Vista Requirments

Bill

That's a smart decision. A person should always wait until the RTM is released before making a final decision on a new OS. If I remember correctly, there were over 300 bug fixes applied to XP between the last beta version and the RTM version.

--

Ronnie Vernon
Microsoft MVP
Windows Shell/User


"Bill Martin" wrote in message ...
You may have put your finger on the difference. Admittedly, the test I ran
was on a 1GB machine and with one of the old Vista betas. I haven't played
with it since. I'll look forward to trying it on a system fitted to it, and
with release level code.

Bill
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"Kerry Brown" *a*m wrote in message
...
Installing a graphics card with a wddm driver speeds up Vista over a
non-wddm graphics card for the reason Rick mentioned. If you turn Glass
off on the wddm card you will see a very small speed increase. The key is
you need a card with a wddm driver whether you use Glass or not. Vista
uses more RAM and depending on the version may have more services running
than XP. This is probably what caused your test to have slower results.
The sweet spot for RAM in Vista appears to be 2 MB for the 32 bit version.
I haven't done much testing of the 64 bit version so it may differ. With
the 32 bit version there is a very noticeable speed increase if you go
from 512 MB to 1 GB, a smaller but again noticeable increase of you go
from 1 GB to 2 GB, and not much of an increase beyond that. To compare to
XP it would be like going from 256 MB to 512 MB to 1 GB with 1 GB being
the sweet spot for XP. So far for the optimum Vista experience I've needed
a graphics card with a wddm driver and a minimum of 1 GB (2GB is better).
As long as there are drivers for the rest of the hardware I can't notice
much difference in speed between XP and Vista if you meet those
requirements. One bad driver and the system will slow to a crawl.

--
Kerry
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User
http://www.vistahelp.ca


Bill Martin wrote:
That's an interesting way of looking at it. I suppose I'll have to
do some testing to fully understand the performance issues then. I
know the limited testing I've done with an Excel/VBA test routine
shows Vista to be a bit slower but that's one case.

Thanks Rick.

Bill
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"Rick Rogers" wrote in message
...
Hi Bill,

You can turn it off if desired, but it may not have much affect on
system resources. One of the changes in Vista, and one of the
reasons it requires higher graphics card capabilities, is that much
of the UI is passed to the GPU on the video card rather than the
system processor, thereby relieving some of the I/O normally
associated with high end "eye candy". --
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

"Bill Martin" wrote in message
...

"gls858" wrote in message
.. .
Bill Martin wrote:
My understanding is that Vista will have flashier graphics, which
of course demand flashier hardware to support it. Will Vista
allow one do disable those features and run with a more prosaic
interface for those who don't want to spend resources for better
graphics? Currently I'm pondering the purchase of a new machine and
am
trying to understand how Vista will play into that decision. Thanks.
Bill

It's my understanding that Vista will automatically "downgrade"
those features to accommodate your hardware.

I just read this morning that MS is offering coupons for Vista.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060810-7467.html

If it were me I would make sure that the machine I bought was Vista
ready, just in case I wanted to upgrade later.

gls858
--------------------------

No, the point is that I wouldn't want Vista to run in flashy
graphics mode even if it thinks it can. I'd rather hold the
computer resources back to speed up my applications rather than the
OS user interface. So the question is whether one can disable the
"improvements" in graphics? If not, then I want to make sure to get
another machine *before*
Vista comes out rather than being forced to use a slower OS that
doesn't benefit me in particular by it's reduced speed.

Bill