The Hundred Gunner

lol, I don't know what to say. I have no idea why you're offended. Redmond is where microsoft HQ is situated. "Boys" was meant to describe the men working under m$.

I don't feel like wasting time on this; I'll just have you know that you're overreacting and leave it at that.

PS: if they hold multiple college degrees in CS and math, why did they put out a product that runs less efficiently than something the open source community produced?

I'm talking about computers like my dad's: Athlon 64 3800+ @ 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM, 7200RPM SATA HDD.

4 min from boot to get a responsive desktop.
2 min to load a browser.
2 min to load a music player.
5-10 in to shut down.

This is vista BASIC, by the way. That means no aero and none of the fancy vista features. It worked in this manner just the same from the day we bought it until 6 months later when we finally decided to ditch vista for XP.

My sig rig, on the other hand, runs vista (ultimate, by the way) quite well. My sig rig DOES have the resources. The other computer does not. A system as described above is not good enough for vista, whereas it is good enough for Linux + C-F. If your vista is running great on a 512MB system, I guess either you're lucky or I'm unlucky.

But you see, this is the problem. Don't you want good software so that you don't have to spend anything extra on hardware?

I still think the software should be optimized to run efficiently as possible before it requires better hardware.

__________________
"But you would be amazed by how many people think that the only reason to have a computer is to play games, and that playing games is all that anyone with a computer does." - dangerousHobo

"Linux is everywhere, it is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. " - mbp

"I have used a mac before. And they still don't have right click I mean come on." - aakar

Blah, blah, can't hear you

Nick7269

I have run XP for many years and I now run Vista.

I am running 4gigs of memory. Seems to be plenty to run Vista with elbow room.

Vista was a little bumpy at first and a total blast! I have really enjoyed building this last pc and upgrading to Vista.


So, I just have not been able to understand why everybody hates on Vista so much? It has all kinds of spiffy new functions that XP will never have. At the same time, I do not expect corporate company's to upgrade for the hell of it, but I do expect enthusiasts to upgrade.

As far as Windows 7... who knows it can flop much worse than Vista has. I expect this after watching peoples reaction to Vista.

Just me 2 cents...

Choggs396

I really think the biggest key to running Vista is 1GB of RAM or more. If you don't have memory to run it, it's going to bog you down - bad. Sure, CPU speed and GFX ability count. But when you get to the point where your RAM is full and you're using the page file/virtual memory (HDD) to actively handle an overflow of programs (including the OS itself).... that's where you're going to take the biggest hit, IMO. At that point, it doesn't matter a whole lot how fast the rest of the components are.

I believe that is the biggest reason why Vista doesn't run so well on "older" systems. The major problem is lack of memory of the system, AND/OR Vista's need for excessive amounts of RAM to run smoothly (however you'd like to put it). Generally, the older the system, the less RAM it has.

Put it this way. To run Vista, I'd rather have this system:

Athlon XP 2500+ / 5400RPM IDE HDD / 1GB RAM

than this one:

Athlon 64 X2 3800+ / 7200RPM SATA HDD / 512MB RAM

Now obviously, you could just add RAM to the second system and instantly make it better. It's simple enough for 99% of the people on this forum. The problem is that most people (typical users) aren't going to know how. (And also, that some people think you shouldn't have to.)

In my experience; I've run Vista (Home Basic, without Aero) on a system with 512MB of RAM. It was a P4 Prescott with an integrated Intel 945 GFX chipset. It ran 'reasonably' well (after I had cleaned it up and removed spyware/viruses, lol). It certainly wasn't "snappy", but it was responsive enough to be usable. I can't remember the exact boot time; if I recall correctly, it was a little longer than expected but not terrible. Probably less than 2 minutes to (responsive) desktop.

But in all honesty, it wasn't running as fast as I believe it should on an OS with "recommended system requirements" of 512MB of RAM and a 1GHz CPU.

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NrGx

Stupid and ignorant.

He's right in what he says. It's unfair to call them "The Redmond Boys" in a derogatory fashion. The actual phrase may not sound harsh, the way in which it is used is.

That's like calling the employees and AMD nongs because they couldn't come through with their Phenoms.

Microsoft is the leader in software in this decade. Full stop. They have obviously done something right and just because they release one piece that didn't live up to expectation doesn't undermine the fact that they are brilliant at what they do. Maybe it is good that open source producers are improving on MS so that they have a point from which they can improve. It's called feedback. Intel got it when they released the Pentium Ds against the Athlons. This is just the same thing.

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"You may clip our wings, but never will we forget how it was to fly..."

