VISTA Memory Requirements - really?



  •  Just found this via google whilst searching for something else: 

        </p>
    

    <font face="Times New Roman">VISTA Memory Recommendation</font>

    indows Vista™ Version  Minimum RAM Recommended RAM
    Business 1GB  2GB
    Enterprise 1GB  2GB
    Home Premium 1GB  2GB
    Ultimate 512MB  1GB
    Home Basic 512MB  1GB

    I am mistaken is thinking that the 'Ultimate' package was the, erm, Ultimate version of Vista, and the one with the most features? If so, why does the Home Premium, Enterprise & Business versions require more RAM if they have less features? 

    From: http://centonspecials.com/html.php


  • Garbage Person

    WTF Not Found: Unreliable sources of information will always be unreliable - especially when they seem to think "Vista" should be in all caps because "XP" was in all caps



  • @Weng said:

    WTF Not Found: Unreliable sources of information will always be unreliable - especially when they seem to think "Vista" should be in all caps because "XP" was in all caps

     

    +1




  •  Must be an acronym. Hmm. VISTA. Vicious Instabiltiy Set To A.... No, Set To Annoy? Various Issues Slipped to .... Something starting with A. Archetecture?  Something something something this archetecture.



  • @robbak said:

     Must be an acronym. Hmm. VISTA. Vicious Instabiltiy Set To A.... No, Set To Annoy? Various Issues Slipped to .... Something starting with A. Archetecture?  Something something something this archetecture.

    Vast Installation, Sucks Teh Ass?




  • Reading comprehension fail. Nowhere does this claim to be memory "requirements". It does, however, claim to be a "recommendation". There's a huge difference when it comes to operating systems. For example, desktop operating systems tend to have higher memory requirements than server operating systems because of all the desktop crap. But server operating systems tend to have high memory recommendations because server applications tend to take more memory than desktop applications.



  • Why complain over capitalization? They are clearly talking about Indows, not Windows.



  • @DaveK said:

    @robbak said:
    Must be an acronym. Hmm. VISTA. Vicious Instabiltiy Set To A.... No, Set To Annoy? Various Issues Slipped to .... Something starting with A. Archetecture?  Something something something this archetecture.

    Vast Installation, Sucks Teh Ass?
    That actually makes sense.



  • @joelkatz said:

    Reading comprehension fail. Nowhere does this claim to be memory "requirements".

    I've always interpreted 'Minimum' to be a requirement.  Especially when its followed by a 'Recommended' column.  Also, if you check the site it was found on, the table is listed directly below the header "Vista Requirements".  Regardless, it still doesn't make sense to recommend less memory for an edition that ships with more features...

    @joelkatz said:

    But server operating systems tend to have high memory recommendations because server applications tend to take more memory than desktop applications.

    Business and Enterprise are not server operating systems...



  • @DOA said:

    @DaveK said:

    @robbak said:
    Must be an acronym. Hmm. VISTA. Vicious Instabiltiy Set To A.... No, Set To Annoy? Various Issues Slipped to .... Something starting with A. Archetecture?  Something something something this archetecture.

    Vast Installation, Sucks Teh Ass?
    That actually makes sense.

    I humbly apologise.  Won't happen again.


  • Microsoft's website lists the RAM requirement as 512MB for Home Basic and 1GB for everything else. Can't find any "recommended" number.
    http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/get/system-requirements.aspx

    EDIT: Hang on, "recommended requirement"???



  • @robbak said:

    Must be an acronym

    Very Interesting System To Administrate?



  •  I'd like to know how people fill in the blanks when they are presented the following sentence:

     

    "I don't really want to go back to XP, because I'd have to miss Vista's ______________________________________________________________________...n  "

     

    So.

    C'mon.

    Fill in that blank.

    Mine:

    - thumbnails in icon view mode, instead of just thumbnail view mode.
    - prettier tray clock; accesible through 1 click

    That's about all I can think of right now.



  • @dhromed said:

    "I don't really want to go back to XP, because I'd have to miss Vista's ______________________________________________________________________...n  "
    Support for >4GB memory.  xp64 sucked ass.  xp32 was great, but contained the memory limitation.

    prettiness

    winkey-tab hotness

    sidebar

    dx10



  • @dhromed said:

    I'd have to miss Vista's _________

    That neat little tool that lets you sort out disc partitions on the fly. (Yeah, which was probably available in XP as a Service Pack or feature pack download or something. I don't know, I'm just a lowly DBA drone.)



