#1 (permalink)

"Microsoft is currently facing a class-action suit over its designation of allegedly under-powered hardware as being 'Vista Capable.' The discovery process of that lawsuit has now compelled Microsoft to produce some internal emails discussing those issues. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has published extracts of some of those emails, along with a link to a a PDF file containing a more extensive email exchange. The emails reflect a lot of frustration among senior Microsoft personnel about Vista's performance problems and hardware incompatibilities. They also appear to indicate that Microsoft lowered the hardware requirements for 'Vista Capable' in order to include certain lower-end Intel chipsets, apparently as a favor to Intel: 'In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded.' Read the whole PDF; it is informative, interesting, and at times (unintentionally) funny."

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/02/28/1746211.shtml

#2 (permalink)

The P-I reminds me of Spider Man. The globe thing isn't just their logo online; that thing is walking distance from my apartment.

Vista is more demanding on hardware than anything that came before it. My work laptop doesn't do a great job with the graphics stuff. It can handle aero, although not always fluently. The real problem is cycling through applications as 3D flyouts. The machine has an integrated video card and shared system memory ... which means the cpu is responsible for all the memory allocation and cleanup for the gpu. My home laptop is almost identical by the main specs: 2 gb ram, a T7200 instead of T7100 so 2 ghz instead of 1.8, both dual core, and so on. But the home one has a dedicated video card, and handles the fancy graphics stuff without touching the cpu. The hardware requirements are strict, but with a good system, it works out pretty well.

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#3 (permalink)

I found this interesting. If anyone is using vista you realize how much cpu it takes up just the operating system before you run even any programs.

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#4 (permalink)

Yeah, my work just bought a new PC with Vista installed. It has 2 gigs of
RAM that are 45% used before you open anything

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#5 (permalink)

yea, vista has been quite the "venture"

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#6 (permalink)

All the more reason to get a Mac The Operating System looks great and it doesn't overload your graphics card or CPU just to load the GUI.

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#7 (permalink)

Microsoft has handled vista horribly. especially for the 1st new operating system from them in like 7 years.

#8 (permalink)

A GUI needs to either run on the CPU or GPU. I have to admit it's clever of Microsoft to offload the work from the 1st to the 2nd option. It's not really a bright idea when everybody goes with the $3.25 onboard graphic chip siphoning off main system RAM, and up until Vista the vast majority of Windows users (those of us who don't play video games, basically) have had no reason to get anything but the cheapest graphics setup available. I hear people with a decent graphics card do fine with Vista - but I haven't even tried that operating system either way for myself. I don't like the screen shots one bit, tho.

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#9 (permalink)

Leopard isn't that much better when it comes to resource consumption -_-


Regardless of whether or not Microsoft did Intel a favor by lowering Vista's hardware requirements, they had already undershot what a smoothly running Vista system should come with by quite a bit, so I don't really see how lowering the requirements by a little bit more is going to **** over consumers significantly less.

I wish companies like Apple and Microsoft would try and be more like Linux distros such as Gentoo (without the installation pains, of course) and sell a stable, secure OS with a UI that merely allows the average user to not have to dick around in a terminal and not a UI that makes it look like a dirty pane of glass has been glued over my monitor (sorry if that offends those who need to see a blurry version of every window on their screen all at once).