Hardware Analysis - Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

Re: Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

Osmer Batcheller Batcheller — 2008-06-22T04:13:38-05:00

Sorry I simply cannot let some of this go by especially concerning games bringing Vista to its knees. That is absurd. My son plays on a laptop with an AMD TL-60, 2gb RAM, and a discrete Clasee II graphics card (GeForce Go 7600 GT) and he has Valve and regularly plays every half life episode released at good settings, and he is half way through Crysis with no problems; while not at the highest settings it has not "brought the machine to its knees," He runs Vista Ultimate with the sidebar open and areo running. However, I have taught him how to run the Ultimite Trouble Shooter and other programs to discover and stop the true culprits of slow machines. Of couse running Vista on a dual core with integrated graphics would be a major mistake. However, any Core 2 Duo with discrete graphics of Class III or above will have no problem and not even notice a change. Look the the amouunt of memory each process uses and the sidebar with the items takes a whole 40mb, bid deal. As for a desktop any new core 2 duo with a graphics card costing at least $150 will fly, including dual cores from AMD, at least most. I have a desktop based on a QX6850, a X38 chipset, an Asus Radeon HD 3870 X2 1gb, and chilled (thermoelectrically) water cooling, and even with Vista Ultimate bogging me down I seem to get by at the highest setting of any game and have a 3dMark06 score of over 17,000 (it varies per overclock and water temp setting). Before this I had a X8000, with a 8800GTX, and before that an AMD FX-60 withteh 7950 GTX, and I preferred Windows Ultimate to XP Pro in every one of them, all home built. Finally, I even sent my youngest son's core duo laptop, a Sony with a T2330 (made for Sony) into Notebookmechanix to be upgraded as he wanted Vista like his older brother. I had a T2600 upgrade, overclocked memory and a few other tweaks. While he now can run Vista wihout complaints, I highly doubt his machine coudl hand Crysis or Half Life 2 etc. One the other hand he is into the Sim's which is plays and renders quite nicely and runs Office 2007 very quickly. Bottom line Vista is fine if you have decent hardware. Just as every one of Window's OS's have required since I recall the first one coming out, each needs ffast and more complex hardware to run, which is logical if you think about it. The first version did nto contain graphics, would'nt you guess that hardware changed radically over the years to accomdate Windows. Signed, Perplexed

Re: Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

Super XP — 2006-09-26T00:11:43-05:00

Well, for me, as long as Vista runs like XP, I will stick with it.

I think there will be a lot more support with Vista then Linux IMO.

Re: Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

Carter Sudeith — 2006-09-25T17:35:37-05:00

As soon as Vista is released, and XP is phased out rapidly (which I expect to happen, as Microsoft is ITCHING to get into the hardware field), I'm going 100% Linux. I'm sick of Microsoft's crap.

And if I decide Linux doesn't work out for me, I might have to resort to BSD

Re: Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

R James — 2006-07-24T17:47:19-05:00

It's a choice to upgrade it always is. I never upgraded to Windows XP until Service pack 1 came out. Since I've had it, it's proven to be a superb OS that has been reliable and robust.

Vista seems to need a lot of memory from what I've read, however I'll be waiting until I see software that requires it. I know games won't be a problem because many allow you to switch between Direct X9 and DirectX8 modes now. So there should be an option to switch between 10 & 9.

Windows XP will still be supported for years to come. Look at it this way Windows 98 support was just ended recently and that OS has been out for years!

Re: Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

Mike L — 2006-05-05T02:32:28-05:00

Yes, because ATI just outnumbers them all.

Re: Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

Super XP — 2006-05-04T11:03:20-05:00

I've heard of ATI cards running better in Windows Vista, but not the CPU's.

Re: Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

Dangerous Dave — 2006-05-04T09:25:55-05:00

Got a quick question this may not have anything to do with anything but I have noticed a trend of Intel processors running better then AMD is it posible that Microsoft has optimized it for Intel and not for AMD yet. I was wondering if this may be the reason for the massive differences in performance in the Vista betas.

Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

dalecosp — 2006-05-04T04:27:15-05:00

It would be interesting to know more about the kernel, in particular whether debug symbols are present as Greg C conjectures above. Of course, unless you sign an NDA, you might not get to find out, eh? If removing the debugging symbols and "optimizing" (and there have been a couple of fairly weird ideas espoused about this) can give 50% better performance, does the system start to sound workable?

As to the age of the kernel, it really depends on whether or not they have done any updating. The *BSD kernels, for example, have some code in them that was probably written in the seventies. Not much, anymore; it's been and is being converted, sometimes at a rapid pace. I don't know how much Apple modified the Mach Kernel for OSX, but I imagine that parts of it, perhaps substantial parts, date from the final release at CMU, which was about the same time that David Cutler's team finished NT, give or take a year.

Surprisingly no one has mentioned anything about a "compatibility layer" (at least not from what I've seen, which is most of the commentary here). Microsoft generally "bends over backwards" to try and ensure that an *.exe from several years ago will still run on today's Windows. That would add a *little* bloat --- it's also been complained about by some of their players ;-) A willingness to do "major surgery" on the OS would be a very Good Thing from Redmond, but I'm thinking, based on what I'm reading, they've not done much cutting just yet.

Probably the real issue is simply that Vista will be a slow takeover, much as XP was, as millions of luser's dime-store Dell and EMachines boxes die and are replaced by their great-grandchildren (with even more proprietary hardware, BIOS/COA traps, and, of course the upcoming "trusted computing" initiative (TPM/NGSCB - whatever). Makes me sick.

Whitebox computers are coming back. May the "whitebox" OS triumph also.

Re: Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

Super XP — 2006-05-03T19:29:39-05:00

"Windows Vista, a true resource hog?
No. And I quote:"

This has nothing to do with what PC you are using. It is the Beta Vista which is the resource hog according to some people which are using the OS.

