a 16 MB graphics card too, as a minimum requirements with no hardware acceleration (it already does actually). So, quit that stuff about 3 GHz PCs.
Have people forgot something called Palladium? Why does nobody talk about this?
Shouldn’t alla users need to upgrade their motherboards with an palladium chip?
This is questions I got…
Stop trolling and read the article.
If that’s all they can get it to scale down to, that’s pretty bad as well.
I expect to be able to run it on a 16MB Geforce 2 with 128MB of RAM and any Pentium III or equivalent.
Now, for Mac it’s understandable to require a graphics accelerator; because their computers have come with them for ages. But there are people with brand new machines who have no good acceleration (entirely shared system RAM doesn’t play nice with anything needing acceleration). So Microsoft should at a minimum make this thing work without their compositor, or make it so you can get the compositor to go on an i810 intel video…
Frankly, I think the age of needing the latest processor to run the latest OS should be over. Microsoft knows this, Apple knows this, we all know it. It’s just a question of whose willing to admit that expecting people to buy new machines for an OS upgrade doesn’t make sense when it could do all the same things with the old hardware. I doubt many people will leap from their chairs in amazement and cry “thank God I bought a $1kUSD computer!” when they see a window spin around during minimization. They’ll say “but it does the same thing it did before, they just animated it. Did I really need this? Oh cool it finds my files, why did I need a new computer for that?!”
Am I rambling?
I’d like an article with real numbers on just what constitutes an old computer.
Do they mean multiple videos playing at once? Why do you need a 3GHz processer for that? Maybe they mean multiple high resolution video streams?
FWIW, if your HDTV has a DTV input, then you can use on of these (http://www.cablesnmor.com/vga-to-5-bnc-cable.html) to connect your computer to the HDTV. Then head on down to your local electronics supply store and buy 5 BNC->RCA converters for about $0.80 / piece, and then get a copy of Powerstrip (http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,6241,00.asp) to help you set up the resolutions corrrectly. That’s what I did, and it works like a charm 🙂
>I expect to be able to run it on a 16MB Geforce 2 with 128MB of RAM and any Pentium III or equivalent.
I believe that this IS feasible, just not with 128 MB of RAM. No modern OS can run well below 256 MBs. Ever tried to run Gnome/KDE/OSX with 128 MBs of RAM? They will start swapping in no time. Same goes for Longhorn.
GNOME/KDE != Modern OS.
They are Desktop Enviroments, not Operating Systems.
Give us a break, you think we don’t know? Are you supposed to be the smart a$$ around here? It’s the graphical environments that usually require lots of memory, and that’s why I mentioned them along with osx/windows.
So Microsoft should at a minimum make this thing work without their compositor, or make it so you can get the compositor to go on an i810 intel video…
Well if you’ve followed some of the presentations given on Avalon, they have stated that the plan is for it to be able to fall back on Software Rendering if neccesary.
Software rendering… nice. Last time I tried anything with software rendering was with Quake 2, which is fine since the engine supports it, but it doesn’t half hammer the cpu if you’re having to prat about with 3d windows or ogl surfaces etc etc (or whatever it is precisely in Avalon that needs the modern GPU to do whatever it does.)
As for modern OS’s not working with anything less then 256mb’s of ram, well I could do the obligitary mention of BeOS, but to bring that up to date, go and download Morphix light or Morphix light gamer and tell me that you need such requirements, I actually installed it on a Thinkpad with a P1 and 32Mb’s of ram, it did Word processing and web browsing just as well as BeOS did on the same machine, whilst by no means speed daemons, they ran at a comfortable, consistant pace (although Moz under Morphix did load up far quicker).
Is longhorn going to offer anything that isn’t currently available? Probably, but also likely is that the new features won’t be enough to justify large scale adoption, especially amongst gamers. I remember watching an early beta of Longhorn being run on the then very latest Alienware and it running like a dog. Now fair play, the release ready version will almost certainly work faster, but by how much?
Will dependable older units of the P3 era have a lookin? I suspect they will, in the same way that windows 95 ran on a 486 with 8mb’s of ram, it’ll do it, but it will not be a pleasant experience by anyone subjected to it.