The Hundred Gunner

lol I still don't understand what you're talking about. apple's boys would be the "boys in cupertino." AMD's boys would be the "boys in sunnyvale." I am one of the "boys in san franpsycho."

It's not derogatory. You're making it into something it's not. Stop freaking out; I refuse to discuss this further.

Yeah, business. I forgot the last time popular = best. Look back at high school. Were the popular kids always the best?

Now, who wants to address the question? I'm just about done with this thread if you all want to continue to dodge this:

Why can't the boys in redmond, a company backed by billions of dollars, make software as efficient as the Open Source community can?

__________________
"But you would be amazed by how many people think that the only reason to have a computer is to play games, and that playing games is all that anyone with a computer does." - dangerousHobo

"Linux is everywhere, it is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. " - mbp

"I have used a mac before. And they still don't have right click I mean come on." - aakar

Blah, blah, can't hear you

dankoni

How many employees does M$ have? How many members does the open source community have? That is your answer. Plus, M$ is about making $$$. Does an 8800GT with 1 or 2 GB of memory make sense? No. Does it make money? Apparently.

And I agree with you on the whole "boys" comment drama. It's a figure of speech. It's not derogatory in any way that I see.

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fallingheights

Why can't my mother easily install a program on Linux? For that matter, how is possible that I can run programs made for Windows 2000 on my Vista box?

Microsoft is huge. It's both a good thing and a bad thing, mostly for them. On one hand they have to try and make every product release appealing to the enthusiast and exciting enough to market. On the other hand however they have to make sure that their OS is backwards compatible, able to run on millions of different hardware configurations (and don't get on me about driver support. 9/10 pieces of hardware you run into, if not more, will run on Vista flawlessly). In addition, every somewhat-modern PC can run Vista, and pretty well.

As Choggs396 stated, RAM is a huge issue when it comes to Vista. 1GB is the minimum and if you don't have it, you shouldn't be running Vista or judging Vista on that system. 512MB was considered mainstream for XP, this is Vista. Besides, RAM is to inexpensive these days, even running XP it would be beneficial for people to upgrade to 1GB memory.

The Hundred Gunner

Microsoft has many employees, most of which (if not, all) hold high degrees in the fields of computers and electronics. I would imagine that they could put something together better than the open source community in which many of the people donate their spare time to complete projects.

The microsoft corporation is supposed to be dedicated to bringing us revolutionary software. They are a business, and this is their goal. I would expect something like aero and the vista OS itself to be able to run on hardware that a Linux box can run on.

I just don't really believe that there is an excuse for it this time. Like the title says (since I think most of us have lost sight of it), this is about the promise that windows 7 will have lower requirements. Hopefully we get what we want to see, because we all would like to see an OS that performs better than vista, don't we?

Maybe because she's not smart enough to go to add/remove programs and click on a check box?

How is it possible? Wine.

Better solution? Go to add/remove programs and search for a native Linux program.

If you're talking about games, certainly stick with windows.

Btw, I'm not trying to promote Linux over windows here; I'm simply answering your questions

I agree. However, don't you think that if Linux and OSX can run on fairly to quite old systems, the multi-hundred dollar windows vista should have been able to do the same?

Vista runs great on fairly new systems, but the fact that it won't run on older systems proves that the OS should have been optimized better. The fact that they DIDN'T, well I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

I agree. You shouldn't run vista if you don't have 1GB. I also agree that RAM is cheap. But why excuse poorly coded software just because you can get the excessive hardware it requires? We're enthusiasts here, all about optimization, right? I would hope that this love for optimization doesn't only apply to hardware. That's all I'm trying to say.

__________________
"But you would be amazed by how many people think that the only reason to have a computer is to play games, and that playing games is all that anyone with a computer does." - dangerousHobo

"Linux is everywhere, it is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. " - mbp

"I have used a mac before. And they still don't have right click I mean come on." - aakar

Blah, blah, can't hear you

prosser13

Why do we want backwards compatiblity anyway?

It just limits the number of new features the Operating System can have because everything has to be effectively "toned down" in order to allow it to run on old hardware...

I want innovation, not tacky new features which are only half developed so they can run on an 8 year old P3...

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lordikon

My first thought would be because the open-source community doesn't have to support tens of thousands of different hardware configurations and drivers. Open-source projects have no liability, if the software gets hacked, meh, nobody gets in trouble. Just my 2 cents.

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3DMark06: 17933, Vista -- Super-pi 1M: 12.471s -- Crysis GPU Bench Vista, 1280x1024 No AA: Avg FPS, 57.45