Will Your PC Run Windows Vista?

[tag]

Here's another link with a few screenshots:

http://www.pcnx.com/reviews/review.asp?reviewid=2005070003

[ROF]

5GB? Finally an Operating System that maintains a full blown presence on 100's of gigs of space. It's good to see microsoft continuing to add more and more features(some wanted, some not) into the windows core. Unlike other OSs that try to strip down a version of they think I might need.

[spectroelectro]

The real answer to the question "Will your PC be able to run Vista?" is "Who cares?"

XP Home is a bloated senile mess. The NT kernel in XP is actually older than the NT kernel in Win 2K. 50% of corporate users still have Win 2K on their desktops and I've heard a bunch of IT managers say they're not gonna move off Win 2K. XP gives the consumer nothing of significance that's not available in Win 2K, and XP Home serves only to remove capabilities that were already present in Win 2K. Viz.: XP Home requires an activation code so you can't run it on multiple desktops, while Win 2K can be run on all the computers in your home with no activation code requirement.

Worse: When SP2 came out for XP, it crashed and bluescreened 60% of the testbed computers on which it was installed:
http://www.messagingpipeline.com/news/25600112

"...Upon completion of the install on three out of five systems, the machines blue-screened. A message stated that "winserv" was missing. The blue screen occurred on both Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel platforms, and all systems were running Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 1 installed. Every possible avenue to get back into Windows failed."

Obviously that was a while ago, and there's now a fix for the fix -- pretty funny, huh? A fix to fix the problems caused by the fix named SP2 that was supoesd to fix other problems. And soon, no doubt, ffixes for the fixes for the fixes...infinite regression, anyone?

The simplest solution is to avoid XP Home like the plague. Stick with Win 2K SP3. You can run Google Desktop on it, you can do virtually everything you need or want to do with Win 2K, including almost any kind of video editing or authoring application imaginable.

The only types of video applications which you probably won't be able to handle from inside Win 2K will be putative mythical not-yet-available HD video authoring apps. No such personal authoring software exists yet because the mfrs haven't yet stopped their infantile food fight abotu which HD delivery platform to use, Blue-Ray or HD-DVD.

So it's safe to say that HD video disc authoring is far enough down the road that at this point it's about as worth worrying about as the alleged date on which you're going to be beamed up by a UFO. Let's face facts -- HD video is in chaos, with two major consortia sitll fighting over whether to use HD-DVD or Blu-Ray as the delivery medium, and the market penetration of HDTVs is still minuscule. Most HDTVs are still in chaos, since if you examine the specs true 1080i HDTVs remain few and far between. There are whole lotta boxes that call themselves HDTVs but only do 740p or 480p. To get a tsate of the confusion and chaos and outright misrepresentation by mfrs that swirls around the current crop of HDTVs, visit some of the Hi Def forums:

http://www.hometheaterspot.com/htsthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/731348/an/0/page/0

http://www.highdefforum.com/archive/index.php/t-8404.html

http://www.hdtvoice.com/voice/archive/index.php/t-12365.html

All the usual problems -- HDTV broadcasts intermittantly jump into and out of 4:3 and back into Hi Def 16:9, HDTVs that *claim* to display 1080i but actually upconvert or upsample, and of course the ongoing debacle of Blu-Ray vs. Hd-DVD, which might require as many as 3 different types of players for some time to come. Blue-Ray, HD-DVD, and line-doubled standard DVD (!)

And this doesn't even address the issue of the MPAA's massive push for re-engineering HDTVs so that all HDTVs can only use an HDMI connector, the better to make it impossible to capture an analog hi-def signal at any point in the link.

http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-12453.html

One of Window's Longhorn AKA Vista's upcoming features is supposed to be that it won't support display of HD video on a non-DRM'd monitor, so consumers are supposed to throw out their current perfectly good computer monitors and buy expensive new ones just to watch HD content on their computers.

http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/entry/1182/what_windows_vista

This entire chaos had created such a bad taste in the mouth of everyone thinking about dealing with HD content in home video that it's probably gong to be many, many years -- if ever -- before Hi Def video really takes off to the pont where it becomes an absolute necessity in home video production. That means that it's like we'll be using 720 x 480 4:3 video for quite some time to come, and thus nobody needs to rush out and upgrade to Vista or Longhorn or whatever Micro$haft is calling it this week. As Smurf pointed out, of course.

