“The complaints about sluggish performance in Windows Vista keep growing. While it’s unfair to point to beta software apps—or whatever Microsoft wants to call them—the warning flags are already evident,” David Morgenstern writes for eWeek.
“A batch of complaints reached my inbox following my recent column looking at Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard and Vista. One message, from reader Randall Asato, warned that folks thinking they can run Aero on older hardware will be out of luck,” Morgenstern writes.
Morgenstern writes, “He said he expected that most upgraders will be at the least forced to purchase a new video card with sufficient VRAM (video RAM)… There are signs that the base performance of Vista on almost any hardware configuration may disappoint. Or at least concerns that Vista will run sluggishly on the system configs that Windows buyers are accustomed to.”
“At the same time, performance may be hindered by the traditional thin configurations offered in the Windows market. Many machines ship with 512MB of RAM, and in the mindset of the market this is sufficient.
For example, the software industry still maintains the fiction that a Windows XP machine with 256MB of RAM can do all the tasks that need to be done, or that users might want to get done. Look at almost any piece of software and 256MB is listed as the base system requirement,” Morgenstern writes. “But that amount has little to do with usability. It’s a joke.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: First of all, 99% of Windows users have no idea what a video card is, much less the ability to upgrade it. Let’s face it, these people bought their personal computer at Wal-Mart. So, when Joe and Jane Sixpack are faced with the idea of having to buy a new computer to run “that there great new Winduhs they got out now,” wouldn’t it be nice if they knew there was a better way this time around? The more ads Apple runs for the Mac right now, the better. Get a Mac.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
a href=”http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/10688/”>Apple’s Boot Camp 1.1 runs Microsoft Windows Vista Pre-RC1 – August 28, 2006
Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard is 64-bit done right, unlike Microsoft’s Windows Vista kludge – August 14, 2006
Microsoft Windows Vista: If you can’t innovate… try to impersonate Apple’s Mac OS X – August 10, 2006
Analyst: Apple’s new Mac OS X Leopard sets new bar, leaves Microsoft’s Vista in the dust – August 08, 2006
Windows Vista rips-off Mac OS X at great hardware cost (and Apple gains in the end) – June 13, 2006
Computerworld: Microsoft Windows Vista a distant second-best to Apple Mac OS X – June 02, 2006
CNET reporter: Apple Mac mini is my most ‘Vista Ready’ PC – May 24, 2006
What’s the difference between Mac OS X and Vista? Microsoft employees are excited about Mac OS X – March 22, 2006
Analyst: Windows Vista may still impress many consumers because they have not seen Apple’s Mac OS X – January 05, 2006<
Wow. Make Windows users sound like Larry the Cable Guy. I thought we wanted these people to convert to Mac. Insulting the platform is one thing, insulting the individuals suffering through it is another. MDN usually is the one to point out that “PC” is the computer, not the user, then turns around and mocks out the users.
Not cool, MDN. Most of us were lost little Windows sheep before we saw the light.
Tiger runs adequately fast on my Imac G3.
That little beast is 8 years old.
Okay, let’s face it: it doesn’t run photoshop CS2, although it could.
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As Slayer said it, and it counts for many windows users:
“You have to die to see the light”
I’m not making excuses for Windows or PCs in general, but the platform requirements to effectively run MacOS X have also increased over the years if you want to take advantage of the full OS functionality. I recall many complaints lodged in this forum regarding the inadequate base RAM and video RAM installed in new Macs.
Apple’s computer hardware seems to generally enjoy a longer usable life than Windows PC’s, but I do not take any joy in finding out that many PC users will find themselves stuck with XP, or worse, in a nightmare of an upgrade cycle trying to run Vista because they hope to escape the virus/trojan/malware problem.
MW “job”…I got the Steveness on my side!
why is it that every Mac upgrade seems to get quicker?
is it just wishful thinking on my part?
every Windows upgrade seems to need new hardware.
I second Akido and I have made the same request in the past to MDN. It serves no constructive purpose to ridicule the eductation level, socioeconomic status, intelligence or other personal aspects of PC users. It makes us Mac users sound like a bunch of egotistical, elitist a$$holes.
