Great! More money to fork out.

another reason why i wont be upgrading so soon.. if home users barely make the memory levels how long will it be till corportate users make the grade?

Im starting to think Vista is media centre on steroids!

Hmmm, time to switch to something less bloated

hmm
i sense a bit of the 'bandwagon' going down here


pcs were coming with 512mb of mem in 2000, its now 2006
OSx runs equally doggish with 512mb
and trying to do anything flashy with kde pretty much follows the same rule


the year is now 2006, 512mb is now standard on -bottom- of the range systems (providing you dont go uber budget)
1gb upgrades are usually under 50 quid
2gB of budget memory can be hand for unter a ton, and as the article said, should become pretty standard as memory prices continue to fall (DDR2 is still considered in that 'new' category and is priced accordingly)
also DDR1 can still provide better performance in certain instances due to decreased latency with the more mature product, DDR2s increase in memory bandwidth does not translate to better performance in every scenario

also, the article mentions the fact that the average pc now has 871mb of memory
so if 256 was dedicated to video shared mem, you still have over 512 systemm memory, although anyone using shared gfx is likely to be the ones below that average not above it, most business systems come with 1024 standard these days too


cant really see a problem its the nature of the beast, if it had looked the same as XP with a massive overhaul to the internals people would of just gone 'no reason to upgrade, it looks like XP'

the fact is the flashy graphics can be disabled, this is not the feature that will attract corporate buyers
increases in managability, deployment and security are what will, including things like the bit locker encryption system (which unfortunatly uses that lovely Trusted computing DRM lark if implemented in a 'best practice' fasion)

anyway
you know me, always one to derail those bandwagons

Good points as always Phoenix. It's just that I like to get some longevity out of my machines. The laptop I use has similar spec to the one you are selling on eBay (P3 - 700Mhz). I bought the thing over 5 years ago and it is still going strong. Clearly I don't use XP on it, as that grinds it to a halt, whereas it runs fine with W2K Pro.

To me an OS gives me easy access to my applications, security is important to me but flashy eye candy graphics are not.

Hmmm.... I'm sure you have point, Phoenix, but I'm not too sure what it is. Maybe, software bloat is OK with you? I can easily run Debian (sarge) with Gnome or KDE as the gui on an 800 mhz AMD Athlon with 256 megs of ram. It also has an ftp server, a Samba server, and Apache web server running on it. Sure it's not as fast as the latest and greatest hardware, but it runs fine. It's not a dog at all. It's not as if I have to sit and wait for a minute or two even for large applications such as OO to open.

If you're satisfied with software bloat and drm, well, I'm happy for you.... I don't think either are acceptable, as I can install Sarge with both Gnome and KDE desktops, along with all their applications, on less drive space than Vista alone will use.

Maybe they need to be more aware of what the majority of users will use as features - instead of a one size fits all approach.

It would be nice to increase performance by implementing a features management wizard that allows you to turn off unused bits of the product...either that or apply standard or customiseable features templates to the OS like "web station", "personal desktop", "corporate PC" or "technical workstation".

This would also help the lock down of the product as well.

Freddy, im equally unsure what your point is, being I can get an XP system working on those specs thats just as responsive with an equal number of services running (in fact the majority of my servers here are Win2k3 R2 on P3 500 - 600s with 256 - 512mb)
i'm unsure why a new UI is considered bloat, the UI is your gateway into a PC, and whilst you and I may well be able to do most tasks with the CLI, 99% of the worlds userbase, corporate or otherwise, can not! these are the people that drive a sucessful product, not the 1% who think monad and bash are king

Do i accept DRM? no, but i will live with it if i HAVE to, do I agree with it? no, and as an individual, wherever possible I will not utilise it, a corporate COO will not have that same stance though, and has no need to, after all, why does he care if his systems are DRM compliant or not?

the point was not to trash vista because it requires new hardware, or get into the pathetic 'gnome on 256mb FTW!!!' argument
its a new OS, it needs modern system specs
but who cares? if you dont have a compelling reason to upgrade, i doubt anyone will force you to, many corporate OS upgrades follow the timelines for hardware refreshes, minimising distrubtion, cost and PM load
it always suprises me how many people get pissed that something new wont run on something old, *shrug*

Phoenix,

Part of my point was just tweaking you a little because it seems you always defend M$.

The other part was fueled by things like this blog from M$ employees. They admit Vista is very much a problem child and that M$ has lost its bearings, vision, and any sense of accountability for upper management. When that happens to a company it's a sure sign it's on its death march. M$ has so many resources that it will take a while to see it's death throes, but when a company's employees talk about it the M$ employees talk about their company there are very serious problems, and any products coming out of said company will have serious problems because the morale has been sucked out of the worker bees.

I don't know if you're old enough to remember or not, but there was a time when the employees at M$ couldn't say enough good things about their employer. Oh, how times have changed....

Well I'm currently running 3 gigs as of this morning, but only because of the VMware networks I play with.

Well, as an honest guy I do have to say the following.

I've been researching 64-bit laptops and servers for the last few weeks and I've come to understand one reason Vista will require so much memory. It's obvious if you think about it, but I hadn't really thought about it before.

64-bit software, such as Vista, use more memory simply because a 64-bit string takes up more memory than a 32-bit string does. It also means that until you exceed the 4 gig memory limit that many systems have a 64-bit system may very well not outperform a well-tuned 32-bit system as the 64-bit system will run out of memory before it reaches its full capacity to do work.

However, the drm being built into Vista and the proclivity of MS to just keep adding features rather than make improvements in stability and reducing the number of bugs makes me doubt that Vista will be any kind of "leap forward" for MS.

Interesting point Freddy, I hadn't thought of that