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Vista's stiff hardware requirements leave many PCs in the dark

Even though analysts predict that over 90 million copies of Windows Vista will ship next year -- far greater than the 67 million mark reached by Windows XP at the one year mark -- it might be a bumpy upgrade path for many businesses. Vista pushes PC hardware further than any previous version of Windows. Many business PCs will get stepped over when it comes to upgrades as a result.

Softchoice Research has determined that roughly half of all business PCs in North America won't make the grade when it comes to baseline requirements for Windows Vista. Likewise, only 6% of business PCs meets the baseline requirements for a "Vista Premium" label. eWeek reports:

The inventory data used in the study represents a total of 112,113 desktops from 472 North American organizations in the financial, health care, technology, education and manufacturing sectors... Vista's minimum CPU requirements have increased 243 percent from those of Windows XP, which in turn had a much smaller increase of 75 percent from Windows 2000's CPU requirements.

Vista's stiff system requirements in relation to currently available hardware represent a significant jump over Windows XP and the hardware available when it launched in 2001. "At the time of release 71 percent of the PCs met the system requirements for Windows XP, whereas only 50 percent of the PCs included in this study meet the minimum requirements to run Windows Vista," said Dean Williams of Softchoice.

The poor state of readiness of today's business PCs can be attributed to companies adopting longer cycles between PCs upgrades. Some companies are waiting 5 years or more before significant upgrades or replacements are made to PC inventory. "Most organizations planning to deploy Vista within the next two years will have a PC life cycle that is affected by these factors, which, taken together, present a significant operational and financial stumbling block if not planned for well ahead of time," said Williams.

For those companies that have already planned ahead for a Vista rollout and have made the appropriate hardware upgrades there will still be software/driver compatibility issues to deal with. Companies that haven't taken the plunge to bring their PCs up to par still have plenty of time to work out the hardware/software/driver kinks before Vista gets its secondary boost with Service Pack 1. In fact, surveys show that 33% of businesses will wait six months to one year to adopt Vista, while 27% will wait one to two years (just in time for SP1).

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I find this hard to believe...
By kibets on 12/5/2006 9:59:11 PM , Rating: 2
My 2 year old cheapo Dell meets the requirements for Premium Vista and it only cost $800.00. (I'm dumping it for a new Vista PCs when they arrive in January).

Most IT Departments replace their PCs every 3 years.




RE: I find this hard to believe...
By Chadder007 on 12/5/2006 10:23:14 PM , Rating: 4
I work for a hospital IT dept. that has over 700 PCs. A large portion of them are on Windows 2000 and they do all that we need still.


By TimberJon on 12/6/2006 12:49:22 AM , Rating: 2
Got any open positions?


RE: I find this hard to believe...
By xKelemvor on 12/6/2006 12:42:49 PM , Rating: 4
Same boat here but we have well over 3000 devices. We are just starting to roll out XP now.

Anyway, the headline should read:

Half of business PCs aren't ready for Vista... but 99% of them don't need it anyway.


RE: I find this hard to believe...
By jp7189 on 12/6/2006 2:30:20 PM , Rating: 5
One simple thing will put Vista on every machine I have to maintain.. hardware autonomous images.. meaning I don't have to make an image for each flavor of hardware. Plus those images are native Virtual PC .vhd images... I don't even need a seperate computer to update the image.

Couple that with the fact that Vista automatically enables/disables features based on available resources, and you're looking at one OS image that can run on multiple generations.


RE: I find this hard to believe...
By michael2k on 12/5/2006 10:52:32 PM , Rating: 4
I don't find it hard to believe at all.

If your IT department is replacing $800 PCs every three years and my IT department is replacing $800 PCs every six... You are spending twice as much as mine. Does your IT department get paid less? Does it become twice as productive?

I mean, what is the point of a three year replacement plan if it takes Microsoft more than 5 years to update their OS? If you bought a PC in 2001 with XP, why would you buy another XP PC in 2004?


RE: I find this hard to believe...
By otispunkmeyer on 12/6/2006 4:47:03 AM , Rating: 2
because the PC bought in 2001 would be a bit slow in 2004 due to programs getting more strenous and requiring mor resources?

since i mostly used my rig for gaming till i sold it. i was used to doing cpu and gpu and memory upgrades almost yearly because i'd find things had moved on and my rig wasnt up to par. what made it worse was that i sampled 4xAA and 16xAF and could never go back!

its the same at uni and work too actually, CAD/CAE/CAM packages are updated frequently and within 2-3 years they find some of the computers just cant hack it.

i guess it all depends on what you use it for. if its just WP, E-mail, Spreadsheets etc then you dont need much of a computer

but CAD,CAE and running complex fluid models etc require more power regularly and since money is time in alot of things, the less time your computers sat working things out, the better


RE: I find this hard to believe...
By ToeCutter on 12/6/2006 7:49:58 AM , Rating: 2
Good point, but who in their right mind is going to consider running CAD/CAE/CFD/FEA on Vista?