Remember the old saying about honey…?
“Many machines ship with 512MB of RAM, and in the mindset of the market this is sufficient.”
Some PC people are afraid to add more than that because of the cost – and fear that the PC won’t last long enough to recoop their expense of the add on.
In a recent conversation with an about to be switcher, I recommend maxing out a MacBook on RAM if possible but get at least 1G RAM at minimum. Their next two statement took me by surprise: “How long do you Mac people expect your Macs to last?”
Me: 5 to 10 years. I have a 10 year old 8600 still performing Photoshop graphic enhancements. My daughter has my almost 6 year old Pismo.
PC User wanting to switch: So that is why you Mac people don’t mind maxing out your computers – you expect them to last long enough to get your money’s worth out of them and for any added upgrades too.”
But of course!
PC’s in general don’t last long enough for them to justify adding MORE RAM and upgraded Video Cards.
The reason why Vista is a bloat hog is that it’s SUPPOSED to force a hardware upgrade.
M$ is going to sell
1: Better security
2: Better looks
3: More features
4: Trusted Computing
5: HDCP
Since most PC users will just get Vista with a hardware upgrade (2 years on average with Dell) it really makes it irrealevant to make it run on older hardware. Actually M$ doesn’t really want it to, because older machines don’t have the TPM chip.
Microsoft is looking at trying to get 100% Vista purchase compliance.
Of course Apple is locking Mac OS X to their Intel hardware the same way, with a TPM chip.
Which later on Apple can start restricting the per seat licensing, all in the grand scheme of one day being able to sell Mac OS X seperatly from Apple hardware.
It’s coming, trust me.
The new Mac ads are amusing but eliteist. When the nerd guy talks about the malware etc., the least the ‘cool’ guy could do is ask how much in time and money, all that crap costs.
MW–still–as in– Apple still doesn’t cut to the chase with their ads.
MDN: First of all, 99% of Windows users have no idea what a video card is…
If 99% of Windows users have no idea what a video card is, then 99.99% of Mac users have no idea what a video card is, considering that most Mac users never had to deal with video cards.
I think there are more than 1% Windows users with some idea of what the video card is. They need to run Windows.
Apple’s give us knowledge that we would have never dreamt about, and they taste great too!
Akido is right. Tone it down, MDN.
I gott agree with the general concensus. I was a winblows guy a long time ago. I have since seen the light, but didn’t have to die first. Just because I didn’t know any better does not make me a trailer trash tee shirt wearing, no teeth, car up on blocks in the yard next to the old refrigerator, cashing my paycheck at the bar kinda guy.
Those were the daze of os9, and osx has changed everything. Most people who are stuck in the myopic mindset of winblows cling to the FUD that surrounded os9, and just don’t know.
There is no reason to be snobbish, yes we have better toys, but that doesn’t mean we cant get more market share.
Asato and Morgenstern are mistaken on one basic premise – that generic Windows users ever upgrade their OS. Most don’t even apply security patches! The people most likely to consider upgrading from XP to Vista are the corporate types, and they are already buying “Vista-ready” hardware where they anticipate they will want to upgrade. Many will test in-house, then push to all “applicable” systems over a period of a few weeks – to keep a single, standard ‘platform’ on the majority of systems.
Joe and Jane Six-pack will need to be sold on the need for any such upgrade … seriously, seriously SOLD! We’re not talking about a banner in the WalMart computer aisle, we’re talking about radio, newspaper and tv execs making payments on their yachts! That banner in WalMart might convince them to pay a bit extra for their next computer (because the old one is so slow, now that it’s caught a ‘bot) and get a Vista model, but that isn’t hardly the same thing as buying a Vista distro and trying the install themselves.
What Vista users are they talking about?
Can I go buy Vista at CompUSA?
How can the performance of a non-existant product be sluggish and cause consumers to complain?