  • @Thief^ said:

    EDIT: Hang on, "recommended requirement"???
    Technically, Windows XP will not get a blue screen of death mid-boot named INSTALL_MORE_MEMORY if you have at least 32MB of RAM. That does not mean you should run Windows XP on 32MB of RAM. It also does not mean you'll be able to use XP on 32MB of RAM. It just won't crash on that amount. Thus, 32MB is the minumum requirement, while 256MB was the recommended minimum requirement. For Windows Vista, that's been changed to 256MB and 1GB, respectively.


  • Garbage Person

    @dhromed said:

     

    "I don't really want to go back to XP, because I'd have to miss Vista's ______________________________________________________________________...n  "

     

    Thumbnail alt-tab.

    Disk manager with partition resizing capabilities ("Oh fuck I just spent the better part of a day installing the all my software and forgot I need to put Linux on this system too. DAMMIT!")

    UAC (but not on my box)

    Run As Administrator - so I don't actually have to log in to a luser's machine to fix it (though I have seen some rather creative ways around this - the best being pulling up taskmanager, starting a command window, killing the explorer process, and using the commandline runas tool to restart explorer as administrator - while still logged into the regular user's account - and then just re-kill explorer when you're done and start a fresh one for the user)

    Improved audio input/output selector (I can actually make shit use different sound boards? NICE!)

    Not having to load third party mass storage drivers from a fucking floppy disk during the install (This is especially important because XP has FUCKING NO compatability with modern SATA controllers, even on SP3 disks, and floppy drives are a rare breed - and working floppy disks even fucking rarer)

    Comes preloaded with no visual styles that are physically painful to look at (2/3 of XP's default styles were painful)

    Being a functional 64-bit operating system.

     

    There's probably even more I'm not remembering off the top of my head.



  • @Weng said:

    Improved audio input/output selector (I can actually make shit use different sound boards? NICE!)
    Ahh yes, and I can even make them different default volumes, so I don't have to turn it up/down to avoid the inevitable blast of sound/muteness whenever I plug in/unplug the headphones.  That is the awesomest.



  • @Weng said:

    There's probably even more I'm not remembering off the top of my head.

     

    Secured user directories. :)



  • @dhromed said:

    "I don't really want to go back to XP, because I'd have to miss Vista's ______________________________________________________________________...n  "

    Ability to recover somewhat gracefully when ATI's driver decides to take a nosedive and crash.



  •  It does have the most features. One of the Ultimate-only features is using less memory. </sarcasm>


  • :belt_onion:

    [Quote user="dhromed"]"I don't really want to go back to XP, because I'd have to miss Vista's ______________________________________________________________________...n " [/Quote]

    ... ability to map a driveletter to a WebDAV share over HTTPS



  •  So far I have the following list:

    For meh items, I've added why I feel they're meh.

     Niiice:
        - DX-10
        - thumbnails in icon view mode, instead of just thumbnail view mode.
        - Support for >4GB memory.  xp64 sucked ass.  xp32 was great, but contained the memory limitation.
        - sidebar
        - Disk manager with partition resizing capabilities
        - UAC
        - Run As Administrator
        - Improved audio input/output selector (I can actually make shit use different sound boards? NICE!)
        - Being a functional 64-bit operating system.
        - Secured user directories.
       - Ability to recover somewhat gracefully when [graphics] driver decides to take a nosedive and crash.
       - Thumbnail on taskbar hover.
       - ability to map a driveletter to a WebDAV share over HTTPS

    								    </p><p>Meh:<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;- prettier tray clock; accesible through 1 click <i>## Nice, but not really necessary.</i><br>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;- prettiness <i>## I turned off Aero after a month, because I couldn't stand it anymore. It's very pretty, yes, it looks great, it does -- but it's TOO MUCH. There is only so much taskbar hover and dialog-fading a man can stand.</i><br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; - winkey-tab hotness<i> ## Pretty, but subtly broken usability: quickly tapping Win+Tab is a no-op, unlike the fully functional Alt-Tab.</i><br> &nbsp; &nbsp; - Thumbnail alt-tab. <i>## Good-looking, but A) far too big to fit in a single view; B) app windows start to look veeery similar at that scale (if they don't, in your normal workflow =&gt; more powa to u); C) the app icon gets lost in the thumbnail noise, exacerbating B.</i><br>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;- Comes preloaded with no visual styles that are physically painful to look at (2/3 of XP's default styles were painful) <i>## True. I think that the tabs and buttons in XP were the pinnacle of subtlety.</i> </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>To be quite honest,&nbsp; I have no idea why we have to lose all the window thumbnail features when !Aero. That does not make sense. Well, it <i>does</i> make sense in that I understand where it's coming from: you'd need to retool Classic to be essentially an ugly version of Aero, and that takes too much time+money. Still it's a shame. </p>


  • @TwelveBaud said:

    Thus, 32MB is the minumum requirement, while 256MB was the recommended minimum requirement.
     

