What will you lose?

woodchip · Post by **woodchip** » Sun May 08, 2005 7:17 am

Reading about the new Longhorn O.S. I read this:

"We're asking for a modern CPU (central processing unit), 512 meg and a display capability that can be run with a Longhorn display driver."

So it sounds like LH is going to need a machine upgrade to run it, which I'm sure, Dell & and Gateway ought to love as the bundle the new O.S. with a newer, more muscular and yes more expensive 'putor. Now I haven't read just what system specs it will take to run the OS but I trust there will be a fair number of souls needing a upgrade.
Secondarily I'm wondering what older office software will not be able to run under the new architecture. I still run a old lotus spreadsheet that does all i need a spread sheet to do. Will older games like Descent run under LH? I'm wondering if all this will be made clear on the packaging of this new, more powerful OS.

roid · Post by **roid** » Sun May 08, 2005 7:36 am

the OS is simply a tool of the machine.
it's ment to run other things, not needlessly hog the resourses itself.
<-- win2k.

this longhorn OS better be a fully featured 3D Virtual Reality OS for it to require such resourses.

D2Junkie · Post by **D2Junkie** » Sun May 08, 2005 11:01 am

Longhorn to me sounds like a revamped windows that takes all the resources from a computer and uses them to do wacky stuff like the Microsoft Word paper clip guy. Looks nice, it's easy to use, but it takes resources and it's a pain. I'm still stickin' with Windows 98SE for right now. Longhorn had better have some sort of real competing factor to get me to upgrade. To me it sounds like a good way of making more people have more bluescreens-of-death's than they already have.

In conclusion, I'm thinking Longhorn might be another Windows ME - Unstable, resource hogging, nothing will work on it unless they really pull some great compatibility "stunt," and expensive.

roid · Post by **roid** » Sun May 08, 2005 11:07 am

[OT: wow junkie, doesn't the crashes and stuff in 98 bug you? you should really at least upgrade to 2000, probabaly get XP, just for the non-crashery within.
in the years i've been running 2000, i can count the amount of blue screens i've had on one hand.]

Top Gun · Post by **Top Gun** » Sun May 08, 2005 11:29 am

If it doesn't have any insane new features, I doubt I'll have any reason to upgrade. XP's still working fine for me, and I can still run all of my old programs/games.

suicide eddie · Post by **suicide eddie** » Sun May 08, 2005 12:04 pm

wow i didnt know Roid has 47 fingers

JMEaT · Post by **JMEaT** » Sun May 08, 2005 12:16 pm

An upgrade isn't in the cards right now, so I'll be sticking with WinXP for the time being. Unless LH will run on my machine w/o hogging all the resources.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sun May 08, 2005 4:15 pm

I've got 1 GB of ram and can easily dualboot, bring it on.

MD-2389 · Post by **MD-2389** » Sun May 08, 2005 11:35 pm

I wonder if they count 1GHz as a modern chip, seeing as thats what I've seen run a beta version of LH, and from what I heard it runs fine. No idea what ammount of RAM is in it though.

BUBBALOU · Post by **BUBBALOU** » Mon May 09, 2005 1:37 am

D2Junkie all ME is is your beloved 98 with a graphic facelift

now that D2 runs on XP better than anything 98 can pull out of it's tuckus. make the move to xp. then when xp support ends then you can move to longhorn... and longhorn will auto configure itself based on your CPU/GPU/RAM as far as what advanced features it will display

Admiral LSD · Post by **Admiral LSD** » Mon May 09, 2005 4:05 am

Virtually every major Windows upgrade (and other OSs too, it's not just restricted to MS) has required at least a RAM upgrade. Remember when 4Mb was supposed to be the minimum for Windows 3.1? 8Mb for Windows 95? 32 for Win98? You can't really expect Longhorn to be much different...

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Mon May 09, 2005 10:32 am

Yeah, LSD, but keep in mind XP only requires 64MB.

Iceman · Post by **Iceman** » Mon May 09, 2005 10:43 am

XP only requires 64Mb to run but its speed is directly proportional to the amount of RAM you have up to around 512K. My main box, sitting idle, uses 420 Mb of RAM. I know that is partly due to the things I have installed on it but knock off 128k RAM and it becomes a dawg to run.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Mon May 09, 2005 11:32 am

Iceman wrote:XP only requires 64Mb to run but its speed is directly proportional to the amount of RAM you have up to around 512K. My main box, sitting idle, uses 420 Mb of RAM. I know that is partly due to the things I have installed on it but knock off 128k RAM and it becomes a dawg to run.

Noob alert, someone got KB and MB mixed up

I run XP on 1 GB of ram now and it is a lot faster in many cases then 512 MB was. Once my system cache hits about 700 MB pretty much every application I use often is cached in the memory and loads instantly.

Top Gun · Post by **Top Gun** » Mon May 09, 2005 12:34 pm

Maybe I should consider a RAM upgrade before a new video card, then. I have 512 megs of RAM, and XP runs like a dog whenever I'm doing something particularly intensive, even with a 3 gig processor.

Top Wop · Post by **Top Wop** » Mon May 09, 2005 1:37 pm

That "modern" figure for a minimum system requirement is only for the new graphical bells and whistles that come with it. If you can run XP just fine now then you will be ok with LH.

As far as the actual OS, some of its major features like WinFS and one other feature will be backported to Windows XP, so essentially upgrading will be pointless. I think they kinda shot themselves in the foot by backporting a couple of the major LH features to XP. So it means there's no real reason to upgrade from XP once you upgrade with the new tech. Its not going to be a big jump like what it was from 3.1 to Win95. On top of that its still Windows NT technology as its base so you can still run the same software made for LH on XP except for rare exceptions (there will always be one or two pieces of software that will put in OS restrictions on purpose to force you to upgrade :rolleyes:), and you will still have to apply 10+ security patches every month. If you are expecting anything major to come from Longhorn, then you are just kidding yourself. Remember when XP was advertised as the most secure OS ever? HAH!

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Mon May 09, 2005 2:13 pm

The big change you should expect in longhorn should be IE7.

Top Wop · Post by **Top Wop** » Mon May 09, 2005 2:41 pm

Yea but would'nt you be able to install that into XP as well?

Jeff250 · Post by **Jeff250** » Mon May 09, 2005 2:46 pm

IE7 is now supposed to be released before Longhorn and is also going to be for XP SP2.

Also keep in mind that Longhorn is still a year and a half away in late 2006. Given the common interpretation of Moore's Law, processor speeds will have doubled again by then.

Longhorn is still based off of NT, so it can be expected to have the same compatibility as XP.

roid · Post by **roid** » Mon May 09, 2005 11:15 pm

Top Wop wrote:As far as the actual OS, some of its major features like WinFS and one other feature will be backported to Windows XP, so essentially upgrading will be pointless. I think they kinda shot themselves in the foot by backporting a couple of the major LH features to XP...

it's like that with 2K as well, most of the the features of XP have been backported (yay).
i doubt they'd backport the longhorn features all teh way back to 2K though. i'll be forced to upgrade.