In ten years we have gone from 486 to P4, and with the release of Longhorn we will have again reduced the operational usefulness of our computers by slapping such a giant on them.
“In ten years we have gone from 486 to P4, and with the release of Longhorn we will have again reduced the operational usefulness of our computers by slapping such a giant on them.”
I think you need to re-read the article. The point of having higher requirements is that you will get more functionality out of longhorn with a better system.
I am glad that MS is pusing for higher requirements. It will only encourage manufacturers to produce longhorn capable computers with some decent specs. Much than than the common pratice of today where most manufacture’s only give us the bare minimum to run the OS. i.e. integrated video is still a joke and I hope longhorn pushes it forward. I mean, laptops are surpasing desktop’s now in terms of integrated component performance.
Longhorn will also bring with it DirectX 10 or whatever you wan’t to call it, but again it will help push computers into becoming more multimedia ready. Today computer’s are still inadaquate when it comes to handleing high defintion video, and with longhorn and dual core, etc.. I hope they fix this problem.
Please dont think I am senselessly trolling but I have a pc with both XP pro and 2k pro on it.Outside faster bootup I see no real huge performance boon by XP over 2k, give or take the newer features that XP offers like system restore.
My thing is I thought to invest in a new OS meant a significant increase of productivity and not so much about aesthetics.That being my main grouse with XP.
It now seems to me when I look over PR about Longhorn a significant portion of the amazing new productivity feature-set will not be ready but the aesthetic features seem to be the most bragged and talked about and appears to be on stream.
Are we to up our ante hardware-wise just to get a better looking OS, depending on taste , than to have something that is actually more productive to use ?
A genuine concern of mines.
The very next post after yours replied to you. Just because you didn’t like the answer doesn’t mean you were being ignored. Nonetheless, enjoy this link:
http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=10422
Look here:
http://slicer.homeip.net/PICS/qemu-0.7.0_longhorn.png
Exactly this will happen to “older” Boxes…
Even if I got a new state-of-the-art 4.something ghz PC in 2007 with the latest and greatest whiz-bang video card, I’d still probably run Longhorn in Classic mode
That is, unless all the eye candy somehow makes me more productive, which it probably won’t. It never does.
I agree wholeheartedly, I always set the classic theme and start menu on XP – although my current computer with 3Ghz P4 and 2Gb of RAM is capable to run with all that fancy Luna style – but I’m just getting lost in all those bells and whistles.
I acually agree with Darius, I got a pretty whiz jammed up pc but still run in classic mode. I really don’t care to look at the os all day long, I need to get stuff done.
That is why many still use win 95/98/2k
well i think they should think of optimizing their 3d thingamajig for integrated video cards, am using a 64mb intel extreme graphics 2 on my new laptop and its sucks knowing that i cant run longhorn with all the bells and whistles (am partial to loads of eye-candy)
What type of ancient computer would you need that doesn’t comply to ACPI? I’m nearly certain that my old 5 year old (750mhz Athlon) one did it.
How old is old though? I mean, if Longhorn finally comes out in 20 years, will it still run on today’s computers?
Today it’s hard to find computer without ACPI. Practically it was supported on most computers since about 1999… As for the QEMU problem, I sent a hack for ACPI/Local APIC support check in Win64 to the qemu-devel mailing list. Perhaps it can help in this case too.
No offence dude, but you’re a stupid a*se…(okay, scratch out that no offence part).
I am glad that MS is pusing for higher requirements. It will only encourage manufacturers to produce longhorn capable computers with some decent specs
What sort of inebriated statement is this? Unsurprsingly as it may be to your rather small and narrow worldview, a *lot* of people do not need raphics accelarators…like say, hmm, perhaps say about 80% of the office workers out there? (The 20% is for those who play Quake III on their office computers.)
Explain to me again why an office worker who just uses Word, Excel and IE needs a 3d accelarator for cool 3d effects? And don’t even talk about software rendering. And based on MS’s efforts in WinXP, there will be a lot of effects that you can’t turn off (and yes, I do know about Display Properties – still not as clean as Win2K – every version seems to add useless cruft).
