Microsoft Internal Emails Show Dismay With Vista 662
bfwebster writes "Microsoft is currently facing a class-action suit over its designation of allegedly under-powered hardware as being 'Vista Capable.' The discovery process of that lawsuit has now compelled Microsoft to produce some internal emails discussing those issues. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has published extracts of some of those emails, along with a link to a a PDF file containing a more extensive email exchange. The emails reflect a lot of frustration among senior Microsoft personnel about Vista's performance problems and hardware incompatibilities. They also appear to indicate that Microsoft lowered the hardware requirements for 'Vista Capable' in order to include certain lower-end Intel chipsets, apparently as a favor to Intel: 'In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded.' Read the whole PDF; it is informative, interesting, and at times (unintentionally) funny."
Re:For more information (Score:4, Informative)
Runs like a champ in a VM on my AM2 Sempron, with 512MB of memory allocated to it.
Vista on minimal HW (Score:4, Informative)
I have found that Windows server 2008 runs very well on a ~ 3 year old Dell 610 notebook, even when the system is locked into maximum battery life (and minimum performance) mode. It has a ~ 2GHz processor and 2 GBytes of RAM.
Playing graphics games costs CPU and GPU processing power. From my point of view, the reason to upgrade to Vista is its significantly higher security than XP, let alone the earlier OS's. Search is also very nice and quite useful.
The low "requirements" aren't the problem (Score:4, Informative)
I don't get what the problems are (Score:3, Informative)
Re:For more information (Score:2, Informative)
Also, the courts do have a basic understanding of the fact that if the machine you bought didn't have a graphics adapter, you shouldn't have expected the enhanced graphics interface (machines that run XP pro, but don't have GPUs don't play graphic games or screen savers either). As far as performance, they'll point of that the MINIMUM requirement meas MINIMUM FUNCTIONALITY, not RECCOMEDNED functionality. This is clearly understood by most in the industry, and considdfered common knowledge in computing. Whaterver the specs say the minimum is, you reasonably need 2-4 times that for performance to be fluid.
Look at Pinacle Studeo for example. The miniumum specs, 256MB RAM and 5GB disk space, cover only whats necessary to install and run the program, and edit a "short" video clip (5 minutes of standard TV resolution 15fps, with no audio was the banchmark) A 30 minute HD video with stereo audio, accoring to Pinacle phone support for version 9 when I had it , should only be edited on a machine with striped performance HDDs and at least 2GB of RAM, and a multi-core (pentium D at the time) processor. lawyers will easily argue that, especially early adopters should have recognised this. "Let the buyer beware"
The minimum requirements for Oblivion are 512MB System RAM, 2 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent processor , and 128MB Direct3D compatible video card. With those specs, at minimum resolution, the game gets aboutn 6FPS. With a $3,500 quad way SLI system, they still can't play it at higher than 30FPS at the game's maximum configurable resolutions. noone has yet built a system that can truly play the game. They reccomend 1GB of Ram and an x800 or better video card. Experts reccomedn 2GB and SLI systems to play at "comfortable quality at higher resolutions" Can I sue those guys becuase it' "unplayable" on my wife's computer even though it meets the minimum specs?
minimum means MINIMUM. Windows 95 could run on 512K of RAM and a 20MB HDD. You can't really use it that way, let alone open a 3rd party application, but it does in fact RUN on it. Why did you expect Vista to be any different? Why did you expect it to require the same specs as XP if it's 7 years newer!?!
Mike Nash (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I don't get what the problems are (Score:2, Informative)
Warned not to buy (Score:3, Informative)
Re:For more information (Score:3, Informative)
Basically, it was practically unusable with Vista, pretty good with XP, and I've fallen in love with Linux on it. Especially multi-tasking. People can say whatever they want about KDE or Gnome being slow. And yeah, if you have any even slightly older hardware running either of those two DE's on default settings then, yes, it will seem a bit sluggish until you reign the eye candy in a bit. But, as one that keeps a large number of programs and virtual desktops, etc. going simultaneously, nothing can touch *nix for multi-tasking. It's just so smooth, it's utterly amazing. Since I've gotten going here and all, I'll also mention that I make extensive use of virtual machines. VMware never ran so smoothly on XP or Win2K for that matter. It feels seemless. You fullscreen your VM and put it into exclusive mode and you will forget that you aren't on the bare metal. With Windows there was always some little stutter or jerky mouse, or something that broke you out of the moment and reminded you that you were in a VM. Linux really is amazing. I can't speak for the BSD's since I don't have any experience but if they're anything like as good as Linux, Microsoft has something very serious to worry about in the long term.
