Vista
A question for the geeks out there. In a review of Vista
My efforts to get Media Center working highlighted two big problems
with Vista. First, it’s a memory hog. The hundreds of new features
jammed into it have made it a prime example of software bloat,
perhaps the quintessence of programmer Niklaus Wirth’s law that
software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster (for more on
the problems with software design that lead to bloat, see “Anything
You Can Do, I Can Do Meta”). Although my computer meets the minimum
requirements of a “Vista Premium Ready PC,” with one gigabyte of
RAM, I could run only a few simple programs, such as a Web browser
and word processor, without running out of memory. I couldn’t even
watch a movie: Windows Media Player could read the contents of the
DVD, but there wasn’t enough memory to actually play it. In short,
you need a hell of a computer just to run this OS.
Is this really true? I’ve got 768 megs of RAM running Mac OS 10.4.8,
and I’ve got Mail, Safari, the Dictionary, Firefox, Word, Excel,
TextEdit, Xtorrent, iTune, SoundStudio, Photoshop, Illustrator,
InDesign, Preview, and the ActivityMonitor running. Plus all sorts of
stuff behind the scenes. Sometimes it takes 15 or 20 secs to swap the
virtual memory, but I could certainly watch a DVD too. How can there
be such different performance?
Doug