    Just to be pedantic: a requirement is the absolute minimum required, though it is recommended to have at least 256MB of RAM for Windows XP. Calling it a "recommended minimum requirement" is therefore incorrect and should be called simply a "recommended minimum".

    Besides, someone got XP to boot with 20MB RAM on a 8MHz Pentium (underclocked), though a 30+minute boot and 0% idle makes it pretty much unusable for actual work :) and required 64MB for setup...



  • @dhromed said:

    To be quite honest,  I have no idea why we have to lose all the window thumbnail features when !Aero.
    With Aero, every window is rendered on it's own texture, so getting thumbnails just means rendering that texture elsewhere (which costs you nothing - if there's something happening in the window, you'll notice that it's happening in the thumbnail in real-time, too). With the non-Aero theme, this doesn't happen, so getting a thumbnail would require redrawing the window somewhere (if it's covered by another window), and grabbing that to show as thumbnail.



    I wouldn't mind Aero, if it allowed the same amount of colour customization as the classic 2000-style theme does - until it does, I'll keep with the classic theme.



    Also, Run As was available in XP (and IIRC, 2000), too, but you usually had to hold shift while right-clicking the program you wanted to run as a different account. And I have no idea what was wrong with XP x64 - used it for 2 years without problems.



  • @ender said:

    @dhromed said:
    To be quite honest,  I have no idea why we have to lose all the window thumbnail features when !Aero.
    With Aero, every window is rendered on it's own texture, so getting thumbnails just means rendering that texture elsewhere (which costs you nothing - if there's something happening in the window, you'll notice that it's happening in the thumbnail in real-time, too). With the non-Aero theme, this doesn't happen, so getting a thumbnail would require redrawing the window somewhere (if it's covered by another window), and grabbing that to show as thumbnail.

    Except for the fact that PowerToys for XP has included a "thumbnail preview" alt-tab replacement for quite some time.  I'm not disputing that you are correct on a technical level, but they already had such a feature working in XP so removing it from non-Aero Vista is suck.



  • @dhromed said:

    "I don't really want to go back to XP, because I'd have to miss Vista's prioritized I/O and not completely blowing goats"

     

     


  • Garbage Person

    @bjolling said:

    [Quote user="dhromed"]"I don't really want to go back to XP, because I'd have to miss Vista's ______________________________________________________________________...n " [/Quote]

    ... ability to map a driveletter to a WebDAV share over HTTPS

    WHOA WAIT WHAT? HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE. THAT'S AWESOME AND I WANT YOU TO HAVE MY BABIES FOR INFORMING ME OF THIS.


  • @Weng said:

    @bjolling said:

     ... ability to map a driveletter to a WebDAV share over HTTPS

    WHOA WAIT WHAT? HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE. THAT'S AWESOME AND I WANT YOU TO HAVE MY BABIES FOR INFORMING ME OF THIS.
     

    nerd.



  • I forget, does Vista have the same file security as Windows 7? As in, only an installer application (and only after asking you) can modify files in "Program files", therefore when the app itself tries to write to its home directory for some reason it gets 'access denied', and you get the same if you try to and write there yourself?

    Just as I have a lot of apps like that. I know, they are supposed to use 'Application data', but they don't, and they have not been updated by the vendor. Whilst evaluating W7, that was a real headache - copy the files to "documents", edit them there, and then copy them back with explorer so I can overwrite them. In the end I gave up and took ownership of the directory and then gave myself full control. Much easier. 

    Saying that, it didn't ask me to confirm the operation when I took ownership so I could alter the permissions. Maybe a bug?  Probably fixed by now though.



  • @bjolling said:

    @dhromed said:
    "I don't really want to go back to XP, because I'd have to miss Vista's... "
    ... ability to map a driveletter to a WebDAV share over HTTPS
    But you can do that in XP too. In fact, although you couldn't use it as a drive letter in Windows 2000, you still could use it as a Web Folder.