And that's my 2 cents. Sorry for the rambling. I haven't had my coffee yet. Going now.
Re:For more information (Score:2, Informative)
Re:For more information (Score:4, Informative)
From what I have seen, for 98% of things in XP 512MB is enough on a properly configured system. I'd say for XP that 128mb is "barely adequate."
It really depends on what you're doing. Personally, I like to have 2GB or more, especially if we're talking Vista, but 512MB is XP is fine for everything but serious gaming or trying to burn a DVD while multitasking.
Re:Question: Has Windows Update ever had a driver? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:For more information (Score:5, Informative)
Nearly all OEMs still allow you to upgrade to XP, but you have to ask. They won't tell you about it, you have to be active about it. But then, those that make active decisions about hardware and systems rarely end up with Windows, let alone MS Vista. Lots of people are getting burned by leaving too much of the decision up to the sales staff.
But even if you can't upgrade to XP, unless she's playing heavily some games that don't run in WINE or surfing a lot of WMV porn, then she'll get more mileage out of a linux distro like CentOS [centos.org] and Kubuntu [kubuntu.org]. Try it. If they suck, then you can crow about it. If they save you time and effort, then it was time well spent and you can go around to any MS Vista users and rub their noses in it. Nowadays even Photoshop runs in WINE.
If it's for school only, then the 13" macbook is perfect for the backpack and can run your choice of Linux or OS X or both, plus a number of legacy applications from Windows.
Re:For more information (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For more information (Score:3, Informative)
From what I have seen, for 98% of things in XP 512MB is enough on a properly configured system. I'd say for XP that 128mb is "barely adequate."
--- end quote ---
Unless of course you like to run Photoshop, or you have a need to run Word and Dreamweaver at (gasp!) the same time, or you like to play mp3s while working or a number of other situations.
Novice users - you might say - are not going to be running Photoshop, but I will be that they *will* have a large number of applications open at once, without thinking anything of it.
I would argue that 512 was ok for 2000, but is inadequate for XP or (god forbid) Vista.
Re:For more information (Score:5, Informative)
There are four radio buttons:
- Let Windows choose what's best for my computer (default)
- Adjust for best appearance
- Adjust for best performance
- Custom
The first radio button is selected by default, and at least on my system, is the same as "Adjust for best appearance", which is what I would expect to be selected by default. This might be different on lower powered machines.
The "Custom" option lets you enable and disable about two dozen fine grained options such as "Slide taskbar buttons", or "Smooth edges of screen fonts".
Emails (pdf) Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Early 2006: Microsoft got cozy with HP to make sure that HP invested in a better graphical experience for Vista. Intel had to make its quarterly earnings and convinced Microsoft to call their chipset "capable" even though it couldn't meat the graphic standards. Microsoft had explicitly told HP that they wouldn't do this, but they, led by some dude named Will Poole, decided to bone HP to make Intel (specifically some SVP chick named Renee-most likely Renee James) happy. Then MS discussed how they are going to try to play it off to intel with some fancy obfuscating letter. They got this guy at MS named Jim Allchin to sign off on it, which he reluctantly did, but chastised them for pulling this crap. Some dude named Mike Ybarra pointed out to Jim that they are boning HP and their customers just to get cuddly wuddly with Intel and Jim seemed to agree, but figured the wheels were in motion and could not be stopped. Mike specifically said, "We are caving to Intel... We are really burning HP... We are allowing Intel to drive our consumer experience..."
Fast forward a year later and some board member John Shirley sends some borderline literate guy named Steve Balmer an email about how his shit won't work with Vista and that some of the stuff may never get Vista drivers. They surmise that vendors didn't trust them to deliver Vista (gee, wonder why) so they didn't make drivers. Balmer sends an email to some guy named Steven Sinofsky asking about the driver situation. Sinofsky agrees that vendors didn't expect them to ship and also says that changes to Vista made it so XP drivers wouldn't work, he questions how smart it was to call the Intel chipset "capable" when it wasn't, and says that they need to be clearer with the industry. Then some exec named Mike Nash points out how his company boned him because he bought a $2100 "Vista capable" laptop that is only good as an email machine.