The real issue to my mind is whether most of the energy and ingenuity of mfrs is now going into *crippling* new consumer audio and video products. As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, no consumer wakes up in the morning and say, "Gee, I want to do less with my computer / TV / radio / iPod than I did yesterday." Yet that is the direction in which we're travelling. Vista with its DRM monitor requirement is aon example, HDTV with its endless ongoing haggling over new CSS formats and the requirement of HDMI-only HDTVs so the analog HD signal is never available unecrypted at any point is another example. Apple's constant fidlding with iPod firmware to break hacks that allow people to move content off their iPods onto their computers is yet another example. Everywhere, we're seeing a fanatical mania by giant corporations for crippling video and audio consumer electronics so that they do less than they used to and won't work at all in many cases. As for example when the new generation of copy-protected CDs refuse to play on computers, and even on some CD players.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-852952.html

http://www.macuser.co.uk/macuser/news/66965/updated-ipod-firmware-update-breaks-real-hack.html

At some point the consumer will rebel. They'll just refuse to lap up the giant corporation's vomit like dogs licking up their master's puke. XP Home takes 1.2 gigabytes compared to the 500 megs of Win 2K and the 150 megs of Win 98SE, yet you can do 90% on Win 98SE of everything that you can do with XP. For my part, I refuse to install XP in any form on my home computers because of its DRM features. Yes, you can get around those -- but the point is, I shouldn't have to. Yes, you can fiddle with your iPod to put back the functionality that Apple removes -- but once again, you shouldn't have to.

It's safe to say that some 14-year-old kid will probably bust whatever CSS upgrade HD-DVD or Blu-Ray video discs fianlly decide to use within 15 hours of its appearance. Just as CSS was busted, just as DVD-Audio discs can now be ripped. All efforts to prevent people from unlocking content are ultimately futile since, as others have pointed out, in order to distribute video or audio discs that are playable, giant corporations must supply both the method of encryption and the key. That's like locking a safe and taping the combination to the side of the safe. There's just no way to prevent people from freely accessing and duplicating digital media content other than by making the media cmpletely unplayable anywhere, at any time.

Since a basic provision of Longhorn is supposed to be the Trusted Computing Initiative, which will involve hardware DRM chips installed on computer motherboards, I for one will never eve E*V*E*R upgrade to Vista. Ever. Period. In fact, if Vista does come with even more DRM than XP, I'll stock up on current botherbaords and use 'em until the cows come home. Hardware DRM on the motherboard of your computer is completely unacceptable, and could theoretically do truly insane things like shutting you entire computer down if you refuse to pay for an upgrade of your OS, or forcing you to buy an expensive new version of Microsoft Word because the DRM chip won't let you open the file format created by the new version of Word unless you pay.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,832770,00.asp

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0%2C1697%2C1237519%2C00.asp

Essentially, Vista represnts the thin edge of the wedge of converting every key on your computer keyboard into a PAY button. Want to play DVDs on yoru computer? Gotta pay a monthly fee. Want to create WOMV12 (or whatever) audio content on your compute rfor playback on a portable device? Gotta pay a monthly fee. If Vista and trusted computing become a reality widely accepted by consumres, pretty soon you'll have to pay to do anything on your computer. Absolutely anything. Want to open a file? Gotta pay. Want to read a file? Gotta pay. Want to create a compressed video file? Gotta pay. And the hardware DRM chip hooked right into your motherboard will _force_ you to pay or your computer stops dead.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/29/effs_trusted_computi.html

Get a load of topics like "Protected media path" and "driver lockdown." It's enough to freeze the lymph in your glands.

http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/07/27/how_microsoft_is_selling_out_the_..._hollywood.php

http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/07/27/drm_chops_off_the_long_tail.php

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003807.php

That's so unacceptable that if it happens I will abandon Windows entirely for Linux. Vista represents the beginning of the end for Microsoft. I smell the same kind of disaster coming with Trusted Computing that hit IBM when it went mad with hubris and tried to force everyone in the computer industry to adopt the Micro Channel Architecture. The industry took one look and said, "Feh!" and walked away, and IBM's long slide into irreelvance in the desktop computer industry began at that moment. Linux is a reactoin to the increasing amount of DRM garbage (region coding which infests both DVD-ROM drives *and* software like WinDVD, CSS infesting DVDs, DRm infesting iTunes and iPod firmware, DRM infesting XP in the form of a registration requirement for activation) dumped onto PC OSs like XP and media players like the iPod and DVD players. As just one example, everyone I now is infuriated beyond description at not being able to FF past those damned commercials at the start of DVDs.

The open BIOS movement has already begun in response to this new round of crippleware from Intel and Micro$haft, which promises to remove even _more_ functionality from our computers -- and Vista is right at the evil center of it all:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/toolkit/hardware/desktops/soa/Battle_brews_over_unlock...87293-2,00.htm

If Vista actually does represent the start of an insane megalomaniacal Microsoft Trusted Computing hwardware DRM on the motherboard Palladium-type push to rewrite the mobo BIOs with proprietary closed DRM'd code that's locked into an OS like Vista at a hardware level, then there will be such a massive tidal wave of backlash that Microsoft will slide into irrelevence just as fast as IBM did.

[smearbrick1]

Wow!!! With all that paranoia you seem to be prone to, it's a wonder you get on the web at all! If I'm not mistaken, weren't there outlandish claims like this made against XP? You know, I'm all for freedom do whatever with my media, and I'm not really thrilled with the prospect of DRM being built into ROM chips on my motherboard (when and if that actually happens), but when it comes down to it, I (the individual, singular voiced consumer) can very little. The multitude of people who will be upgrading to Vista from XP probably upgraded to XP without batting an eyelash. The majority of people only care about "is it new". I would be willing to be that about 50% of computer users can't even tell you what an OS is, let alone be able to decipher the implications of "protected media path" and "driver lockdown". Hell, several people I know, when something expires on their pc (antivirus for example) they immediately bust out the credit card and upgrade without even researching. I would be willing to bet that a large percentage of Norton antivirus or Mcafee antivirus software upgrades sold in the US come from unknowing users just clicking "upgrade".