(Key requirement: RIGHT mind ;-)


RE: I find this hard to believe...
By TomZ on 12/6/2006 9:11:42 AM , Rating: 2
Why wouldn't you run all apps on Vista? Anything that runs on XP should run on Vista.


By Ramshambo on 12/6/2006 9:21:51 AM , Rating: 2
I work for an Engineering/Drafting company that uses MicroStation and AutoCad. We are probably going to start rolling out Vista upgrades toward the end of 2007 (Lots of testing to do).

We refresh our PCs every 2 years now thru Dell.


RE: I find this hard to believe...
By copiedright on 12/6/2006 1:38:35 AM , Rating: 4
I try to live by my three computer rules:

1. New computer every 3 years.
2. Graphics Upgrade every 18 months.
3. Clean it every 6 months.

Well, at this rate it does everything I want!


RE: I find this hard to believe...
By Christopher1 on 12/6/2006 7:58:18 AM , Rating: 2
That's about how it goes unless you are building and upgrading a computer yourself.

If you are building and maintaning a computer yourself, the periods change.

1. New computer case when the standard changes (ATX-BTX)
2. New motherboard every 3 years.
3. New graphics card every 18 months.
4. More memory (if you don't max out the motherboards capacity at the beginning), every 9 months.
5. New processor every 2 years (what was the high end will become the low end, and afforable if you buy cheap the first time)

There are the every so often unforeseen things, like a motherboard/etc. dies before the end of the 3 year period, but those you can't really plan for.

Businesses, I would say that they should upgrade their computers whenever a large advancement in processor technology or OS is made (like Core2Duo just recently came out, and Vista is coming out!).


By Spivonious on 12/6/2006 3:52:12 PM , Rating: 2
Or you spend a little more when you build it and upgrade the whole thing every 4-5 years.


RE: I find this hard to believe...
By bjourdo on 12/6/2006 11:27:14 AM , Rating: 2
If it were entirely up to the IT department, I would say this is correct, but rarely do the IT professionals get the last word when it comes to a significant investment in technology. More and more boardrooms are requiring longer cycles between PCs upgrades. For example, my workstation was Upgraded two years ago to 2.4Ghz P4 with 256m of RAM. I'm in the Mortgage industry where we are experiencing a cycle of declining revenues and corporate consolidation, the trend is likely to extend for another two years. I would be very surprised if we saw IT infrastructure upgraded any time soon. My guess is that when the cycle turns around and we do reevaluate the need for upgraded technology that we will adopt a step down from the most recent available tech. and we are the largest, sub-prime, wholesale mortgage lender in the US.


By rcc on 12/6/2006 12:30:33 PM , Rating: 3
For me Vista will have to wait for some cash and and a computer update. I'm in no hurry.

But, as the title reads, this sounds just like the hubbub surrounding the XP release. Even funnier is that some of it is the same people, who are now running XP.




By TomZ on 12/6/2006 12:49:53 PM , Rating: 2
I totally agree. I remember hearing so much about how XP was bloatware and offered nothing over Win2K other than a "pretty face." Now, I am hearing the same exact argument about how WinXP is all things to all people, and Vista is bloatware and offers nothing.

I can't help conclude that some people just cannot cope with change or the rate of change of technology very well.


By msva124 on 12/6/2006 3:47:29 PM , Rating: 2
It's going to bomb, and I'd be surprised if you don't register a new screen name out of embarassment.

The analogy to XP is wrong. Most of us were using 98/ME back then. It crashed a lot, but it worked with all our apps and hardware. We were wondering why there was a need for XP if it did exactly the same thing. The answer was stability. Not having to deal with blue screens everyday was a major improvement.

What is Vista's major improvement? Less spyware? Fine, but that's not incentive enough to put up with the hassles of User Access Control, steep hardware requirements, and a changed interface. XP did not add any new hassles.


By TomZ on 12/6/2006 4:03:51 PM , Rating: 2
Well, I think the point really is that, when Microsoft releases a new OS, we all (myself included) tend to have negative feelings about it, because we are comfortable with what we are running today. But the experience I've had over and over, is that the upgrades always brought a better overall experience, even if at the point of running "setup.exe," it was not clear what the benefits might be.

Are you running Vista? I challenge you to run Vista for 1 week, and then decide if you want to keep that or go back to XP. For me, the difference is most like the difference between Win2K and WinXP - after running WinXP, there was no way I would want to go back to Win2K. For me, the situation is the same for Vista - I wouldn't want to go back, and I am working hard to get all machines that I manage upgraded so that I don't have to work in XP any more.