In the end, some exec John Kalman says that lowering their standard for Intel screwed them and they won't make such a stupid mistake with Windows 7.
In short, Will Poole is a weasel who is just trying to make some Intel chick happy. Mike Ybarra is too thoughtful and has too much foresight to work at MS. Jim Allchin needs to go with his gut and remind Will Poole which side of the desk he sits on. Steve Ballmer is missing some keys on his keyboard. Steven Sinofsky and Kohn Kalman have 20/20 hindsight. HP deserves to kick somebody's ass at MS. They should probably kick Intel's ass too, but MS is too busy licking it.
Re:For more information (Score:2, Informative)
Mac Mini's have the same problem (Score:2, Informative)
We finally got around to bothering with it a month or so ago and asked an Apple rep from Apple.com what kind of memory the thing used. It was standard SODIMM stuff so we looked it up on NewEgg and found the exact memory that the rep mentioned for about $25 for 1GB.
The Mini is designed to not be easily upgradable by a user so I figured since it was only $25 for the memory I'd splurg and let the Apple Store take care of it. I figured $20 - $40 tops for the installation. I call them up and ask if they'll install a 3rd party memory module. Nope. So I ask how much for 1GB. They told me $150 dollars and the "installation is free." I told them that was ridiculous and hung up.
So we went ahead and risked opening up the thing to install the memory ourselves. There was a guide on-line we found. It wasn't too much trouble.
So this isn't an MS problem. It's a "cheap bastards" problem. They'd rather cut costs on the hardware to save a few bucks. At least with MS, you're working with a system that can be easily upgraded cheaply. I'd be annoyed with lack of memory from Dell but at least they don't make their system a pain to upgrade or mark up their prices astronomically.
We'll never buy a Mac again. The system is fine, we'll forgive them for not including enough memory for OS X by default but charging $150 for a $25 part is inexcusable.
Re:Emails (pdf) Summary (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Are there any MBAs at Microsoft? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:For more information (Score:4, Informative)
From what I can see, that's pretty much what it does. So in order to get good performance on Vista, according to Microsoft, you need to roll it back to Windows 2000 look-and-feel.
Re:At least... (Score:5, Informative)
Please, please, PLEASE stop spreading the utter trash about the "dos aint done till lotus won't run" as if it is some sort of truth. It is not. Repeating it just makes you appear to be either a troll, or someone who unfortunately believed the misinformation trolls that post this crap on this site.
Please read the first few links on this search result and stop yourself spreading FUD in the future [google.co.za]
And please, spare me the comments about being a M$$$ $hill. I have no affiliation with microsoft, I just really hate it when people spread misinformation on this site, which then gets repeated infinitely as if it were truth. The less FUD coming from, and aimed at microsoft, the better.
Re:For more information (Score:3, Informative)
*blinks* Are you for real? 512MB is quite adequate for XP. That's what my wifes machine had before I upgraded it and that only because the RAM was on sale. I have a good dozen programms running in WinXP Pro and I have... wait for it.... 547MB used... So, yes, it would hit a bit on swap... However, with a good swap out strategy , it would be stuff I rarely use (if Windows has a good swap out strategy is another discussion). 512MB for XP is very adequate.
Re:It's time, boys and girls, for (Score:3, Informative)
Just for another reality check: I ran Windows XP Pro on a 600MHz P-III with 512Meg RAM for about two years. That machine was absolutely usable and I could run iTunes, OpenOffice.org 2.0 (at the time), Firefox 1.5.x, Thunderbird 1.5.x, AVG Antivirus, Gnucleus, Truecrypt, GAIM (Pidgin, back then it was called GAIM), and "Media Player Classic" at the same time. Heck, even Eclipse (not know for its frugality on the memory aspect) ran just fine for smaller projects. I only bought a new laptop because it physically started to fall apart!
Anyone saying that 512MB for XP is borderline has simply no clue.... I'd say that 512MB is advisable as a minimum, but it will work great if you have 512MB.
Yes, this was a fully patched XP SP2....
The fun part is that upgrading the harddisk had more impact on the performance than going from 256MB to 512MB. (It was a laptop and the old laptop harddisk was really, really, slow...
