Is Microsoft a danger to the environment?

By Stan Beer
Monday, 26 November 2007 18:42

Opinion and Analysis

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? CONTINUED