Why exactly do you need a high-end PC just to handle your desktop windows, and a few applications? Sure, video editing, photoshop-ing (and YES, that is a noun..lol…check out adobe.com, adobe made a statement on it), games etc…
And sure, you could say, it’s capitalism, nobody’s stopping you. But you and me both know that the software industry has a history of artificially inflating minimum specs (or simply by being very lazy coders) to push more hardware – you don’t actually need all that grunt just to blit a few windows to the screen, and handle screen drawing.
Stuff like say, QNX, BeOS, or lightweight WM’s like XFCE (which incidentally looks pretty, is full featured etc.)…or even say E17 – even in it’s pre-release state, it’s fast on *very* low end hardware, and Raster has always been an excellent coder…his xrender vs evas benchmark, although perhaps a little *cough* slanted is a case in point…
cya,
Victor
Having seen a couple weeks ago a site where a video stream window was moved like if it was a paper (not as if it was a wood) and reading it was done with a i810 chipset… does M$ need a monster to do the same (or even less)? are their coders worst than 2 (two) coders (if I remember correctly) making it by their own?
Sorry, I don’t remember the URL
I believe that Morphix used Xfce and I agree it is superbly posissioned for use in low spec equipment, even usuable under arcane laptops such as the Thinkpad 380XD that I own.
As for the chap that wrote off my earlier comment about longhorn reducing capabilities of systems perfectly usable under say… 2000pro, I will say this: If your OS uses more of your systems resources as a proportion of the total, there will be less available for use by your games etc. So under Longhorn, expect your framerates to go down.
Longhorn will not improve media performance if it is swallowing up greater amounts of your system, indeed I would argue that it would be worse. If you want better performance from the same hardware, use a lighter OS, if using WindowsXP, try using 2kpro. Take BeOS or Morphix or some similarly setup lightwieght distro, and give its multimedia capabilities a whirl, its pretty increadible to see 8 or 9 different videos running symaltaniously, utterly useless, but impressive not the less. For games, always always use the lightest OS you can that supports the game you want to play. This is basic stuff, and you really should have learned this stuff at school
MamiyaOtaru:
Eyh, sry for that..but I tought someone would reply with the subject: RE: Ignoring my post?…
So I did not really care about the other comments…
Software rendering… nice. Last time I tried anything with software rendering was with Quake 2, which is fine since the engine supports it, but it doesn’t half hammer the cpu if you’re having to prat about with 3d windows or ogl surfaces etc etc (or whatever it is precisely in Avalon that needs the modern GPU to do whatever it does.)
I think you may be missing the point. The point is that they plan to allow avalon to run no matter what type of card you have, and it will fallback to software rendering if it has to. What you should be able to assume from this is that they will be able to use Graphics Hardware Acceleration when possible.
What sort of inebriated statement is this? Unsurprsingly as it may be to your rather small and narrow worldview, a *lot* of people do not need raphics accelarators…like say, hmm, perhaps say about 80% of the office workers out there? (The 20% is for those who play Quake III on their office computers.)
What don’t you get? MS pushing for this will mean CHEAPER hardware in the market, which is GOOD for EVERYONE.
3 GHZ and 512 megs of RAM MINUMUM!!! my god, Xp requires 64 megs minimum and it starts swapping at anything below 256, does that mean we need FOUR TIMES that amount to avoid swap effect?
as others have said most of the bloat in longhorn and xp are unwarranted the first thing I do with any OS or DE (gnome/kde, etc) is turn off a majority of the graphical tartiness. It speeds up the system for instance you minimize a program and instead of it doing a fancy animation as it’s going down, it just disapears from sight instantly.
another useless longhorn feature is the 3D effects on windows… does it make you more productive? no, and you can bet again if businesses pick this up they’ll turn it off as it uses precious ram and CPU power.
(as you can probably tell I’m not going to be picking up longhorn)
I’m in the business to reuse old computers and there is NO WAY IN HELL, we put anything about 2000 on any of the computers we have because it is too bloated. If we can get customers into linux we use FVWM or some other lightweight window manager because KDE and GNOME are both slugs on anything below a 500 with 256 megs of ram.
I really don’t care if my PC can run all the graphical glitz that MS will add to their new OS. I still run Windows 2000 on my home PC and the first thing I did to the XP installation at work was turn off all that junk.
