This Just In: MS Vista Requirements a killer!

[danielneri]

wow you guys wont believe what microsoft said about vistas specs,

Nigel Page is a strategist with Microsoft Australia. He told APC today that Vista would work best on a video card with more than 256MB RAM, 2GB of DDR3 memory and a S-ATA 2 hard drive.

amazing...


http://www.apcstart.com/teched/pivot/entry.php?id=6

[sec]

Im not sure about the 2GB of memory... Ive got Vista installed as a secondar OS and when I run that it seems to be fine... Ive only got just under 400mb of memory...

But yes I can understand it needing a 256MB graphics card - it is very graphics intense...

[danielneri]

im not anywhere close to those requirements

[Nuvo]

Neither am I.
I only have 256MB of DDR RAM and a 64MB GPU.
I find it somewhat funny that you'd need insanely high specs to get vista to run well as I believe apple's osx has had many of the visual capabilities for some time and their systems only come with 512MB of RAM and a 128MB graphics card.
Then again, since osx is built on unix, it probably doesn't eat a large amount of system resources to get things done, unlike windows.
This is what I have always liked about *nix OS's like linux as it means you don't need an ew PC every time a new version of the OS comes around.

It should be noted however, that these specs are mainly for the 64Bit versions and the 32Bit versions shouldn't need the higher amounts of RAM.
If you run it with AERO disabled, it won't actually use so much GPU power, which is better for laptops and such which don't tend to be so high spec.
The specifications aren't the final, solid specifications yet either since they haven't completed Vista and rolled it out as an actual commercial product as of yet (sure, you can get a beta version, but it's not 100% done).
It's my belief from my time spent on the net talking to other computer users, that a large amount of computer owners do not upgrade their PC's overly often.
Ugrading is more common amongst the gamers, developers and modders than it is in the home market which is mainly made up of people running browsers, email clients and word processors more than anything else.
People simply won't want to have to go out and buy new stuff just to run a new version of an OS that costs a fortune and which they will probably end up having to protect with third party applications such as firewalls and virus scanners like they have in the past.
As one of the comments posted on that site stated, Asia, despite being home to countries such as Japan and South Korea which are very technologically advanced (I'd call S.Korea having robot building schools and 100MB home broadband advanced, wouldn't you?) has a fair number of countries in it which simply will not be able to run Vista.
In those counties where hardware we call outdated is still selling for quite high prices, Vista is likely to drop like a stone.

The fact is that hardware shouldn't need to be completely overhauled just to get a computer to run, you should only really need to upgrade if you're planning on doing something that'll task your system such as high end gaming or 3D animation.
I don't want to end up with a beefy PC that I'll only use for browsing the internet and editing plain text files and I simply refuse to even bother with Vista based on this, and the fact that with all the DRM trash Microsoft is planning to put in, vista could very well require an internet connection to run some stuff, and I really do not want microsoft to dictate to me what I can or cannot run (oh, he's running firefox... PREPARE THE NUKES!!... Preferably the linux based ones which won't just go straight up, come down and hit us...).

SAersiously, I see myself on either a pure linux machine or a mac (with the possiblity of running linux as well) by the time Vista gets it's bloated rear end out of beta.

[CannonBallGuy]

Neither am I.
I find it somewhat funny that you'd need insanely high specs to get vista to run well as I believe apple's osx has had many of the visual capabilities for some time and their systems only come with 512MB of RAM and a 128MB graphics card.
Then again, since osx is built on unix, it probably doesn't eat a large amount of system resources to get things done, unlike windows.
This is what I have always liked about *nix OS's like linux as it means you don't need an ew PC every time a new version of the OS comes around.
[SNIP]
SAersiously, I see myself on either a pure linux machine or a mac (with the possiblity of running linux as well) by the time Vista gets it's bloated rear end out of beta.

Yes, you're right.
OSX will still be infinitely better than Vista on release and has far lesser requirements.

And good for you on breaking away from the crowd of ignorants.

[Nuvo]

Actually, the "breaking away" started a few years ago when I first installed Mandrake.
Mandrake 8.2 was beutiful, but had no compatibility with my sound setup, so I upgraded as soon as I could get hold of a copy of 9.1 (codename: Bamboo), which then had problems with my monitor (either that, or it was the other way around, I have slept since using mandrake).
I have tried SuSE, Knoppix, Ununtu (which I currently have installed) and I even got a liceCD for linspire, but being as lame as it is, it didn't even boot on my system (even with ACPI turned off, which is usually what prevent linux booting for me).
Now all I want is a system that's stable, usable and supports the hardware I use, which Linux hasn't managed to do without some work, and which windows will not do as it's bloated and unstable (I'll give you a week before they find the first hole in vista which can be exploited).

AERO is another attempt by microsoft to butt in on a portion of the Apple market in my view (and in the eyes of many other people).
Apple has had a vector based drawing system for ages now and Microsoft is only just pushing theirs out after using a bitmap based system.
This kind of system is like comparing an image made with paint to an image made with fireworks in that an image made in paint can only really be edited in terms of colour pixel with the colour grey at screen position X, Y and then in order to move that about, you have to set the pixel back to it's origional state and create a new one.
With a vector, you can create it and then modify it without restriction as it's not actually painted down like a bitmap / raster image, it's drawn using math.
Vector based desktop environments should be the norm for high end home OS's, but Microsoft has dragged it's feet with other things and simply hasn't got a reliable and efficient way of implementing them with it's current OS code IMHO.
Lets face it, the XP interface upgrade wasn't liked and I doubt it was a big challenge to get done since it's mainly a case of replacing dynamically drawn gry boxes with stored and then modified ugly blue and green boxes (thank god for those who hacked it to support extra skins, I have been using my apple skin since I got my last PC).

Python, did the beta version even have a usable version of AERO?
I'm pretty sure they didn't include it :/

[tony]

if that is correct then i wont be using it and will more than likely change to linux ive been contemplating doing it for a while but never had a need to seen as i have everything ineed, but im not gonna buy a very expensive computer just for an operating system