By msva124 on 12/6/2006 6:41:57 PM , Rating: 2
Fine, I'll try it, even though my video card (Mobility Radeon 7500) does not have a driver and performance on my notebook has been reported to be sluggish.


By msva124 on 12/12/2006 11:12:57 PM , Rating: 2
Well, I've gone ahead and installed Vista. One word: horrible. Even the things I thought I was going to like about it do not measure up to expectations. But there's one problem that stands out the most, performance. I am running in Vista Classic mode (all eye candy turned off) and this thing is just slow. It feels like my hard drive light is always on and CPU is always in use. This is on a T42 Thinkpad, Pentium M 1.7Ghz with 1GB RAM.

As for the user interface changes? I am reminded of OS X. Everything is different. Not different because it's better, different just for the sake of being different.

I almost kind of feel bad for Microsoft. That's is how bad this is going to bomb.


By Pirks on 12/7/2006 5:01:16 PM , Rating: 1
well, I tried vista rtm (build 6000), starts not much slower than XP, works ok, not slow, windows open fast and everything.

but then I opened a WMV HD movie, first episode of Harry Potter (sorcerer's stone afair). my CPU is loaded 40% when I watch this movie on XP and is loaded 80% when I watch it on Vista. with the latest nVidia drivers on my 7800GS 256M video (not the slowest one, eh?) and with the latest creative drivers on my Audigy 2 ZS. Aero is on, I double checked that.

besides, sometimes the movie stutters a little, looks like some background process intervenes or something

besides, when I switch to full screen or back from full screen to window, system freezes for a moment and does the switch pretty painfully, everything is jerky and stuttering for a moment, and sometimes my speakers go boom as if audio driver was hitting something... you know, this kind of impression.

when I switch to full screen or back on XP it goes smoother than butter, I haven't even released alt-enter and the screen is already full of video, no stutters, no booming, works 100% perfect.

and these ugly old XP windows covered with glassy borders... and this ugly unreadable tiny 9pt fonts on my 1600x1200 21" monitor... and this new DPI concept which breaks GUI windows the same as it was in XP. and the unchangeable (by dragging mouse) width of command prompt windows (still can only change height by dragging border with mouse as in windows 3.0), and that old familiar system services window that forgets its size and column settings as it was in NT 3.51 and continues so far... the list goes on and on. see you later MS, and I'll check out Leopard in a while, time to see if they gonna deliver vector based properly resizable GUI, that'd kill windows for me in a sec - pray ballmer pray they won't deliver it! ;)))


By TomZ on 12/8/2006 12:40:56 PM , Rating: 2
Pirks, this is exactly the type of Vista "review" we would expect from you. Go back to your Mac. All you have proven is that bias trumps objectivity (and that you are using crappy nVIDIA beta Vista drivers).

I just loaded Vista on a second machine last night, and it is working great. It loaded fast, and the peformance is good, even with the Intel integrated graphics (non-AERO on that machine, for now). Running on a 19" CRT at 1600x1200, and everything looks great. We'll see if my wife has any complaints or now.

Also, on that machine, I got to see UAC in action. Her account is not an Adminstrator account, and so when I installed device drivers, apps, etc., I get a password prompt. I like that aspect, because I am more confident that the machine won't get corrupted by accident. I can imagine that anyone who manages PCs will like that also. It is like what was available in previous versions, but more fine-grained, and with the ability to dynamically override permissions, instead of the process just failing.


By Pirks on 12/8/2006 2:39:51 PM , Rating: 1
quote:
you are using crappy nVIDIA beta Vista drivers
Come on, Tom, don't be a Windows zealot - because zealots always blame crappy drivers and such - I've been using LATEST OFFICIAL WHQL drivers from nVidia, downloaded DIRECTLY from their site JUST A WEEK AGO - it was 93.something or 96.something, I don't remember.
quote:
I just loaded Vista on a second machine last night, and it is working great.
I guess if you try to play any large WMV HD movie (just try to get Harry Potter in WMV HD format) your opinion might just suddenly change ;) ESPECIALLY when you compare how Windows XP plays SAME movie on the SAME hardware.
quote:
I got to see UAC in action
Yeah, I'm glad MS finally starting to catch up with Unix and OS X in that aspect, it's just several years late as always ;)

And don't even try to answer some CONCRETE points in my post, Tom, 'cause I'm afraid you have nothing to say about that system services window forgetting its size and column settings every time I close it, the "feature" I got used to see from NT 3.51 days :(

About fonts I agree it's a matter of taste, my eyes hurt when I see default Vista fonts on 1600x1200 screen, but your eyes may be ok. Still this does not compensate brain dead DPI scaling in Windows GUI, it's as ugly as ever - you try to increase system DPI, and a lot of system windows go crazy, I love WMP window the best - you stop seeing info in there 'cause it can't properly resize its internal panes according to the new DPI setting.

