Stan Beer
Monday, 26 November 2007 19:42
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
As many commentators have alluded to in numerous articles for the past two decades Microsoft and Intel have a very special relationship often referred to as the Wintel alliance. The question is in a world concerned with climate change and global warming can the world afford to allow the Wintel alliance to continue?
It is no secret that crux of Wintel is to drive
the sale of ever increasing Intel-based processing power using ever
more feature rich and hardware resources demanding Microsoft software -
primarily the Windows operating system. As a result, for the past two
decades and in particular since 1995, successive iterations of
Microsoft Windows have become increasing complex, more feature rich and
above all more demanding of computing resources.
In addition, the advent of the Internet, while it seemingly scared the
life out of Microsoft, has actually been a boon for both the software
company and Intel. Through necessity, the Internet has spawned a
software security industry that consumes additional computing resources
for Intel and provides Microsoft with fuel to develop its next more
secure release.
The latest example of the combined software and hardware largesse of
Microsoft and Intel is Windows Vista. This is an operating system which
takes up at least 4GB of disk space when installed, requires at least
2GB RAM, a cranked up dual core processor running at 2Ghz or more and a
dedicated graphics card to provide acceptable performance.
However, if you want really good performance with Vista you need a
system like mine - a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB RAM and a Nvidia
GeForce GPU with 256 DDR2 - basically a gamer's box. We have two Vista
boxes in our office. The one with the lower specs mentioned above
performs acceptably - about as good as a 512MB XP Service Pack 2 box
with a late model Pentium 4 processor. On my box, Vista actually
performs quite well. It's not a bad operating system if you have tons
of resources.
The above pretty much sums up what independent consultants and
Microsoft itself has said about Vista - it likes memory (not to mention
processing power). The more memory you give Vista the better it
performs and about 4GB is what it needs to perform well. Plus if you
add in a dedicated GPU things will be sweet and you'll probably find
that Vista is actually a pretty good operating system to work with.
So what's the problem?
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