Your Opinion on Vista?

ElbertF · Post by **ElbertF** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:37 am

I believe XP was adopted a lot faster. I remember I had a Win2K laptop and wasn't sure if it could handle XP, but I was so frustrated with the crashes that I decided to upgrade anyway. And what a relief that was..

Last year I upgraded my XP to Ubuntu (again, relief).

Stallyon · Post by **Stallyon** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 1:27 pm

Nicholas the Italian wrote:Also, please consider the "Moore law" is no more valid. As we approach the physical edges, a lot of parameters of modern hardware are increasing less and less rapidly.

I believe computer technology is still in it's infancy. We are already seeing multi-core CPUs, and soon we will be looking at nanotechnology. We have a long way to go yet! We are by no means at the end.

Nicholas the Italian · Tue Apr 15, 2008 3:20 pm

Stallyon wrote:We have a long way to go yet! We are by no means at the end.

Of course, but we (Microsoft) can't keep relying on the fact that power doubles every 18 months.
My notebook (not desktop, notebook) is 3 years old and is starting now to show its age (compared to notebooks sold now). 5 years ago 3-year-old PCs were considered stone age things.

In other words, Microsoft should IMHO built OSs that are able to work smoothly and effectively on today's average computers, instead of designing (only) for tomorrow's top-class hardware. That's all I wanted to say.

god0fgod · Post by **god0fgod** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 4:31 pm

Microsoft don't design OSes for tomorrow's top-class harware, they just need tomorrow's top-class hardware to run nicely.

Tripp · Post by **Tripp** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 4:34 pm

Nicholas the Italian wrote:
Stallyon wrote:We have a long way to go yet! We are by no means at the end.
Of course, but we (Microsoft) can't keep relying on the fact that power doubles every 18 months.
My notebook (not desktop, notebook) is 3 years old and is starting now to show its age (compared to notebooks sold now). 5 years ago 3-year-old PCs were considered stone age things.

In other words, Microsoft should IMHO built OSs that are able to work smoothly and effectively on today's average computers, instead of designing (only) for tomorrow's top-class hardware. That's all I wanted to say.

Thank you for making that point. Adam, this is what I was trying to point out in a earlier post. Not everyone has 4 GB or even 2 GB of RAM. And I beg to differ, you can still find computers with only 512 MB of RAM. Actually, unless you're willing to spend a few hundred bucks, the average person IS NOT going to get something with 2+ GB if RAM. And from my point of view, I still see a lot of computers with 2 or less GB of RAM compared to computers that are higher end models.

I do realize that as time goes on, even the lowest of computers are upgraded or replaced, but I still don't see why Vista has to use so much RAM.

And think about the economics of it. Would you rather spend money upgrading your computer to have Vista or stick with XP on lower specs? I think most would go with the second choice there.

god0fgod · Post by **god0fgod** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 7:05 pm

Drugs wrote:I do realize that as time goes on, even the lowest of computers are upgraded or replaced, but I still don't see why Vista has to use so much RAM.

Because Vista is bloated beyond belief.

AdamR · Post by **AdamR** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 2:10 am

god0fgod wrote:
Drugs wrote:I do realize that as time goes on, even the lowest of computers are upgraded or replaced, but I still don't see why Vista has to use so much RAM.
Because Vista is bloated beyond belief.

I'll state it one more time and one more time only: Disable Superfetch and memory usage will be a virtual non-issue. I will acknowledge the fact that it's more RAM intensive than I'd like it to be, but I hardly consider it bloated. RAM is there for a reason. It's to cache data. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Superfetch bridges this gap by filling it up as full as it can go. If were dealing with a low-RAM system, this will, unfortunately, result in page file and HDD swapping. One thing I would have liked to see Microsoft do is automatically disable Superfetch on machines with less than 2GB of RAM to avoid this problem.