All in all you also got the feeling that Vista is XP with glass on top, since almost every system dialog window there was taken directly from XP and equipped with glassy border. You may like it, again a matter of taste, but I can see the toll the Longhorn reset took on MS, they couldn't do much with GUI this time, in remaining two years they got to redesign Vista from scratch... so they did the only ting they could under these conditions - they just slapped glass on top. With all due respect to internal system changes and WPF and DX10 etc I still give MS B- for GUI and consistency - it's ol' good Windows mess, the way I got used to it, same old bugs (system services window, remember?) but with glass on top - great, just great MS, thanks for your time!

This of course does not mean I'm a future Mac switcher, so don't be afraid, I can as well find a lot of deficiencies in Leopard as well, but in this particlar area - GUI design - I seriously expect Apple to beat MS to death again - I remember a lot of tiny details in OS X GUI that amazed me (it's been a while since I worked in OS X) like that wonderful ability to do drag'n'drop between remote and local desktop - OS X is full of this kind of attention to detail, this is the part where I'll be looking at when trying out hackintosh with Leopard.


Vista's hardware requirements versus XP's
By Bonrock on 12/5/2006 9:58:30 PM , Rating: 5
"Vista's minimum CPU requirements have increased 243 percent from those of Windows XP, which in turn had a much smaller increase of 75 percent from Windows 2000's CPU requirements."

No kidding. There must be some explanation... Oh, right. Windows XP came out two years after Windows 2000, while Windows Vista came out more than five years after Windows XP.

Seriously, why are the hardware requirements such a surprise? You can't add features, improve performance, and cut costs all at the same time. That's life, deal with it.




By shabby on 12/5/2006 10:49:10 PM , Rating: 1
Ya no kidding, pc's have gotten more then 243 percent faster since xp came out. Is everyone still buying dell's with 128mb of ram or what?


RE: Vista's hardware requirements versus XP's
By michael2k on 12/5/06, Rating: -1
By L1NUXownz1fUR1337 on 12/5/2006 11:17:26 PM , Rating: 3
Please,

macs selling like mad?

milk almost came out of my nose.

The remote possibility that macs are selling could be related to the fact that there are 1 "smart self-building open market PC user" to every 30 "stupid users that can't handle more than 1 mouse button".




RE: Vista's hardware requirements versus XP's
By TimberJon on 12/6/2006 12:47:41 AM , Rating: 2
Amen to the 1:30 ratio. Biggest raise I've ever got from an employer was due to my ability to build systems.

Its all great and wonderful that out-of-the-box systems are selling a little bit better these days, but you get an inferior product, almost no selection on hardware/software and you find yourself up to your eyebrows in driver issues and slowdown. My friend still has one of those HP Pavillion systems from Costco, 1.0 Celeron with 128 Ram? and he was asking me why it has problems with XP Home? gawd.

Im ready for Vista. Got myself one of those SLI KO systems (without the SLI gfx) from cyberpowerpc. Overclocked Conroe and 3 Gigs of memory. Raid1 on 2x 10k raptors. And it will be obsolete in a matter of months, possibly weeks.. But ill be happy in the knowledge that I built my system piece by piece.. with blank HDDs out of the box. To conquer on my own terms..


By Christopher1 on 12/6/2006 8:01:19 AM , Rating: 2
The blank harddrive self-install is the best thing to do. I've found recently that there is a LOT of shit that manufacturers install on their systems, that is not necessary at all.

Who needs three different internet provider programs? Who needs umpteen-billion media players? Who needs three or four virus trials on their system?

The manufacturers need to learn that less software = more value, because all this stuff slows and bogs down the systems GREATLY until you uninstall it.


RE: Vista's hardware requirements versus XP's
By ToeCutter on 12/6/06, Rating: -1
RE: Vista's hardware requirements versus XP's
By ToeCutter on 12/7/2006 6:34:30 AM , Rating: 2
OMG, these forums are so freaking predictable!

Buried, just as anticipated.

Too funny...


By Pirks on 12/7/2006 4:38:04 PM , Rating: 2
c'mon man, this place is for is downmodding self-assembling clowns, what do ya expect? state to them some market share quotes and dare to challenge their self-assembly newegg oriented narrow brains - and you get downmodding clowns chirping and jumping on you like The Flood from Halo - yuck!

the clowns will never understand that majority of consumers don't give a coocoo about self-assembly, blank hdds and newegg.

to the downmodding clown a world is his cool oc'ed rig, anything that's outside of his new shiny fashionable oc'ed core 2 duo is outta his mind as well. get used to it already, it's anandtech! it't not a pc world, windows world or, god forbid, mac rumors site :)


RE: Vista's hardware requirements versus XP's
By Trisped on 12/6/2006 1:02:14 AM , Rating: 1
Don't buy into apple hype. It is like when they switched to Intel processors and claimed everything was 33% faster. It wasn't. Only a few things were, and only if they were recompiled to run on the different architecture.

