Half of American Business PCs Can’t Run Vista
Thx to Jim Leonard for the pointer to this eWeek piece:
“Ultimately, the rate at which the average business CPU’s MHz rating is increasing has not kept pace with Vista: The CPU requirements for Vista have increased 243 percent from those of Windows XP, whereas the speed of the average business PC’s CPU has only increased by 215 percent over roughly the same time period,” Williams said.
Question is this: will Vista drive massive refreshment in business PCs, or does the steep step-up mean it may take years before we see XP vanish and Vista dominate. I still see some Windows 98 and 2000 machines, so we are not going to see anything tsunami-like in the uptake numbers.
Personally — I’ll load it onto my X60 tablet to play with it, but I don’t feel the aching need to have it the way I may have felt with earlier Windows versions.
Dave,
the problem isn’t CPU clock speeds. It’s the piggish memory footprint. It’s pretty questionable how it will run on a notebook with 2GB… the one imm diate solution is to off load data storage to DDR flash drives. In the two demonstrations of Vista on notebook i’ve seen down here, users need to have every memory socket fully populated to get it’s full functionality including the new interface, And the demonstration then looks like MSFT’s dem,o of Win 3.1 running multiple clocks with a tab interface.
I want to talk to you about this off line soon.
The one big advantage is in pen-based computing. And I plan on upgrading mem on my X60 tablet as soon as i get copy of Vista.
The added build cost of Vista premium is about $90 (not including new hybrid flash hardfiles or tricked out video logic).
Lots of people gonna wait on Vistam I think and I’ll predict sub 5 percent uptake on the upgrade side in the first 9 months of availability. But heu, i’ve been wrong before.
Best
Jim
The only new feature people really want, in my experience, is freedom from spyware, viruses and trojans. It continues to be a problem even under XP SP2.
If Vista can ever earn the title “the spyware free Windows,” it could earn some serious adoption. Which of course also means closing the holes in Outlook, Word and IE, as well. The first two are considered part of the Windows platform even if technically they are not.
Actually there are a lot of functional features that people want in Vista. Check realistic reviews in http://www.tomshardware.com and computerworld.com and perhaps pcmag.com .
The hardware that Vista doesn’t run on well is mostly legacy hardware and will soon be replaced anyway. You want to target an OS so that it meets maximum functionality possible and not drag it down because some older machines can’t handle it. Hardware is so very cheap now especially comparing in today’s $$$ (David, what would those early Thinkpads cost in todays $$$?).
This time next year, Intel will have chips fabbed on 45 nm (from 65 nm today) and things should start getting really cheap. Incidentally, the newest Santa Rosa platform due in the Spring for notebooks will have a faster graphics processing unit than the current GPU and thus better able to handle Aero.
…and somewhere in Southern California, Fake Steve is having a Chai Latte in his sunroom and laughing his butt off…