The article never says whether he gets those memory stats from the 32 or 64-bit version of Vista (at least, I didn’t see that anywhere). 64-bit WinXP eats up more RAM, too. Also, you can’t just look at the current amount of RAM used and compare that directly to XP. Vista has a much more sophisticated prefetcher, and it’s loading up some of the stuff it predicts you’re going to use so that you don’t have to wait for hard drive access so much. So some of the RAM being eaten up and some of the processes loaded are not for the stuff that’s going on now, it’s for the stuff that’s going to go on when you load that email program (or whatever) that you load up 10 times a day.
Having said that, I don’t see what the big deal is. You mean older betas of Vista with less features used less system resources than Beta 2? No kidding!
Vista runs more processes? With a fully 3D desktop, incremental search all over, speech recognition, per-app audio control, Media Center functions built in (I notice he didn’t compare against XP MCE), a bunch of additional networking features (“people near me” and so on), etc etc etc? NO WAY!
Yes, Vista is a RAM hog. It needs optimization in quite a few areas. It’s a beta product, and it behaves like one. That’s not exactly news of the century.
When it’s released, I’ll give you a little hint: it won’t run as fast as XP at doing some basic things, it’ll take up more memory, and it’ll use more resources. It’ll also be chock full of both big and small new features that make using your PC a lot “nicer.” And everyone will gripe about how it’s more demanding on hardware.
Just like when OS X was released, and all the Mac guys complained that it requires a “rediculous” amount of RAM and runs like crap on their Macs that they bought “just a year ago!”
MS, just curious if you’ve been using OS X since the day it came out. What few memories I have of OS X’s initial release weren’t pretty. Didn’t it used to be a lot worse in terms of memory, clunkiness, lack of DVD software, so on? Does Windows still lack an integrated DVD player?
Was playing with Vista last night, did seem sluggish with Aero turned on. Turned off felt a lot faster. Have a Geforece 6800GT 256MB Ram and 2 gig of RAM to go with an AMD 3500 64bit CPU. One thing I can’t figure out is how to turn off that “Allow” pop-up every time I want to install or change something.
Nope, didn’t use it until I got my wife a new iMac in April. I understand it took time to get this way, but it’s very nice. I just don’t see any compelling reason to use Vista.
Stop being an idiot.
Try running OS X on a last generation Mac.
(Our IT department decided everybody should run OS X 10.4, because we had some problems with InDesign on the Mac playing nice with InDesign on our pcs which apparently could only be solvd on OS X. They installed it on the machines in our graphics department and boy did productivity suffer… now OS X is gone again and after summer our graphics department will have new machines. PC’s)
A new OS hogs hardware and runs bad on older machines and betas doesn’t work perfectly. Big news.
I didnt realize people would be so dense to compare an early beta of a brand-new OS with 7 months of development left in it to ones that have been released, bugfixed, tuned, patched, and service packed for years.
And inexpensive optical mice that don’t need funky reflector mouse pads.
And Xbox/360/Live
Hotmail is pretty good (they bought it way back when, though they did keep it free and further develop it - the concept of “free web email” may not be around if not for the big Hotmail push by MS).
MSN Messenger/Live Messenger is good. Co-operation with Yahoo on IMing and trying (in vain) to create an open IM standard.
SP2 was pretty nice for a free upgrade.
And letting us keep one consumer OS for five years (going on six, though that’s unintentional) instead of the yearly Mac $99 OS upgrade cycle.
DirectX turned out pretty good for developers and gamers. Better than the “takes three years to change the spec, independant vendor extentions to do the same thing” OpenGL.
I’m not a programmer on a large project, the but ones I know swear by Visual Studio.
“Vista is a hyperinflated conglomeration of foecal matter, stuffed almost beyond measure with gratuitous CPU-eating GUI tricks, inefficiencies a magnitude of order higher than anything else we’ve ever delivered, and Hollywood-sponsored media restrictions to give it that ‘just-squatted’ smell.”
When I read this quote on Slashdot, soda came out of my nose! I’m afraid that year after year of fixing Windows problems has made me a hater. It’s sad, but there you go.
I always snicker a little when someone calls me a fanboy. Most of the people who know me personally find that in almost all things I have no company allegiances, never play favorites, and have virtually zero brand loyalty. Maybe to Pixar - they’ve earned it. ;) I have strong opinions, but I’ll turn right around and totally bash something really crappy from the same company as something I shouted from the rooftops about the week before.
Saying that Microsoft hasn’t given the computing world anything good is just like being a fanboy: it’s a closed-minded iconoclastic view of quality based solely on the company, not the merits of the products themselves. They’ve made lots of screw-ups and have plenty of bad products, too, but nobody asked for a list of those.