In reality every OS upgrade normally adds new functions and options that add to the system resource drain. Yes, they clean up some of the sloppy implementations from earlier, but the overall effect with ANY OS upgrade is always higher resource demands. And that my friends is how we will stop the Borg!


Oh, and Vista as with any new Windows OS should not be installed on any computer older then 1 year. Less then that is questionable at best.


RE: Vista's hardware requirements versus XP's
By ToeCutter on 12/6/06, Rating: -1
By TomZ on 12/6/2006 9:19:18 AM , Rating: 3
quote:
*(Consider the irony: The most RECENT version of MS Office is for Mac users only ;-)

I'm running Office 2007 here - not sure what you mean by that - seems to me you're running a version that's 3 years old.


Why no "Up" directory button in Vista?
By vailr on 12/5/2006 10:45:12 PM , Rating: 4
After trying Vista, I went back to XP. Why did they decide to omit the "Up" directory button, for navigating in Windows Explorer?




RE: Why no "Up" directory button in Vista?
By L1NUXownz1fUR1337 on 12/5/06, Rating: -1
By TimberJon on 12/6/2006 12:51:09 AM , Rating: 3
Translation for non leet people:
"Noob, Use Total Commander"


RE: Why no "Up" directory button in Vista?
By Kougar on 12/5/2006 11:15:28 PM , Rating: 4
Because there is Breadcrumbs, for one thing. A single click will take you anywhere within the entire folder address structure that you want to go, which includes the one higher folder or the root DIR.


By TomZ on 12/6/2006 9:30:59 AM , Rating: 2
The "breadcrum navigator" is a really nice feature - it saves a lot of time when you're navigating around your HDD and network drives.


a
By Xorp on 12/5/2006 10:02:00 PM , Rating: 2
I don't see why any business would use Windows for anything remotely important. I love how Microsoft makes everyone think Vista is "must have", while XP is more than fine for 90% of people.




RE: a
By neon on 12/5/2006 11:33:48 PM , Rating: 2
I work for a university, and 2000 is quite sufficient for our office tasks.

Since my computer is a P!!!/800 with 256 MB SDRAM, it doesn't seem like there is a Vista on my horizon.


RE: a
By msva124 on 12/6/2006 9:42:02 AM , Rating: 2
Nope, no Vista on your horizon. It would bring that system to a screeching halt.


RE: a
By thegrimreaper3 on 12/6/2006 2:53:30 PM , Rating: 2
what kind of university runs 2000? We do life cycles on everything every 2 years here and will be starting fresh again next fall.


RE: a
By neon on 12/6/2006 7:23:26 PM , Rating: 2
It's a large public state university.

Actually, WinXP is available to me - we have the MS site license. However, a) it's my boss' machine, so it's not getting upgraded until she buys another machine, and I get her old one; b) it already is sluggish on W2k, and would likely be even slower with WinXP.


In other news...
By Yawgm0th on 12/6/2006 12:12:53 AM , Rating: 2
99.4% of North American business do no plan to migrate to Vista anyway, citing lack of any tangible benefits to productivity as the primary reason.




RE: In other news...
By msva124 on 12/6/2006 9:40:09 AM , Rating: 2
LMAO


RE: In other news...
By yacoub on 12/6/2006 10:22:23 AM , Rating: 2
yeah seriously, until they FORCE people to Vista by stopping the security updates and patches for XP, there's really very little reason for most people to upgrade. XP Pro SP2 is a very stable, easy to use, compatible OS.


well
By yacoub on 12/6/2006 7:57:18 AM , Rating: 1
Considering my friend gave up on Vista and went to XP-64bit, I'm not too interested in Vista either. (He said it was basically one issue or another, never able to get everything working properly together. Driver issues, etc.)




RE: well
By Master Kenobi (blog) on 12/6/2006 8:05:08 AM , Rating: 2
Your friend is a scrub then. It took me about 60 minutes to get everything functioning perfectly in Vista 64-bit. From there it took me another 60 minutes to get Office 2003, and 2007, as well as STEAM, and several games loaded and running.

That was 6 months ago. My Vista box is still going strong. So I have to ask you, does your friend really know what the hell he's doing? I doubt it.


RE: well
By TomZ on 12/6/2006 9:29:29 AM , Rating: 2
Your friend probably tried a beta release that may have had driver issues - it makes sense to try the RTM version if you had problems running Vista betas.


What reason...
By BigToque on 12/5/2006 10:36:52 PM , Rating: 2
What reason do most companies have for upgrading before they do their scheduled hardware upgrades that I'm sure come every 3-5 years?