I guess sometimes ignorance is bliss...

I had a bigger point to make, but I can't remember the rest.

[rkgibbons]

Hey Spectroelectro:

Good to see you're buying into the same anti-Microsoft CRAP that has been plaguing the nether-regions of the web for the past six or seven years.

You need to spend less time surfing for anti-Microsoft propaganda sites, and more time actually using Windows XP. It's a great platform.

Sure, it might be a little bloated, but you have to consider the breadth and depth of the things it needs to accomplish (and does accomplish remarkably well).

These types of rants grow tiresome.

I've been waiting for Microsoft to force me to pay for everything since Windows 98 (when all you anti-Microsoft grunts first claimed it would happen). Then Windows 2000 came along, and I grabbed my credit card expecting to pay for everything (as you grunts insisted would happen). But stll nothing. Then XP. More grunting, more assurance. Still nothing.

Oh wait, it's Vista. That's wheh Microsoft will finally sink their teeth into us. And instead of making money by providing a quality product, they'll extract money by putting the screws to everyone and drain every last cent from our pockets.

Yah.

Keep grunting, Mr. Grunty-McGrunt-Alot.

[ROF]

Obviously that was a while ago, and there's now a fix for the fix -- pretty funny, huh? A fix to fix the problems caused by the fix named SP2 that was supoesd to fix other problems. And soon, no doubt, ffixes for the fixes for the fixes...infinite regression, anyone?

The simplest solution is to avoid XP Home like the plague. Stick with Win 2K SP3. You can run Google Desktop on it, you can do virtually everything you need or want to do with Win 2K, including almost any kind of video editing or authoring application imaginable.

Dude, what are you on about?

Win2k SP3 is over 2 years old and has been replaced with service pack 4 not longer afterwards and hundreds of fixes and updates since then. Do a search at microsoft to see a listing of patches and updates for XP. Now compare that with patches and fixes for Win2K. Did you notice anything?

Win2K has more patches and fixes then Win98, WinME, and WinXP combined. How could you recommend someone stick with SP3 for Win2K when SP4 is available plus the additional security updates, especially the ones released in May of this year? Are you recommending people go back in time? Are you recommending they use an unstable and unprotected build as their Operating System?

You posted alot of "fluff" but nothing you said had any substance.

[SatStorm]

SP4 for WIN2K has problems, especially regarding internet browsing

All those fixes / patches try to handle the issues SP4 presented the first time for the W2K users.
By using SP3, 85% of the later issues disappear!

[vitualis]

Let us not forget, once again, that Windows XP is in essence Windows 2000 with a better looking GUI (which is optional) and better driver support.

Conspiracy theories aside, I find it hard to for anyone to argue that Windows XP is not a great home consumer operating system. Yes, Windows 2000 is pretty good, but it is also somewhat cryptic to your average person (when compared to Windows 98SE or *gasp* Windows ME). Windows XP brought the NT platform to the masses.

I think that Windows Vista will probably be fine once the initial spate of bugs are sorted out. However, there seems to be relatively little incentive for people to pay for an upgrade from Windows XP SP2 to Vista as a lot of the "cool" stuff that Vista/Longhorn was meant to have, have been taken out. This is especially true if you don't have the video hardware to run the new GUI.

Regards.

[VERVE]

Man!

Do people nag or what. I do realize that it is "mainstream" and even cool to Trash MicroSoft, but hey, Monopoly with a bad product...or a worthless concept and implementation or whatever u wanna call it...most companies are using Windows, and most of those are generating their money from this product, so stop nagging, and go make some money of it too!

and now..for the sake of blending in the crowd.." Hey DUDE...MS sux.. :P "

Cheers,
VERVE

[Deku Scrub]

I shouldn't have a problem running it on my computer, but I am in no hurry to upgrade.
I will probably wait at least a year 'til most of the kinks are worked out.

[AlecWest]

I'm not sure whether mine will run Vista or not. But, I don't immediately switch to another OS just because "it's there." It has to provide me with an ability to do something I want to do with my computer that I can't do with it already. The ONLY reason I installed WinXP was to break the 4GB filesize barrier inherent in FAT32 systems ... allowing me to capture or manipulate large video files without worrying over size limitations.

But that's pretty much all I use WinXP for - video work. Most of the time, I'm in my Win98SE partition and happy as a clam to be there. Win98SE does me fewer "favors" (ahem) and doesn't try to phone home as much as XP (and XP-based software).

Bottom line? If I really need Vista to perform a function I want to perform, I'll probably get a bigger hard drive and add it as a new partition (if that's possible). But I'd have to have a "need" for it first. And, that "need" would be tempered by my willingness (or lack thereof) to accept embedded straightjackets like DRM.