Justification for the exponential increase in Windows "minimum requirements"

[Balthisar]

@ultrafilter

Microsoft might be able to start over and write a new OS that worked significantly better than any current version, but it would take ten years to develop and probably be priced out of the consumer market.

My understanding is that is is exactly what Vista is. It’s not just a minor, under-the-hood tuneup, but a ground up re-write for a lot of the core system code. And listening to the /. crowd, it does seem priced out of the consumer market. And although it’s not 10 years behind yet, it’s way, way behind.

[crazyjoe]

@engineer_comp_geek

A little history of Microsoft…

Windows 3.0 - the first windows where people actually started using it, ran in 286 protected mode.
Windows 3.1 - minor changes to the above with some 386 enhancements, but still basically ran in 286 protected mode

Windows 95 (which identifies itself as Windows 4.0 - things make a lot more sense when you look at version numbners) - compatible with older versions of windows and DOS. Minimum requirements are based on what most people have available, and the thing will barely run on the minimum requirements (486 with 8 MB of ram, IIRC). Microsoft takes a lot of flak for setting the minimum requirements too low, but also takes a lot of flak for making an OS that won’t run on a lot of hardware. You can’t win.

NT 4.0 - the “business” version of windows. Has a better kernal, better protection, but a lof of the things that make it “better” also completely break compatibility. Also requires a higher horsepower CPU to do the same thing, since programs can’t directly access hardware to speed things up.

Note at this point that Microsoft has two completely different OS lines that they are maintaining, “Windows” and “NT”.

Thios was a pretty good summary, I just wanted to point out that there was a prior version of NT, NT 3.5, which had the old Windows 3.1 look on the NT backbone. And I loved the fact that for YEARS after NT 4.0 was out, long after windows 95 had intriduced the USB standard and Windows 98 had made it ubiquitous, NT 4.0 did not support it. This held the USB platform back quite a bit. Note how much more inexpensive and more widespread USB devices have become since Win2K finally embraced the technology.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

2GB??? Are they serious?

Who runs a 1Ghz processor with 2GB of RAM?

[Shalmanese]

The reason for the the huge increase in the RAM requirements is that Vista has drastically rewrote how memory is managed. XP and it’s predecessors tried to keep as much RAM free as possible so you can put stuff in there that you tell it you need. Vista does the opposite and tries to fill up as much of the RAM as possible with stuff it thinks you need based on extensive profiling of how you use your computer. Before XP, once you got above a certain amount of RAM, adding more was completely useless. Now, every increase in RAM will improve performance, although asymtotically so. So Microsoft is encouraging people to fill up their computers with far more RAM than they would actually need to contain their working set to improve the responsiveness and startup times of their applications.

[drachillix]

@Really Not All That Bright

2GB??? Are they serious?

Who runs a 1Ghz processor with 2GB of RAM?

People who hate page files. Hard drive caching is a HUGE performance drain, a little extra memory can go a long way. My workshop machines have 2G of ram w athlon 3200+. Hardy the bleeding edge of processor speeds but they have to be doing about 5 things at once to bog down.

[Cerowyn]

@crazyjoe

Thios was a pretty good summary, I just wanted to point out that there was a prior version of NT, NT 3.5, which had the old Windows 3.1 look on the NT backbone. And I loved the fact that for YEARS after NT 4.0 was out, long after windows 95 had intriduced the USB standard and Windows 98 had made it ubiquitous, NT 4.0 did not support it. This held the USB platform back quite a bit. Note how much more inexpensive and more widespread USB devices have become since Win2K finally embraced the technology.

If you’re going to nitpick that there were earlier versions of NT, you should start with NT 3.1, and mention 3.51 (which was a much more substantial upgrade than the .01 version bump suggests) as well.

GQ material this topic ain’t. You stand a better chance of getting an objective answer about abortion.

[mittu]

@Cerowyn

GQ material this topic ain’t. You stand a better chance of getting an objective answer about abortion.

That thought did occur to me. The trouble is I couldn’t be sure if there was a GQ answer until I found out what the answer was

It seems we are stuck with the snowballing-requirements-for-little-to-no-improvement methodology for now at least.

[CaveMike]

@Sage Rat

Not really.

So long as they kept the interface for all the drivers the same, they could rewrite the kernel in a couple of months. Most likely they have rewritten it several times.

What could they rewrite in a couple of months? The NT kernel is huge. Are you suggesting that all of the Windows code that runs in kernel-mode, but is not loaded as a driver could be rewritten in a few months?

[CaveMike]

@Balthisar

My understanding is that is is exactly what Vista is. It’s not just a minor, under-the-hood tuneup, but a ground up re-write for a lot of the core system code.

I think it was worse than this. My understanding is that it started out building on XP. However, well into the program the quality was a mess, so they undertook a massive rewrite.

[CaveMike]

@Sage Rat

I’m not sure about Vista, but I believe that Windows XP added some big thing where pretty much every Windows object would convert everything shared into XML, and then back for internal processing. Similarly, most any Windows or MS object can be loaded and called from any scripted language–necessitating that everything is in proper COM format. Etc.

This sounds like Monad, the object-oriented command-line that was developed for Vista and is available as an add-on for XP.