[QUOTE=Colophon]
Sure, if you do heavy-duty graphics work then you want a decent amount of RAM. My point is that Vista is now supposedly the basic OS for anyone and everyone. Why does my mother, for example, who wants to use a bit of email, type the odd letter and maybe edit a few 2-3MB photo files, what do they gain from such a massive bloated piece of software apart from slower performance and more crashes?
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Like the massive and bloated XP performed slower and crashed more than the positively nippy and stable Win 9x? Or like the massive and bloated OSX (for which 512MB to a gig of RAM is also a practical minimum) crashes all the time? Hmm.
One thing Vista’s using all that memory for is pre-loading your frequently-used programs in to memory, which (surprise) makes them load faster when you choose to open them. Another thing is the advent of managed programming languages, which make software development easier and more reliable precisely because developers don’t have to fart about with tortuous manual memory manipulation, and as a result don’t write so many bugs, buffer overflows and vulnerabilities. Believe it or not, the memory is being used for genuine reasons.
I don’t understand why this bothers people. Memory is so cheap these days it’s practically free; why do people get upset that it’s used (when they don’t, for example, mind buying ever-bigger hard drives)? There’s no need to go hand-optimising machine code to get your app to fit in 8K any more, and the benefits gained by actually using the extra memory can be huge. Sure, some of it gets “wasted” on whizz-bang stuff, but then on the other hand people piss and moan about how their computer isn’t “pretty” enough if the fades and animations aren’t present.
Apart from anything else, I don’t know why this canonical granny/mother keeps getting brought up in these discussions. So she only uses email? Fine, then she probably doesn’t need a souped up hypermachine; hell, she could probably survive with a Mac Classic. But I don’t see the ads saying “Windows Vista: almost as good as a nice cup of tea and a sit down,” so what’s the problem? It’s not like you’re being forced to run out and buy the latest thing; presumably your mother already has a computer, right? Why is it only operating systems that get subjected to the granny test? Do you look at a Ferrari and think, “fine, but does my elderly mother really need three and a half thousand cubic centimetres of displacement, generating two hundred and seventy five foot pounds of torque? I think not!”
Lots of people are using their machines for things that would previously have been considered outrageously heavy-duty. I remember watching “Tomorrow’s World” years ago and being told by a saucer-eyed presenter how in “the future” we might be watching tee vee on our pee cees, while a top-of-the-line computer strained in the background to produce a grainy, jerky, five-second clip of his face. Now we’re streaming telly to our desktops without a second thought. We’re editing home movies, touching up our photos, ripping our CDs … you name it. The person who only checks their email is a receding myth (hell, even my own mother, who’s a pensioner now, has started to get to grips with YouTube). Face it; the formerly difficult is becoming commonplace, and all of this takes memory, just as it takes disk space and processor power.