I do not understand why so many bytes of a pro Mac web site are spent on non-existant M$ OS’s. If M$ wants us to talk about their products and how they compare to Macs, they can finish them, release them, and sell them. STOP HELPING M$ HYPE THEIR POORLY MADE WARES.
After reading MDN’s snipet at the top my first question was the same as Ray’s, “…what VISTA users?”
Obviously we’re being referred to beta testing or preRelease trials, but the tone of these critiques sounds like its [VISTA] out there now, and its falling short as a final product release. Talk about WWII style propaganda…
Sometimes making a thing or event seem worse than it really is has the net effect of making the reality not seem as bad as its really going to be. (I think Confucius said that somewhere.)
So my advice to MDN (not that anyone asked of course) is to maybe lay low and let VISTA be whatever VISTA is going to be – let it speak for itself. An objective, sans rhetoric, reference to an article from time to time would be ok, but anything more might just be a mistake. I live in rural southern IL (I was born and raised in the “big city”), and I can tell you that calling people stupid, directly or indirectly, has the strong tendency to make people even less prone to any positive change. Just FYI.
I used DOS and Doze for 20 years before I switched. I was the office geek/tech advice guy, and built more top of the line Dozers than I can count. I will argue that the average (I said AVERAGE) Mac person probably knows no more about Vcards than the average PC person does. I’ll bet the top Doze gamer subset would blow away the equivelent Mac subset as far as box mods and upgrades go. It’s the gamer PC way of life.
But, having said all of that, any non-gamer who doesn’t seriously consider OS X just hasn’t been paying attention. I just finally got tired of Doze and was ready for the change. I’ve never ever regretted my move to the light.
You guys complaining about MDN’s take are being far too sensitive. First of all, they’re joking. Way back before the the world became a bastion for political correctness, there used to be this thing called HUMOR, where you could make fun of something, and people weren’t afraid to laugh, sometimes even at themselves.
Second, regardless of whether you used to be a PC user or not, if you’re hanging around these boards, you are not the type of person MDN is talking about. The truth is, most of the population is extremely ignorant when it comes to computers. They are the people who think a 3.5″ floppy disk is a hard disk, that their monitor is the entire computer (and they don’t own iMacs), and that the operating system they run is Microsoft Word. We see these people everyday. In fact, you might very well be sitting next to one of them right now. If you’re reading this post, on a Mac-centric website, chances are, you are not one of them.
PC folks also criticize the Mac for not being upgradeable, but the truth is, very few PC users ever upgrade anything.
Remember the old saying about honey…?
what kind of idiot spends his time trying to catch flies?
That should read: what kind of hillbilly spends his time trying to catch flies?
Ask Bill McNeal
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To ndelc: Just because an insult doesn’t directly insult me, doesn’t mean it’s any less wrong. In our case, why would we expect PC users to discard their preconceptions that us Mac users are snobs when we resort to such tactics? We get all bent out of shape when people want to “put a lit cigarette” in our eye, yet we feed the fire that caused those feelings.
Also, in my experience, those who bash political correctness are often doing so to cover their own racism. Unlike some, I do not fondly look back on the days when racial slurs were uttered as a matter of course. The world is better now than it was, but obviously we have a long way to go.
Well, I had to replace my Radeon 9800 Pro (128 megs RAM, stock) on my ’03 dual 2Ghz G5 to make it work with Aperture. So this is hardly a major complaint about Vista. After all, you’re happy with what you got? Don’t upgrade!
Dude man
Akido,
They need to be slapped awake, anything less won’t accomplish the task. Here’s why:
Defending Windows over Mac a sign of mental illness
Akido, first of all, it’s unlikely that the type of people who MDN is talking about would ever visit MDN anyway, so I doubt that they’d ever see it to be offended. Second of all, what we’re talking about here is the purchase of a product. I would question the common sense of anyone who would decide not to buy a superior product that would make their life easier just because they regard others who use it to be snobs.
“Also, in my experience, those who bash political correctness are often doing so to cover their own racism. Unlike some, I do not fondly look back on the days when racial slurs were uttered as a matter of course. The world is better now than it was, but obviously we have a long way to go.”