Does anyone really think that MS are going to add visual effects that are actually useful? I’d be willing to bet that it’ll be 99% eye candy, nothing that actually makes me more productive.
As long as all the flashy effects can be turned off I think I’ll be happy enough with Longhorn.
Now I don’t want to bash apple, but instead the view towards Longhorn….
It’s funny how everybody seem’s to support Apple and their use of OpenGL and 3D acceleration when it comes to their desktop, and all their pretty eye candy… yet when I mention that Longhorn is trying to achieve the same thing, everybody here cries foul. Visual effects can be useful. What about thumbnailing? I think that is a useful effect. Eventually we will have live video thumbnailing instead of just the first frame, assuming people upgrade their machines somewhat. Transparecy is also very useful.
Many here are just arguing using the fact that there are a lot of poorly built, underpowered machines out there. Your arguments are centered around the fact that most users will only need to do word processing… well, maybe today that is true, but you are failing to see the future. What about voice recogniziton, better security, faster searching, less crash prone… all these things are very important, although you may not see it yet.
Having a 3d accelerated desktop should bring better performance and smoother operation… longhorn will be offloading the desktop drawing to the GPU more than XP does now. It should help in all cases, I really can’t see it as a negative.
Anyways, like the article said, longhorn will be scalable to many machines, but of course you will be getting less from it on a underpowered machine. Users can get more work done if they have to wait less for the machine, hence faster machines with better requirements is a plus.
@Victor – I am sorry you still live in the day’s of low system memory and no/poor GPU support… but my point was that Longhorn will help push manufacturer’s to have better system requirements (i.e. at least DirectX 9 compatible). As one poster said, it should bring DX9 level graphics standard and cheep. Not only that, but the computer won’t get a longhorn seal if it is of poor quality. It’s kind of like Intel’s Centrino branding program.. I believe that is a good example of requirement and quality testing that provides a good computer.
Yeah, some millionare guys like you may buy state-of-the-art CPUs and VPUs and such…but do not forget there are whole load of people who are content with their current machine.
And don’t tell that longhorn will help hardware makers produce cheaper and nicer hardware…we already have games and multimedia apps. No need of OS’s trying to push limit…id software and epic mega games will do that just fine. No need of bloated OS’s which will actually slow people down by showing fancy nancy 2 second animations in every action that can take only instant to do so.
Well put, Hec.
No need of OS’s trying to push limit
Are you serious? HAHAAHAH.
Yeah, some millionare guys like you may buy state-of-the-art CPUs and VPUs and such…but do not forget there are whole load of people who are content with their current machine.
I’m not close to a millionaire, but my machine is pretty much on par fot the RECOMMENDED machine specs for AERO GLASS TIER (the highest one).
My previous desktop is on par for minimum longhorn requirements (using the lowerst graphics tier, classic).
Now, if you don’t meet minimum requirements, then fine, don’t use it. This is called evolution, learn to accept it. They’re trying to set a higher standard in hardware and software, you can’t blame them for that. And yes, they ARE trying to make money. Oh no!
You can still use Windows 2000, XP, 2003, or even 9x if you want. Or use linux! If you’re purchasing a new machine online, there is sites they will prebuild them for you and let you buy it WITHOUT an OS.
So, why exactly are you complaining?
Will dependable older units of the P3 era have a lookin? I suspect they will, in the same way that windows 95 ran on a 486 with 8mb’s of ram, it’ll do it, but it will not be a pleasant experience by anyone subjected to it.
Are you serious? I remember Bill specifically marketing Win95 as onlying “needing a 386 with 4mb of ram, but of course we recommend a 486 and 8mb”.
Please. It was hellish on my 586 with 20mb of ram, after several upgrades. Win95 didn’t run well until I had a 300mhz cpu with 256 mb of ram! I can remember waiting for ages to get Win2K to boot up on a P3/733 with 64mb of ram… gawd….
MS’s “minimum requirements” are a complete lie. Take anything MS puts out as MIN and triple it. CPU, RAM, etc. Then the OS will run good.
Of course, by then, you’ll need two generations LATER of the same OS.