Re: Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

Greg Clouston — 2006-05-03T12:42:31-05:00

To those that say "it's a beta", I say yes it is. What does "beta" mean? Beta means that the software is feature complete. Yes it may not be optimized and it probably still has debugging symbols attached. It still doesn't excuse the performance.

Running Vista on a P4 1.6? I'm sure that desktop looks great. I'm certain that's about all you could do with it is look at the desktop or browse the file system. Slap Visual Studio 2005 or Office 2003 Pro on that beast and see how well she performs. I'm guess you wouldn't want to spend all day working on that machine.

To bottom line it for everyone. Does the sharp increase in hardware requirements justified for all of Vistas new bells and whistles? If they had of left all the features they promised three years ago in, I'd say "yes". As it is I see no reason for me or the average user to "upgrade" to Vista.

Sadly most of the flock will migrate to Vista for the sole reason that it will come with their new PC. Those of us in the know will wait for service pack 1 (30-60 days after release). I'll wait for some hard numbers from benchmarks and side-by-side comparisons before I make my decision.

Re: Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

Diogo Torres — 2006-05-03T07:02:29-05:00

Interesting, did you know "Vista" in portuguese means "Eyes" or "sight" ?
Most coment�s i read here can be assumed correct with it's name
"Sight" - Hum... "We have a dream!" ...boosting the hardware evolution?
"Eyes" - ...Just Making it better to the eyes (if you have a "powerfull" Machine touhg)

this is no flaming topic just... whatever
regards

Re: Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

Landon Dodd — 2006-05-03T03:48:15-05:00

Dual AMD FX-60's, 4 GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB Video Cards, 8 Gigs of Ram, Dual Asus SLI Motherboards, 4 Monitor Xscape setup, dual liquid nitrogen/liquid cooled systems. Bring on the system requirements. With more demanding software, the more the hardware companies are forced to upgrade, thus prices fall for the outdated items that were once "the cutting edge." This is just the beginning of the transition to more extreme hardware. It started with the 256MB video card and is quickly progressing to the 512 MB video card, next is the 1024 MB video card. Graphics design machines have been using this kind of hardware for awhile. When games begin to look as good as the same imaging software they use, naturally hardware is going to have to increase. Dont expect to still get by with your 1 gig of ram 10 years from now. The transition has to start somewhere. I'm not saying that operating systems have to be inefficient; however, we all know that companies like Intel are Microsoft's lapdog, so naturally Microsoft is going to try to get them business, even at our expense. Let the Linux fanboys come out and fly their flags. If Linux was so great and perfect they wouldn't even be concerned with Windows, which hints that it isn't, and there would be more games on it that Windows, which there isn't. Microsoft has a stranglehold on the good OS market, so they can basically do as they please. Eventually everyone will make the transition, so what do they care? Vista ran great on my machine, and I greatly anticipate its release.

Re: Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

A_Pickle — 2006-05-03T00:33:22-05:00

Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

No. And I quote:

A_Pickle: http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/57550/

I got myself a bit of Windows Vista Beta 2 action on my secondary tower. I've got it running wonderfully on my second tower at 1280x1024, with every visual effect turned on. Let the Linux fanboys and Mac zealots be quashed in their feeble attempts to belittle Windows Vista's hardware requirements:

Pikl's Vista Box:
Pentium 4 2.4 GHz, 533 MHz FSB, 512 KB L2
512 MB (2 x256 MB) PC3200 DDR SDRAM
40 GB 7200 RPM Ultra ATA100 HDD
ATI Radeon 9600 XT 128 MB

Supreet Virdi: http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/57848/

Ok, a friend of mine who works for Microsoft at India, Bangalore came here to New Delhi few days back with Windows Vista Beta 32-bit, for a month break (His permanent address is in New Delhi). He has a following system where he live:

Intel Pentium4 1.40 GHz
Asus Motherboard with i850 Chipset
Samsung 256MB RDRAM PC800
GeForce4 MX440
80GB Hard Drive

Fortunately, I was there at his place when he was installing Windows Vista on his computer, it was running pretty good on that rig mentioned above. He also told me that Vista may be available in three months time from now on.

Microsoft: http://chris123nt.com/guides/Beta1_5112/

While Microsoft have not officially published requirements for Longhorn this is what we would reccomend as the minimum for a smooth running Windows Vista� Install, these guidelines will allow you to run DWM (Glass).

2.4 GHz Intel Pentium 4 Processor or higher; 1.6 GHz AMD Athlon/Opteron/Athon 64 /Pentium M
Nvidia GeForce FX5200 or higher/ATI Radeon 9500 or higher
512+MB of RAM
8 GB of free hard disk space

Re: Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

electricnun — 2006-05-03T00:33:01-05:00

Just because Vista is a beta dont expect that the moment they realease it they will chop out 50% of it and fine tune it to run similar ot XP. Thats dreaming.
The jump from 98SE to XP was a big enough one i think in all reality we have to expect similar. (I dont count ME lol).
The average PC owner finds his PC runs slow, takes it to the shop, pays a fortune and gets it home working and thinks all is well, those people are the consumers and they are happy to pay. No newbie out buying a pc is going to say "Oh no we wont buy Vista, its a resource hog". They look at the pretty stuff and think they got value for money.
MS has the monopoly and i doubt you will find many consumers jumping up and down, they are pleased right now because PC's are cheaper than they have ever been.
We all have to just bend over like good people...or change to linux! lol

Re: Re: Windows Vista, a true resource hog?

Bitmap — 2006-05-02T23:53:36-05:00

P.S.
If I'm coming off as frustrated, angered, or PO'ed, I apologize. I'm just very black-and-white in my explanations.