If you really want an in-depth analysis of RAM usage in Vista, read this:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html

- Adam

Stallyon · Post by **Stallyon** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 5:13 am

I have 8 GB of RAM on my machine and it runs perfectly

Tripp · Post by **Tripp** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 11:04 am

Stallyon wrote:I have 8 GB of RAM on my machine and it runs perfectly

Isn't 8 GB a bit ridiculous?

AdamR · Post by **AdamR** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 11:40 am

Drugs wrote:
Stallyon wrote:I have 8 GB of RAM on my machine and it runs perfectly
Isn't 8 GB a bit ridiculous?

If you're a multitasker and have the money for 8GB of RAM, then not really. One thing you learn quickly when having a lot of RAM at your disposal is that there's no need to close applications, which is nice. Even with 4GB, I never close Firefox, my email client, media player, IM client, and a few other applications.

I personally wouldn't spend the extra money to get 8GB (at least at this point. When I replace my motherboard in a year or so I will), but for a power user I don't consider it overkill. It's on the "top of the line" end, but not overkill.

- Adam

SamG · Post by **SamG** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 2:44 pm

Stallyon wrote:
Nicholas the Italian wrote:Also, please consider the "Moore law" is no more valid. As we approach the physical edges, a lot of parameters of modern hardware are increasing less and less rapidly.
I believe computer technology is still in it's infancy. We are already seeing multi-core CPUs, and soon we will be looking at nanotechnology. We have a long way to go yet! We are by no means at the end.

Nevertheless, at the consumer level (which I consider to be in contrast to the enterprise market and not the small and medium business market, which is a consumer market), tweaks and price reductions have become more common than outright examples of Moore's Law. It's true that processors, busses, and memory continue to improve even on consumer machines. But economics and technology interplay (not to mention environmental issues), and we seem to be at a point such as Nick describes, even if it amounts to just a lull in the action. How much hardware and OS does one need to do typical computer-dependent tasks? That's not just a question of technology, but also of economics. I don't claim to know the answer since "typical" is a moving target. But the general trend seems to be as Nick describes, at least for now, and that trend seems to be not clearly understood by all software people.

AdamR · Post by **AdamR** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 2:59 pm

Along with what Sam said, I think one reason we've seen a slowdown is because, for awhile, hardware manufactures were pumping out new technologies and software developers weren't able to keep up. Take, for example, truly multithreaded applications. They're still few and far between. The same is true for 64-bit applications. The technology, in theory, can close to double the performance of an application. Yet only high-end enterprise applications (such as database servers) are actually getting anywhere close to this performance boost.

Software holds the industry back more than anything else. The solution to this is getting everyone on the same page and actually starting with a base layer that allows full scalability with relative ease for the next decade or so. Multicore processors aren't going away in the future and the only thing that's going to happen is more and more cores being added to the die. The solution to this is designing applications that can scale regardless of how many processors there are. Applications that can scale to from 32-bit to 64-bit, and heck, even 128-bit address spaces, etc.

- Adam

ToonArmy · Post by **ToonArmy** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 3:56 pm

I think its a good thing Microsoft are now using system memory more thoroughly but by the sounds of things they didn't apply quite enough polish and as a consequence things are suffering. Personally I don't see myself upgrading past XP on my desktop or 2000 on my laptop for quite a while (mainly because I don't use Windows all that often.)

ElbertF wrote:Last year I upgraded my XP to Ubuntu (again, relief).

Keyword there is "upgraded"

Travis™ · Post by **Travis™** » Thu Apr 17, 2008 9:54 am

..................

god0fgod · Post by **god0fgod** » Thu Apr 17, 2008 3:58 pm

ToonArmy wrote:I think its a good thing Microsoft are now using system memory more thoroughly

Microsoft pretend all the new features are the cause of the extra resource use but it is all bloat. Vista should use no more than half a GB of RAM. I don't understand why the home basic version uses so much little resources ,compared to the others, for the difference in features. Microsoft must have purposely added more bloat to make people think the more expensive versions are better.

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