After 10 months of Dell + Vista, XP comes back home!

[Bram Turismo]

Well, it's been 10 months since I've had my Dell Vostro with Vista Business. I've got 1024 mb RAM on it, and although Dell never wanted to listen to us, they still gave me a product with Vista on it.

I have got to say that I loved Vista, even though I never had enough RAM, and it showed when I played games. I could play them, they ran quite smoothly, but never to the level I could play them on a different OS.

So, I installed SpeedUpMyPc from UNiblue and immediatly I recieved the information that Vista was using half a giga of my RAM, that's 500 mb just to run my pc without any apps!

Although it never crashed, sometimes it refused to shut off, so yesterday I had enough of it and a friend of my father did a fresh install with XP.


I got it back today, and immediatly my pc started up faster, much faster! Just in seconds, I could start, something that took 5 full minutes with Vista (literally!)


Don't get me wrong, I really loved Vista, but you need at least 2 giga of RAM to run it smoothly, something which is a little "meh" for the average computer guy...


Anyway, I'll be playing some games, and I'm pretty sure they'll run much smoother now that I have a full 1000 megas of RAM to use 👍

 

[GilesGuthrie]

Up until about 2003, memory was really expensive, and was the limiting factor in system specification. It's always been the case that the current, or future version of an OS has a bigger resource footprint than its predecessor. All of those additional capabilities come at a price. I personally don't think that machines should be bought with less than 2GB now, especially if they're to be running Vista.

Whilst Vista will sit somewhere near Millennium Edition in the "MS OS Chart" for user & administrator popularity, it has taught everyone about how additional features increase system overhead. Even people who are installing current Linux distros are starting to comment that the overhead is greater than expected. In simple terms, what we need - as users and system administrators - is the ability to install a secure, stable operating system with a minimal footprint, and then add features as required.

I think that Microsoft are taking steps in this direction with the "everything off by default" Windows Server 2008 (which isn't even a file server out of the box). It'll be a while before we see it in a Microsoft Desktop OS though. On the Linux side, that customisation is available, both in the blunt "how many text editors would you like?" form, and in the "here's how you rebuild the kernel" form. Both methods of customisation are out of reach for basic computer users. So, we're in a situation where the hardware builders provide more and better hardware for less cash, but our machines don't really get any faster because the OS writers are taking up all of the extra performance with added features that most of us won't actually use, and don't know how/are not allowed to disable.

Vista's feature-bloat is the real killer to the value analysis of its installation in corporate environments. Even now SP1 is out (the traditional time to start an evaluation for a corporate deployment), my clients aren't really asking us about it, or are not showing any enthusiasm for it.

 

[Bram Turismo]

I'll agree on the point that pc's should not be offered with Vista when they have less than 2GB of memory, but imagine the price for a machine in the eyes of the computer user that asks the minimum. I'm talking about sending e-mail messages, just those minimum tasks. I certainly wouldn't buy a 2Gb machine for that, a 512 mb ram celeron would do the job just perfectly 👍

I'm just a bit annoyed that every single computer out there is offered with Vista...