*Sonic*

Well I found a spare machine at work and installed Vista retail Ultimate

1st impressions are that I cant believe how much slower everything is over XP

Machine is following

Pentium 4 2ghz
512Mb Ram
40 Gb 133 Hard Disk
Nvidia Geforce 64Mb Gfx card

Not an ideal spec I know, but one that probably a lot of our customers have

Now we do have it installed on a 3Ghx cpu 64bit version 2gb ram, and it runs ok, not blistering like you might expect, but just about ok, oh and it crashes every time the screen saver and hibernation kicks in

Onto my questions

On the Vista Advisor it tells me (my laptop) cant run or will have problems with the following

Nero 7
Java
Cisco Network Assistant
Active Sync
Bluetooth

Anyone know what sort of problems I might have especially with the Cisco Network Assistant, and Java stuff

Steve

Shark Man

Well, that's me screwed. Think I'll stick with XP 64bit

GaryK

Not surprising they must have added huge amounts of code to do all the *fancy* stuff and its going to need some serious gear.

The amount of source code in each windows release has grown significantly.

Windows NT 5.0 (in 2000) was 20M lines
Windows 2000 (in 2001) was 35M lines
Windows XP (in 2002) was 40M lines
Vista 50M lines

Iain Young

That's not necessarily a factor in speed though. Problems encoutered are more likely to be due to poorly optimised (or buggy) drivers for the initial release.

Some more numbers for you (million lines of code)...

1993 Windows NT 3.1 - 6
1994 Windows NT 3.5 - 10
1996 Windows NT 4.0 - 16
2000 Windows 2000 - 29
2001 Windows XP - 40
2005 Windows Vista Beta 2 - 50

also...

Operating System SLOC (Million)
Red Hat Linux 6.2 - 17
Red Hat Linux 7.1 - 30
Debian 2.2 - 56
Debian 3.0 - 104
Debian 3.1 - 213
Sun Solaris - 7.5
Mac OS X 10.4 - 86
Linux kernel 2.6.0 - 6

So OSX is actually bigger than any version of windows

*Sonic*

The biggest hit for performance is graphics card, ie you need a very fast one, with huge amounts of memory

Its the screen redraws i noticed that were incredibly slow, even with everything turned off and looking like XP, hard disk hardly got accessed at all

with absolutley nothing running, system was using 312mb ram, so minimum really will be 1gb ram to run an application as well

It is a bit like I said previously though about Vista, todays operating system for tomorrows pc's or rather next years brand of pc's

Laptop owners will be pretty screwed for running Vista anything like decent, as you cant upgrade the gfx cards in the majority of them

GaryK

Agreed Iain although it is significant I think.

Yes and it manages to do everything windows can at a much improved speed, and with intel cpu's and parallels desktop even Win32 emulation is useable!

Gary

Iain Young

Very true. Which proves the point that a large code base has nothing to do with the speed of the software.

I've not tried the Vista final release yet, but I did try beta 2 and found it to be just as fast as XP on my machine, so I suspect any speed problems that people are having at the moment are because of low ram, slow graphics hardware, or dodgy drivers.

I'm surpised Vista even actully tried to run on the spec that Sonic mentioned (especially the graphics card).

*Sonic*

Vista will allegedly run (ok ok, it will install) on a lower spec machine than that, but you dont get all the nice 'aero' features

I can according to the microsoft blurb run Vista on my old Celeron 1 ghz pc with 256mb ram, although it does recommend upgrading the ram

bugeyeandy

Apart from the shiney interface - just what is the point of Vista?

ScoobyDoo555

to play catch up to OSX

Dan

Shark Man

So, would a geForce 7600 (256meg) cope?

Its a bit jerky on desktop re-draw as it is (only very slightly though). Although it maybe the screwy 64bit drivers that probably need a bit more refinement.

I think the built in intel gfx on the two works PCs will screwed, not that I had any doubt about that

*Sonic*

We do have it running on another P4 that has a 37 quid 256Mb gfx card in it, and it does run the aero interface

It is still slow, but you can see what the potential of a high end pc will be like

Its funny how it is turning out, years ago my mates would all keep going out and buying the latest gfx card, 3-400 quid's worth just on a gfx card, so they could play the latest games at the best resolution etc etc

Now they can go out and do the same thing just to load the OS

MJW

To finally bring 64-bit addressing to home users to take advantage of the 64-bit chips that have been available but under-used for years. It will also allow machines to address more than 2.5Gb RAM, thereby making programmers even lazier !

Iain Young

Also, supposedly a much better security model, much better graphics handling (which should help enormously with games), plus a plethora of smaller fixes, rewrites etc...

Daz34

Apparently, no DirectX 9 cards (or lower) fully support Windows Vista's features.

Iain Young

That is true. To get the full feature set in Vista, you need a DX10 graphics card. It will run ok with lower cards though...

ChefDude

the twiddly graphics are for the home users.

for business vista is all about easier to developand utilise, ineropability and workflow.

everything behind the scenes, data wise, will be an evolution of XML

the architecture is pretty smart actually.

InvisibleMan

for business works fine on a 1.6Ghz 1Gb internal graphics laptop though graphically it didnt work well with some of the games it came with.

InvisibleMan

using atm on a pc via virtual pc 2007 with 512mb & using geforce4 mx gfx - office 2007 is nice

Shark Man

That's interesting, I looked at the box for my GPU last night and it clearly has stamped on it "Built for windows Vista"...Barstewards

Mind, it didn't come with 64bit drivers either, so that says it all really

mattbeef

I dont get what your all worried about the real OS will be out soon 10.5

Shark Man

That doesn't come with a free upgrade voucher though (plus "postage" )

ScoobyDoo555

It has to be said, while I wind up about OSX, I've been holding off updating my woefully inadequate PC (2Ghz Athlon-thingy with 1Gig ram/ ATI 9700pro all running on IDE drives) until Vista comes out and is running properly.....

Hopefully, this next 12 months will see Vista settle down (remember the issues with XP when it first came out?)

Once that happens, it will be time for a new toy...... and Halo3

Dan

Mick

iTrader: (1)

I installed Vista RC1 on these 2 machines...

-abit- AN7 v1.0 MoBo|Athlon XP2400+|OC'd at 2250MHz (15x150)|Maxtor 200GB 6L200M0 SATA|Crucial 3200 Memory 2x512MB|Sparkle FX5700LE 128 MB or MSI GeForce FX 5200 128 MB Personal Cinema|LG GCC-4320B DVD/CDRW|Arctic Cooler -Copper Silent 2L|CWT 400W PSU|4x USB 2.0 card|Black Tower Case w Blue info screen OS - Dual boot WinXP and Vista RC1 (32)
-abit- AV8 v1.0 3rd Eye 'RocketBoy' MoBo |Athlon 64 X2 4200+ |Seagate 20GB & Maxtor 80GB IDE|Corsair TWINXMS 3200XL Pro Memory 2x512MB 2,2,2,5|Gainward FX5900XT Ultra 128 MB (450/850)|Phillips CDRW 5200|AMD Std Cooler|Antec True Blue 480W PSU|Boring beige Tower Case OS - Quad boot WinXP and Win98SE - and Vista 32 and 64 bit RC1

And there isn't really much difference in speed between running normal programs... I do find that a basic 3DMark 01 score on the AMD 64 X2 4200 machine which is ~ 18000 drops to ~ 1/2 that when running Vista... - still higher than the XP2400 machine though LOL

Mick