At what point did I mention anything regarding racism? I don’t appreciate you putting words in my mouth. I don’t tolerate racism, but I also believe that going to the point where you cannot even acknowledge differences in people is equally as damaging. How will we learn about other types of people if we can’t talk about what makes us different? Political correctness has been taken to the extreme in this country, to the point where you basically can’t risk offending anybody. Forget race, you can’t make a joke about hair color, or style of clothing, or apparently, what computer one uses. That’s ridiculous. Life is funny. There’s nothing wrong with pointing that out. My favorite comedians are Dennis Miller, Chris Rock, and Bill Maher. What they have in common is, they’re honest, and they don’t apologize for offending anyone with their honesty.
Take a step back and look at this discussion. You’re all bent out of shaped because MDN joked that most computer users in the world don’t know much about their computers. Sorry, but I find it ridiculous. No offense ; )
Bloke — geek test!
It is almost inevitable that Vista 1.0 will run at the same speed as the first retail version of OS X.
However, before I get flamed to death, let’s be clear on the differences…
When OS X was released, memory was more expensive, video processing power was more expensive – hell, everything was more expensive. As a result, it was more ‘difficult’ to own a system on which Cheetah (as it was known, with unintended irony) would run with ease.
To put some flesh on that argument, OS X was initially released in an era of PC100/133 SDRAM, 80GB EIDE disks and <shudders>sub-GHz G4 processors</shudders> with a truly crapulous 256KB of L2 cache. Vista will, by contrast, be released (and is probably being tested) on systems with DDR2 memory, fast SATA disks and multi-core multi-GHz processors with more L2 cache than an Apollo mission could shake a Saturn V rocket at.
That, in spite of all of these advantages, Microsoft have still managed to build a piece of OS software that can overwhelm its host hardware beggars belief and calls into question any number of elements of Microsoft’s development process and expertise including…
1) Design and programming: Einstein has a quote attributed to him which, paraphrased, says something about things being as simple as possible and no simpler. Buckminster Fuller is quoted as saying “When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
I’ll give dollars to doughnuts that if you looked at a Microsoft design or the finished code as a monolith, it would be neither simple nor beautiful. Look at any number of Windows apps versus their equivalent Mac versions and you’ll see that problem in miniature: bloated by feature, bloated by size, less elegant in implementation, less consistent – need I continue.
2) Development tools: how well optimised are the tools that Microsoft are using for their OS platforms. I know we live in a high-level world where the C/C+/C++ languages are the weapon of choice, but there is a solid possibility that the tools being used by MSFT’s developers are generating code which is, at best, inefficient. Combine that with a set of APIs which are more concerned with customer lock-in than elegant development and is it a surprise that Vista might be a little sluggish.
3) Quality assurance: As I’ve mentioned on several threads before, recent betas of Vista displayed some (pretty serious) bugs related to the completely rewritten network stack.
Now these bugs have been resolved (although there are probably more available to take their place), but the question remains: if you had these problems nailed in the old Win2K/WinXP network stack – which you allegedly ‘acquired’ (nudge, nudge, wink-wink) from one of BSD environments – how in the name of almighty Zarquon did you let them re-appear in Vista.
Does MSFT not have a “Network Stacks for Dummies” manual?
And if they don’t, how many other “re-inventing the wheel” fsck-ups can the Vista customer expect.
Which brings us to the nub of the QA issue: if they can’t get the basics right through QA and testing, how on Earth are they going to deliver an OS which has any concept of performance optimisation.
As a sidenote: the last Monday of August is a public holiday here in the UK and a number of PC retailers are running “promotions” which appear to be concerned with shifting as many Celeron laptops as possible for around £350-£400 from manufacturers like Toshiba and Acer. I wouldn’t dream of selling a system with that spec without doing the whole “caveat emptor” thing about Vista, I wonder how many <strike>suckers</strike> customers are going to be disappointed when they come to load Vista on their systems in twelve months.