It makes sense to get Vista with new PC's, but it's not like employees are going to increase their productivity by moving to Vista (unless their productivity increases due to Vista's improved ability to try to prevent unsuspecting users from infecting their computers with virus' and spyware causing less downtime - actually, I guess that's a pretty good thing :))




RE: What reason...
By rykerabel on 12/7/2006 12:21:00 PM , Rating: 2
4,000 teachers; 1,000 support personel; 35,000 students...

Yeah, better protection from viruses etc is actually a very likely method to increase productivity.

And no, Macs are not the solution. These people manage to get viruses on their fully updated and AV protected Macs too.

Website filtering, email filtering, spam filtering, phishing filtering, virus scanning software and hardware and yet these people expose themselves so thoroughly that the stuff still gets through.

Simply, Vista > xp, and Macs may be better but don't run too many of our required educational software AND are not perfect either.


Bios date 2099........
By crystal clear on 12/6/2006 2:47:14 AM , Rating: 2
Whilst We are busy discusssing Vista,
Asia is busy getting things done-Talk less work more-

HOW


Windows Vista Ultimate for $3.50

Bangkok (Thailand) - Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system will not launch until January 30, but software pirates around the world are already churning out illegal copies of the recently released RTM Vista. Often these copies are sold for pennies on the dollar when compared to the original price: We were able to purchase a copy of Vista Ultimate, which will retail for $400, for a mere $3.50 (US).

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/12/04/vista_thailand_t...


They conclude like this-

Back at home, we found that we had bought a fully functional RTM version and virus-free of Windows Vista that would allow us to install Vista Basic, Vista Premium, Vista Business or Vista Ultimate. We passed on installing the software, but the back cover paper claims that neither a product key nor activation is required to install the software.

also-
there is some inconvenience for the user of a pirated Vista RTM: Users are instructed to set their BIOS date to 2099 before installing the release. The date is set back to the regular time after installation. We were not able to confirm that this hack will pass Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage checks for software updates.

Unquote-

Those guys at TG daily-Toms hardware have exposed some very
interesting aspect of VISTA-What a VISTA.




RE: Bios date 2099........
By JollyRogers on 12/6/2006 8:46:41 AM , Rating: 2
$3.50 is pretty expensive for Indians... we pay only $2.25 for Vista RTM copy (Pirated hehe)in India.


Vista rulz!
By msva124 on 12/6/2006 9:50:05 AM , Rating: 2
It took me only 30 minutes to get it installed on my Inspiron XPS notebook. Everything works perfect, and the transparent windows look so cool! I have been staring at the clock widget all day. LOL at anyone who can't use it cuz their computer's too slow!




RE: Vista rulz!
By Davelo on 12/7/2006 12:20:24 PM , Rating: 2
You bring up a very good point why Vista will NOT make it to the corporate desktop. What corporation wants their employees sitting around staring at the clock widget all day? Vista sounds to me like a backward step in productivity.


Does this really surprise anyone?
By edge929 on 12/7/2006 4:03:51 PM , Rating: 2
Hell, my computer at home, being a computer "enthusiast" doesn't run RC2 very well with the following, all water cooled.

Opteron at 3Ghz, 74GB Raptor, X1900XTX, 2GB PC4400

My speeds/RAM are at least a year old now and I've built many an AthlonXP systems for average Joe's that will never run Vista. Drivers can only do so much for performance.

My company is the largest health care quality improvement organization in the US. We have over 800 PCs all on Windows XP or 2000 and for those of us using XP, only about 2% have SP2 let alone SP1. Most everyone has the same Gateway workstation with a whopping 512MB of RAM (not fun with Visual Studio 2005 open, let alone anything else). I'm sure we'll upgrade to Vista someday, just not in the next 5 years.




By darkpaw on 12/7/2006 4:57:02 PM , Rating: 1
Only 2% SP2?

As a security auditor, that is a very scary prospect and likely an extremely easy network to break. It would be a ton of potential paperwork from an audit standpoint ekk.


P3-800Mhz is the minimum
By jp7189 on 12/6/2006 2:24:07 PM , Rating: 2
I mean com'on business PCs slower than Vista's minimum are begging for the scap heap. Granted it won't run like a champ, but during the Vista testing at our company I have to say the user interface is more responsive than XP's.





By Davelo on 12/7/2006 12:16:46 PM , Rating: 2
All it does is make everyone less likely to purchase it. Forget upgrade sales. Only new PCs will have it.




have any of you guys run the beta?
By Samus on 12/8/2006 7:15:17 PM , Rating: 2
...basically if you have less than a gig or ram your totally fucked. most office machines have 256-512mb. that'll crunch with vista.




