Intel, the giant chip maker and longtime partner of Microsoft, has decided against upgrading the computers of its own 80,000 employees to Microsoft’s Vista operating system, a person with direct knowledge of the company’s plans said.
The person, who has been briefed on the situation but requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of Intel’s relationship with Microsoft, said the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that requires costly hardware upgrades to run smoothly.
“This isn’t a matter of dissing Microsoft, but Intel information technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista,” the person said.
The end-of-life scenario for XP is in process. The announced “schedule” for W7 readies everyone for the next round of improvements.
Choices, anyone?
Thanks, K B
@Thinker
Your whole argument stems from an illusion of choice. Soon, you wont be able to buy or get support for “what works”(XP) any more. So when the average office worker’s hardware fails, they are forced into an “upgrade”, and the growing pain that goes with it.
Microsoft has done a lot for the industry. By being the defacto standard, their bloated software drove hardware development initiatives. CPUs and RAM got faster. Their insecure, buggy code spawned countless anti-virus, and anti malware companies.
When it comes down to it; What speed CPU and how much memory does it take to run a word processor?
yawn
#34,
Well if all you want and need is a word processor then anything will do. It all goes back to requirements…You don’t need a hard drive either. My first machines had one disk drive (floppy) for the system software, and one I used for swapping the program floppy and storage floppy.
To an extent, yes you do get carried along with the stream. We now have calculators that are more powerfull than the Apollo moon lander. And you can bet when the new moon lander has its debut it will be compared in such terms. 🙂
So we don’t ‘need’ the latest and greatest anymore than Central air and 250 HP engines in our cars or cable tv. 🙂
What do you need??? Thats a very good question indeed.
Here are two quantitative examples of how Vista sucks.
the minimum supported RAM config for XP is 64MB, while the minimum for Vista (except the much reviled Home Basic) is 1024MB. that’s sixteen times as much. Moore’s Law would allow for an increase of 8x during the period between the two OS’s release. So Microsoft overshot hardware requirements by a factor of two.
Both 32-bit implementations have a 4096MB cap on RAM utilization (with the same 3.5GB-ish limit of actual usable RAM). Given identically configured machines, Vista has less usable RAM than XP because the system hogs nearly 1GB more at startup.
Then there’s the other issues: does anyone care about Aero? Does the general populace want to spend the time to totally re-learn how to setup and configure their system? Are there any features that are just so “must-have” that merit a $200-$400 expense not counting the required hardware upgrades?
Who can blame Microsoft? I still resist the switch to Vista, even though I have the hardware to run it just fine – what a bloated OS.
A good suggestion is the ‘Rule of Microsoft’ 🙂 You take the maximum suggested amount of RAM and double it. Thats what will make you happy. I’ve always used the specifications on the box as a minimum. (I don’t know who sets those up. Marketing?) So with XP (no SP2) it was at least 256, even though they said 128. (Just like W2K was happier in 128 when 64 was rated as max needed)
My XP SP2 was happy with 2 GB of RAM. But not in Ultimate (the P4 3 ghz was the culprit I think)
Aero only comes in the upper levels of Vista anyway and if you take the max rated for Vista, 1 GB and double it to 2 GB, and for Business or Ultimate I’d add an additional GB at least.
My Vista Ultimate SP1 is at 3 GB, and having fun. Running Aero with a 19′ and 24′ Flat Panel and a decent Nvidia card. (I ported the Flat panels over from my XP box.)
The ‘Rule of Microsoft’ (but indeed any computer) was introduced to me when I took my current position some 5 years ago. Now its not written down anywhere, but things tend to expand to fill the available space, no matter what.
If you’re stunned at the costs involved, (which is not a small point, to be sure) you must realize that performance software (Aero) will require a performance rig. Performance cars cost more.
Take a look at gaming machines, the ones that really perform, have great ping times and play well with WoW, or other colaborative online games.
The resource curve is only going up. And you need to think of how long you will have your computer. Everything ages out. I figure no more than 5 years per computer. Then it will be time for the bigger and better.
Again, this is nothing new.
Vista 1 GB>2 GB +1 or more for Ultimate
XP-SP2 256MB>512MB
XP 128MB>256MB
W2K 64MB>128MB
98 32MB>64MB
Those are the real world figures. And remember, RAM is cheap. With any, and I repeat, any computer. More is always better if you can afford it. (experience has told me)
But you could get a good machine from Dell, HP with Ultimate for say $1200-1500 or less. Add monitor and video card (if you don’t like the packaged one) to taste, or carry them over.
I realize its not chicken feed, but have you tried them out lately?
Hey just because my computer is faster then my last one doesn’t mean I should up my OS to something more lethargic.
Besides I work in the design community. I haven’t seen any windows based computers in months.
I have a laptop designed for Vista. It has Vista Home Pro, 2 gigs of RAM, and runs much faster than my 4 year old XP machine did. I’m happy. Security is better too.
Most (but not all) of my XP apps had no problem running on Vista, including most commercial programs, freeware (Open Office) and games. A few programs had good patch programs or new versions available where necessary.
If a company is considering changing any version of Windows to a newer version, it needs to enumerate all of the programs and utilities that run on their standard installation, especially their custom ones. Those programs have to be tested thoroughly and updated if necessary to run on the new version of Windows. Custom programs may (make that will) need to be tested heavily and modified before a rollout.
This is true for other operating systems as well. Upgrading a Mac OS may well break installed applications (my wife lost some documents when she upgraded her Macbook’s OS).
The same is true of Unix, Linux (where a program might run on Ubuntu but not Red Hat, or vice versa), and even VMS.
People are *never* happy. A friend of mine cried for my help with her computer. She had caught a virus by simply sticking in an infected USB pen. Even though her computer had come preloaded with Vista, she had downgraded it to XP because everyone was telling her how much it sucks, even though she didn’t really know why it sucks. I’ve been using Vista for about a year and I am really enjoying it and I am feeling much safer than when I used XP.
No, Linux is not an option. The only thing I like about it is bash. Other than that, it sucks.
#38: Since you mentioned it, Vista has an XP style UI for those who prefer it, Aero (curved corner windows)and it has Aero Glass (semitransparent windows).
Aero Glass annoys my 57 year old eyes (I really don’t like text or my background bleeding through the window I’m using) and seems to make the PC run slowly, so I disabled it (which is easy, uncheck one checkbox).
Aero looks just fine and doesn’t slow down the PC, and neither does the XP style interface. I’ve settled on Aero, YMMV.
New Dell laptop, 3GB RAM, dual-core proc, and Vista was a dog and BSODed on me four times in a week. I’ve now “upgraded” to XP and it is much faster, more stable and less irritating.
I’m also dual-booting into Ubuntu 8.04 and it is looking very promising. Very stable and Compiz has all the eye-candy you could ever want.
XP is a toy. The last real OS Microsoft produced was Win2k. I will admit that Win2k3 and XP x64 were not bad. Moral of story. Get a Mac!
I don’t know f-all about h/w but my box is running vista fine. Ands its a baremin system: 2ghz duel core with just one gig of ram! I got a rating of 2.0 at first and it could barely run in aero, then I put in a nvid 7300 card, it went up to 4.5 now it runs great including(aero/glass). I thought about increasing the ram but there’s no hurry. Ps my laptop running xp is faster and it’s almost 2years older.
We came to the same conclusion where I work. After a quick eval on a test machine, we figured the hardware upgrade costs, the software licensing, the uncertainty of existing applications running with it make Vista something best avoided as uneconomical and of no real benefit to the company.
can work together, so many people ,