  • @Mole said:

    I forget, does Vista have the same file security as Windows 7? As in, only an installer application (and only after asking you) can modify files in "Program files", therefore when the app itself tries to write to its home directory for some reason it gets 'access denied', and you get the same if you try to and write there yourself?
    Yes.@Mole said:
    Saying that, it didn't ask me to confirm the operation when I took ownership so I could alter the permissions. Maybe a bug?
    No. That's a "feature": By default, programs that ship with Windows are exempt from UAC prompts, and automatically elevate. This is a security risk because if any of these programs can have code injected into them -- wndproc hook, debugging hook, plugin, or rundll whose sole purpose is to run injected code -- that code is exempt from UAC prompts too. Big argument, and those of us outside Microsoft who care lost, twice. Sorry.



  • @Mole said:

    I forget, does Vista have the same file security as Windows 7? As in, only an installer application (and only after asking you) can modify files in "Program files", therefore when the app itself tries to write to its home directory for some reason it gets 'access denied', and you get the same if you try to and write there yourself?
    Actually, this was the case at least since NT4, except that up to (including) XP the default account always had administrative privileges, allowing the writes there. Thanks to this, too many programs were still programmed without taking these restrictions in mind, and MS decided it was easier for everybody to keep users running as administrators, but instead have all programs use limited privileges by default, and to silently redirect legacy programs that try writing to restricted locations to a folder in user's profile (and to allow for elevation when a new program really requires administrative access). Two and a half years after Vista's release, I still see "developers" asking how to prevent their application from being installed to Program Files on Vista, because the "new" security model breaks their software.



  • @TwelveBaud said:

    By default, programs that ship with Windows are exempt from UAC prompts, and automatically elevate. This is a security risk because if any of these programs can have code injected into them -- wndproc hook, debugging hook, plugin, or rundll whose sole purpose is to run injected code -- that code is exempt from UAC prompts too.

    You can't inject code or hooks to processes that run under elevated token, from processes that run under regular (restricted) token. You can't SendMessage to their windows, too, except for a handful messages that are carefully marshalled.

     



  • @Zemm said:

    Besides, someone got XP to boot with 20MB RAM on a 8MHz Pentium (underclocked)
    Huh. I was told that was unpossible because of the size of Windows' PFN Database (to keep track of all 20MB). Learn something new every day.



  • @alegr said:

    You can't inject code or hooks to processes that run under elevated token, from processes that run under regular (restricted) token. You can't SendMessage to their windows, too, except for a handful messages that are carefully marshalled.
    Yes, that's correct; I spoke too quickly earlier without reading the details. The problem is that some processes are automagically allowed to elevate with no user prompting whatsoever, and any code they load, be it MMC console plugins, or ActiveX controls, or Text Services Framework packages, or in RunDLL32's case literally anything, is also shrouded in the aura of no-prompt elevation. That code can then go on and do anything it wants. But you're right: passive injection won't work; the victim has to actively look for code to run, but the problem is there are far too many willing victims.



  • @ender said:

    And I have no idea what was wrong with XP x64 - used it for 2 years without problems.
    I never used it but I was highly advised against it becuase of horrible driver support.  Not XP's fault, but a problem nonetheless.

    @ender said:

    Two and a half years after Vista's release, I still see "developers" asking how to prevent their application from being installed to Program Files on Vista, because the "new" security model breaks their software.
    Not to mention developers who wonder why they can't write to HKLM.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    I never used it but I was highly advised against it becuase of horrible driver support.  Not XP's fault, but a problem nonetheless.
    I didn't have too many problems - the M-Audio sound card driver was somewhat unstable, and all the rest was fine (including my laptop, which originally came with a 32-bit only CPU).



  • @Zemm said:

    someone got XP to boot with 20MB RAM on a 8MHz Pentium (underclocked)
     

    Wow.

    O_O


  • :belt_onion:

    @TwelveBaud said:

    @bjolling said:
    @dhromed said:
    "I don't really want to go back to XP, because I'd have to miss Vista's... "
    ... ability to map a driveletter to a WebDAV share over HTTPS
    But you can do that in XP too. In fact, although you couldn't use it as a drive letter in Windows 2000, you still could use it as a Web Folder.
    I don't remember the exact details, but Windows XP cannot map a drive letter over HTTPS natively.

    From the article: "Note Windows XP only supports SSL / https connections when using My Network Places, but can be tricked into using SSL with NET USE by creating a forward server using stunnel."

    stunnel authenticates and maintains the SSL session and exposes the webfolder on localhost:80

    Vista supports this out of the box



  • I want to add this to dhromed's list

    Vista's backup utility.  The first time it ran, it took forever, but subsequent backups were incremental, so they ran in minutes.

    I'm Rezzy McRezzerton.  Nice to meet you.


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