I don't like vista.
By aceadoni on 1/3/2007 7:08:29 PM , Rating: 2
I went to a tech tour with AMD/Msoft and they tried to demonstrate asigning flash memory as system usable lets just say that didn't work. The thing is where I'm at we replace equipment every 3 years to take advantage of the technology. When you compile code and your testing stuff 2 cores are better than one. Saves time and increases productivity. Every 3 years buy a new set of rigs not top of the line but not the crap dell spits out from china either. After XP64 works we will evaluate vista on the 64bit side. We use a lot of machines with 4GB+ of memory so having a POS OS that's memory footprint is larger than most of the apps we run is not our idea of positive ROI. Vista has nice cool features Microsoft needs to start making os's with practical features. The person in the call center has no need for a fancy desktop or any of the other BS that is packed into vista and the fact is most people don't.




Huh
By GotDiesel on 12/6/2006 11:43:23 AM , Rating: 1
another reason not to downgrade.. LOL

We only change OS/hardware when the applications we use are no longer supported by the vendor on that platform..




By TimberJon on 12/6/2006 12:57:57 AM , Rating: 2
Dumba$$. Every new product gets hyped. Its a fact of life.

What you are saying here is like telling everyone to not have children, because of the "integrated imperfections" that could lead to failures and unwanted problems.

We are human smokey, we seek problems. Some of us like the challenge. My win98SE still runs to this day with an overclocked celeron 366 and 700+ RAM, never had a BSOD in its life. YOU must not know how to run your own rig.

I see the benefits of having next generation hardware, and the software to match it. There will be bugs, but there will be fixes! Thousands of people telling millions of people how to fix their dingleberries in Vista. Im looking forward to it. Im foaming at the mouth. And I got a free upgrade to Vista with my recent PC Purchase.


By hergieburbur on 12/6/2006 2:41:09 AM , Rating: 4
You obviously haven't tried it yet if you are foaming at the mouth for it. its an inferior offering. There are some nice improvements, but there will be major hassles too (not supporting windows help or older programs comes to mind). Plus, the fact that it pretty much alternates between asking you to confirm almost everything you do and trying to up-sell you a service while hogging your resources means I will be staying with XP as my primary OS for now.

BTW, My company has a few thousand employees and we have NO plans to support Vista or IE7 at this time.


By ZeeStorm on 12/6/2006 9:20:06 AM , Rating: 3
Wait wait wait, let me get this straight. You NEED extra space, and you think Vista's interface gets you more than XP Pro?.. Wow, that certainly made my day. Have you ever realized how absolutely BLOATED Vista is? That 15GB minimum requirement for Vista premium isn't a joke. Not to mention some stupid toolbar that M$ stole the idea from every other company (which is again, taking up more space on your desktop). How is adding some stupid toolbar, making everything use more resources, and taking up 5x more minimum requirement HDD space giving you extra space?

P.S. I've been running 4 screens for 3 years, where have you been? There's nothing Vista can do that XP can't besides look pretty and use more resources. Good day.


By TomZ on 12/6/2006 9:43:20 AM , Rating: 2
Yes, Vista uses more resources, but "bloated" is a value judgement. With hard drives these days typically being 250, 300, 400GB, I don't think 15GB is an unreasonable amount of space to dedicate to the OS, do you? And with todays HDD prices, that 15GB costs only about US$3.00, which again is not much, is it?

Besides, my Vista Ultimate install is only taking 1/2 of that amount - aout 7.5GB.

Each time anybody releases new software that requires more resources, idiots everywhere complain about it being "bloated." I think folks like you don't understand software at all, and you fail to realize that software companies need to continue to add in more functionality in order to keep their products competitive. More features necessarily leads to larger install images, more CPU and RAM usage, etc. When you consider the rate of change of hardware, I think this is perfectly fine, and is what benefits end users the best.


By dead1ne on 12/6/2006 2:10:17 PM , Rating: 2
My Windows XP install takes up about 700MB. While that is because I removed most of the bloat that comes with XP that 700MB is all I need. The same is going to be true of Windows Vista. If MS would give me the option of installing just what I wanted I wouldn't have a problem with the full install taking up 15GB but since I have to gut the installation disk myself I'd really prefer if there wasn't so much bloat.


By Master Kenobi (blog) on 12/6/2006 7:57:49 AM , Rating: 2
Not to rain on your parade but your company must not deal with external companies much. We are migrating our company to IE 7 right now because the rest of the internet is migrating. Either keep up or deal with the complains that your site and services aren't functioning to the external world. Vista on the other hand is likely 2 years away for us.


By hergieburbur on 12/6/2006 4:52:56 PM , Rating: 2
Actually, we deal with external companies a lot, and a few of our products are web based. IE7 breaks so many of them (firefox runs them better), that we had to indefinitely delay supporting them.


By TomZ on 12/6/2006 9:25:31 AM , Rating: 1
quote:
You obviously haven't tried it yet if you are foaming at the mouth for it. its an inferior offering.

Inferior in what way? Please try to back up your wild assertions with some facts!