My dad uses a P-III 733MHz/512Meg RAM laptop with XP Pro to this day.... Yes, he's a poweruser and does database stuff with his laptop. It's amazing.
Re:I don't get what the problems are (Score:4, Informative)
Memory usage is still high -- about 1G of physical RAM in use at idle,so I disable ReadyBoost, which brings physical memory in use down to 850M.
Now I reboot, and launch a task mananger, giving a few minutes for the system reach equillibrium. Once it has, I launch my first vmware machine, and the physical memory shoots up to 1.98 GB, and the system appears crashed. However the disk is working, and there are occasional flashes of screen update. After about five minutes I start to get occasional screen updates which show about 3/4 of physical memory free and about 3/4 of kernel memory paged; CPU use is about 10%, but the system is still unresponsive. A few minutes later the virtual machine is up and everything is responsive, and most of the physical memory is free. I can start and stop the virtual machines with no problem.
Apparently Vista handles a sudden large memory allocation very poorly. The vmware demon doesn't allocate any memory until the first VM is launched, after that it hangs on to a large block of pages. During the initial allocation, it would appear that is about 400M of physical RAM taken up by operating system pages that aren't really needed anytime soon but which Vista feels it needs to swap out to disk. After things stabilize and I quit all running vmware machines, I'm cruising along using under 500MB of physical RAM, 400MB less than before I launched vmware, although there are a lot of page sitting in swap.
So it would appear that the problem isn't the size of Vista's working set, but an amazingly huge virtual memory footprint combined with poor handling of large memory allocations. This would explain, for example, why you supposedly can use Vista on 512 MB; the actual working set of the OS is probably small enough, but getting the bulk of the memory footprint swapped out could take a while. I'd say a typical office apps user probably is safe with 1GB, but somebody like me probably should have 4GB of RAM.
In any case, for my usage patterns, Superfetch only results in superficial performance; ReadyBoost, however, helps a great deal with the fact I don't have enough RAM to launch vmware smoothly; aside from that the improvement is not very noticeable.
Re:Vista on minimal HW (Score:4, Informative)
Re:At least... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:For more information (Score:2, Informative)
Apparently you don't run Firefox.
I am running XP and I currently I have 2 applications running (Firefox and Pidgin), and I am using 579MB (of 2GB) of memory. Top offenders: Firefox (53MB with two tabs open) and, Symantec AntiVirus Corporate (67MB). Infact, even explorer.exe is using 51MB of RAM.
If you have less then 512MB, sure it may "run", but you have to be some kind of masochist.
you know you've screwed up when.... (Score:4, Informative)
Robin Leonard, a Microsoft employee, wrote that Wal-Mart is "extremely disappointed in the fact that the standards were lowered and feel like customer confusion will ensue.
If Walmart is complaining about quality, then you've really dumped a steaming turd into the marketplace.
Seth
Re:It's time, boys and girls, for (Score:3, Informative)
I just happen to find it easier to set up a desktop with three or more windows dedicated to some activity and keep switching to different ones when different situations arise.
My editor windows all show as the window/frame label the host I'm logged into and the userid. My terminal windows show the window label as the host and current directory and as I use zsh, the $RPS1 shows the host, userid and exit status of the last command I executed and the wonderful command hook lets me keep everything up-to-date no matter whether I ssh/telnet or cd somewhere else. This happens to interact wonderfully with how KDE displays stuff in the summary bar.
I developed all that over years of experience. I don't think any job that I've had in the last 20 years or so has required anything less than being logged into several machines simultaneously. One required being logged into dozens of computers under different userids each day and that's where I did most of the shell stuff to keep from becoming completely confused and typing who am i; pwd; hostname all day.
I'm glad for you that you gave up on virtual desktops in the Microsoft Windows 3.1 days, whenever those were, I can't live without them and to each his or her own. Just curious, but I thought virtual desktops weren't supported under Microsoft Winodws. At least when I was in Microsoft Windows XP appreciation "class" I never found a way to enable them. The answer only matters in a theoretical sense. The Microsoft Windows 2k desktop box they gave me at work (used only as a footrest) was upgraded to RHEL 5 last summer and was described in the previous message and the Lenovo T60 Microsoft Windows XP notebook was also upgraded to RHEL at the same time.