Looks like one of the few personal computers that can run Vista decently will be the Mac Pro Quad Zeon Workstation. Since it appears Microsoft is cutting off a huge segment of its current Windows users due to hardware requirements, MS should have just done a more drastic reduction in legacy support “by design” (instead of “by accident”).
Um…yeah. For all those thinking MDN is being snobby when referring to average users, I have a little wake up call. Redmond, Washington is a hugely snobby city. Microsoft is a snobby company and they are smug too so, In my opinion, turnabout is fair play
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Good take MDN. The point is that most people aren’t going to fiddle around with video cards. Either they think Vista warrants a new computer, or they stick with XP.
And the difference between Tiger and Vista today…
…Vista………………………….Tiger
and what will be even better will be the arrival of Leopard on the scene”
…Vista…………………………………………………………………………………………………….Leopard
Hey! What’s wrong with being trailer trash? Some of us use Macs. I spent over half of the year in a trailer of one sort or another. Mac on one side of the desk and AV software riddled Windows PC on the other side with internet access over satellite and a diesel generator for power.
I don’t know if it means much but the Windows PC is on the left hand side of the desk.
==
I’m not making excuses for Windows or PCs in general, but the platform requirements to effectively run MacOS X have also increased over the years if you want to take advantage of the full OS functionality.
==
Gee, I’m using my 4 year old iBook with Tiger just fine…
Aw, no ripple effects! How will I ever get my work done? Oh noes.
(Actually iLife 06 is the cut-off point for my Mac. Won’t install or run. I’m not counting on Leopard running on my G3 but it’d be a nice thing to do…)
Big Al,
Are you a hurricane victim (curious)?
I sure get tired of MDN always insulting Wal-Mart shoppers. For
the record, we bought our first “Mac” at Wal-Mart. At the time, we
didn’t know anything about computers, but a clerk at Wal-Mart
showed us a “Mac”, talked with us about it, and we bought it. Now
we have several “Macs” and are very glad that clerk pointed the way
to Apple. If Apple, and MDN, wants more “average” people to buy
Apple, then they need to do more in educate people, not insult them.
I get very tired of always seeing Microsoft adds on TV. How about
Apple selling”minis” on QVC. All that audience ever sees is Dell. If
people don’t know about an alternative, then they can’t buy it. Apple
needs to educate, educate, educate. The current adds don’t cut it
for me. They insult. They don’t educate or sell.
Just my two cents.
Big Al,
Thanks for showing up and setting us – uumm – straight?
Fanatic Realist,
Ok right, so the real point is that VISTA is relatively late, and Mac OS X is already way down the road. I think most us Mac fans are on the same page when you put it that way.
PC User: All my apps are running glacially slow. Got any tips?
MS helpdesk: Try adding 16GB of RAM.
Mr. Peabody >
No, the real point that someone needs to address is how come Vista appears to overwhelm hardware that is several generations on from where Apple started in spite of delivering similar functionality to Jaguar/Panther-era OS X.
Now – without being a conspiracy nutjob – here are your options…
a) Microsoft are incompetent
b) Microsoft and their hardware OEMs are involved in a conspiracy designed to promote increased sales of new computer systems
c) Microsoft have intentionally – and without the knowledge of their OEMs – developed an OS which requires the purchase of new computers
d) both a & b
e) both a & c
Before answering, ask yourself how Apple OS development team has around 300 members and MSFT’s has several thousand. And yet, Vista is late, it’s sluggish and it’s buggy.
Personally, my money is on Answer E – because once a criminal with no scruples, always a criminal with no scruples.
Not a hurricane victim. I work in the the Canadian oil patch searching for oil and gas. I earn a good 6 figure income.
No sympathy needed here.
Big Al:
Have you met my anxious little friend, Concerned? He’s a terribly worried that your 6-figure income may not last much longer than civilization, as we know it.
Considering how much Vista has turned around with the latest build (5536 Pre-RC1) and how much praise is being heeped upon even by some people previously elated to bash the pre-release versions – this article seems rather behind the times.
It definately stands out compared to all the other stories when one does a news search for “windows vista” in goole.