I just loaded Vista RTM onto my main workstation, and so far, I think it is incredible. After seeing the performance of the betas, I was a bit discouraged, but the RTM build runs fast - it is nice.

And sorry, andbody who decides to stay with IE6 and not upgrade to IE7 needs to have their head examined. The productivity benefit of tabbed browsing alone is worth the upgrade effort. It's a no-brainer. I really wonder how your company arrived at that decision.


By Quiksel on 12/6/2006 9:54:36 AM , Rating: 2
Some companies (or dare I say "many") run software that does not work right in IE7. As nice as 7 is, we can't roll it out to any of our business users because it would break everything these people do (a real "showstopper").

Just because it's out and great doesn't mean we can just throw it onto every machine we see. Testing is the key, no matter how compelling the upgrade may seem!

And we aren't thinking Vista for at least a year, for many of the same reasons as listed above.

~quiksel


By TomZ on 12/6/2006 10:17:15 AM , Rating: 2
I agree, organizations need to do testing, but that is a smart approach. I am more against the "ignorant approach" where people say they have no plans at all to deploy IE7 or Vista, even though they know nothing about the software and have done no testing at all.

BTW, what kind of compat issues did you see with IE7? I've been running it for a long time now, and I haven't seen any issues at all.


By hergieburbur on 12/6/2006 4:57:15 PM , Rating: 2
Lets see,

More resources used for what is essentially a window blinds re-skin.

No support of the old help interface (for the guy who asked who used it, a lot of other programs help files are based on it).

Annoying requests for confirmation of anything useful.

Slower running on DX9c games.

Obfuscating a lot of settings in an attempt to idiot proof the box...

I could list more.

As for upgrading to IE7, why would I when firefox 2 is better already??

Admittedly though, I was so turned off by RC 2 that I haven't tried the RC2 yet.


By TomZ on 12/6/2006 5:58:37 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
More resources used for what is essentially a window blinds re-skin.

If you believe that, then you are fooling yourself. You might want to consider reviewing this article if you want to really know what is in Vista: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_vista. That article gives a long list of new features and functions in Vista.
quote:
No support of the old help interface (for the guy who asked who used it, a lot of other programs help files are based on it).

Yes, Vista no longer ships with the help viewer from Windows 3.1. I think that is pretty reasonable. Here are the facts:

1. Microsoft has long ago released updated help technologies to replace WinHelp. Applications continuing to ship WinHelp files should not be doing so anyway. WinHelp sucks by today's standards, and it is time to retire it.

2. Microsoft is going to release a WinHelp version that is Vista-compatible, in order to support legacy apps. (You can probably run WinXP WinHelp now on Vista, although I haven't tried it.)
quote:
Annoying requests for confirmation of anything useful.

The purpose of these requests is to make you aware that something is going on that has security implications. While I agree that the prompts can be annoying, it is probably better than not being aware of these situation, as with WinXP. Besides, if they annoy you, you can simply turn them off.
quote:
Slower running on DX9c games.

I don't know anything about this, sorry.
quote:
Obfuscating a lot of settings in an attempt to idiot proof the box

I totally disagree. Settings are, if anything, easier to find, and the Windows shell has much better search capability, which relieves you from the need to manually navigate to settings (or even remember where settings are).
quote:
As for upgrading to IE7, why would I when firefox 2 is better already??

FireFox being better or worse is purely subjective, and irrelevant anyway. What is clear is that IE7, the browser supplied with Vista, is superior to IE6, the browser supplied with WinXP. That is the comparison that is relevant for Vista.
quote:
Admittedly though, I was so turned off by RC 2 that I haven't tried the RC2 yet.

Me, too. Performance was terrible with RC2, but I'm now running RTM bits, and performance is awesome. I think it is faster than XP, especially in application startup. Office 2007 RTM bits also have good performance, which contributes to a good experience.


By darkpaw on 12/7/2006 4:49:20 PM , Rating: 1
I have an MSDN subscription and have been using Vista on and off for about a year now. The only reason I don't use it full time is the shear number of game compatibility issues with it. Everything else stated by TomZ is pretty much right on.

In general, Vista is better then XP in almost every respect. It will definately be installed on my non gaming machines and I think most of the blame for the gaming problems I am having actually lies at feet of nVidia. They need major work on their Vista drivers and have had plenty of time to do so, but they are still utter crap. I hope the release a driver that isn't a complete PoS by the time Vista launches for retail next month, but after a year of mostly the same issues I'm not confident.

Some of the security things in Vista definately go overboard for the security consious (first thing I did after installing release was diable UAC), but for the average user it will be much, much better.


By johnsonx on 12/6/2006 7:23:39 PM , Rating: 2
Where's your brother Beenthere? Shouldn't he be in here spouting the same clueless drivel?


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