I think anything that requires 1gb of memory (as a minimum!) is obviously not designed very well. I can run the latest version of Ubuntu on 256mb if I so choose.

You could probably install 7 with 256mb, just turn off Aero or something. Although if you still have 256mb RAM, might as well keep using Windows 95. :P

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/...
Blackbox feature looks neat. Built in ISO burning? Neat.

Yeah, some of those features make me interested in Windows 7. It seems to me that we have another ME/XP situation on our hands. Where MS put out a steaming pile of shit(ME/Vista) to turn around and drop a Golden Egg(XP/7) on us. But We'll see.

The new shortcuts stuff is really neat. I love my Quick Launch bar, but if I can do Win+(1-5) to open my 5 favorite apps and not lose taskbar space, Even better.

I'm curious, I hate Vista, but hmm, might as well try out 7 and give it a shot. ThinkI'll try both the 32 and 64 bit versions. My laptop is a 64 bit processor so it may be able to run the 64 bit but not sure as it had driver related issues with Vista 64 bit last time I tried.

Oh and I haven't installed a single driver yet. Flawless so far.

I wonder what the mac community is going to say about this.

Microsoft has a history all right…


I think it started with P.T. Barnum.

This could be very interesting.

On a side note, was Vista able to recognize over 3 gb, or is that a 32-bit limitation?

"With SP1, Windows Vista will report the amount of system memory installed rather than report the amount of system memory available to the OS. Therefore 32-bit systems equipped with 4GB of RAM will report all 4GB in many places throughout the OS, such as the System Control Panel. However, this behavior is dependent on having a compatible BIOS, so not all users may notice this change."

No I don't have 256mb of memory, lol. I do however have a system with only 1gb of Rambus…I was going to upgrade it to 4gb (it's maximum) but I need to purchase a memory riser and uh, 8x512 800mhz RAMBUS == Expensive… $2,200 + From Dell actually. I would have to get the 512mb rimms to upgrade properly, because I have 4x256 in it right now.

Just because I have lots of RAM available doesn't/shouldn't mean that the OS should use up a good gig of it, ne? The reason I have lots of RAM in the first place is to run lots of programs, or programs that need large amounts of RAM – it's not to run an OS and a handful of programs. :wink:

Exactly what I'm thinking David. The operating system(for me) is just there to allow me to use that memory I purchased to run other programs. I don't want it hogging it all up! =)

It's not. :) Look at my desktop pic, you'll see my RAM usage (out of 2gigs). And Firefox is the one taking up most of that.

Sure. But a lot of the features in it blow balls without at least a gigabyte. Try turning on Tracker (which is crappy compared to Win7's equivalent), Compiz (buggy and slow compared to Win7's equivalent… although more flexible), KDE4 gadgets, etc. etc. You can run less stuff using less RAM: that's all you've really said. :)

Maybe you don't _want_ the extra stuff, sure. Your call. You can turn most of it off in Windows, too.

(DISCLAIMER: I've been a Linux "fanatic" for almost 10 years. Then I got a Vista laptop, my first Windows machine in almost a decade. Then I realized that Linux really sucks – Linux is buggier, slower, lacking in features, and it's a general pain in the ass to use. I have ceased to wonder why it only has a 2% desktop market share after years of being "generally usable on the desktop." Windows kicks its ass all up and down the street. Both Ubuntu and Fedora have a ton of new bugs every release, each release changes around half the ****ing desktop for no good reason, they still work like crap on laptops or on modern video hardware even with the "best of breed" OSS Intel drivers, still fail to function reliably with suspend/hibernation or other common laptop parts, and it's still near impossible to install software that the distribution hasn't blessed and prepackaged… even getting newer versions of distribution-provided applications usually involves waiting months and then upgrading your whole damn OS. Linux == piece of total crap for desktop usage for anyone outside of the hardcore geek users.)



32-bit Windows has always been able to use a full 4GB, the limit of the 32-bit address space. Individual applications were limited to a subset of the available address space so that kernel-space code would have a reserved set of memory addresses for kernel-related activities. It's like filling out your tax forms where they have a boxed off area that says "reserved for government-agency use only." :) Whole sheet of paper is there, and the whole thing will be used, but you yourself are not allowed to write on part of it.

You could actually have more than 4GB even on a 32-bit machine using PAE. Individual applications were still limited to a 3GB addressable memory space, though. It just made it possible to run more memory-intensive applications at the same time. Usually only found on servers and high-end workstations.

AMD64/E64T machines only allow a 44-bit address space (there really isn't any remote need for 64-bit addresses for some time to come; memory speed and size are not keeping up with Moore's Law), and I'm assuming Windows reserves part of that address space for itself still.

Hmm, my Linux experience hasn't been as nightmarish as yours I suppose. Haven't noticed the new bugs with every release, and definitely don't think it's a pain to use. Installing software, even not from the repos, has always been dead simple for me. I last tried laptop support some 4 years ago and yes, it was terrible, but on my desktop – the computer I run Linux on anyhow – there are no problems at all. I use Windows for games at this point and that's pretty much it…

It is perhaps worth noting that what I do is very Linux-centric and what Linux is very good at, so it just doesn't make a lot of sense to run Windows for most of it. When I was running Windows, half the time I was in Cygwin or even a VM to do my work, because the terminal environment is just so much nicer for many things I do.

It is also perhaps worth noting that I am not only highly computer literate but am also a relatively skilled programmer, so I can fix many problems so quickly that I don't register them as really being present.

Interestingly enough, I find Windows to be quite lacking in features for things I care about. Things like multiple desktops, window manager effects (not eye candy – I mean things like clones of Apple's Expose), and so forth, come with Ubuntu but to get them in Windows you need to install 3rd-party, sometimes sketchy applications…

EDIT: just to note, I was rather brief in all of the above because I'm not terribly interested in a very long drawn out conversation here, just wanted to say a few quick things. (Also, I'm getting on an airplane in a few hours… :wink:)

Not to get into a *nix vs Windows debate, but yeah it is true new bugs are introduced into Linux distros far too often (not like Vista was without problems though).

I remember making this bug report: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi...

I still snicker. I'm in the Redhat/Fedora source. :P

I'm currently using 737 MB of RAM on Windows 7 while installing Cygwin, running Windows Media Player, scanning with Windows Defender, running IE 8, task manager, and cMUD. That doesn't honestly seem exorbitant to me.

Breakdown of usage:
Windows Media Player: 50 MB
Internet Explorer 8: 30 MB
cMUD: 29 MB
Cygwin: 10 MB

That leaves 618 MB being used by the OS and Windows Defender.

I'm fairly sure I remember seeing 32 bit machines with 4 GB of RAM only having 3.5 of it registered and showing up on diagnostic windows showing the pc's specs because the other half of a gig was failed to be recognized.

IE is lying to you. That's just the memory used by the iexplore.exe file, which is only a fraction of what IE is really up to in the places Windows won't report on. The price of being so deeply integrated into the OS.

Sure. That's not really what I was complaining about. I still run Linux on my desktop for that kind of stuff. I just stopped recommending it to other people for anything other than servers or specialized Linux-friendly stuff. I never tell people that Windows sucks and Linux is better because – for their needs – I know for a fact it isn't. If you want to do what Linux is good at and don't mind putting up with what Linux is bad at then of course Linux is a fine choice for you.



Yeah. I just have gotten to the point where now I consider time spent fixing problems to be wasted time. I could spend 30 minutes hacking around a broken RPM script or I could spend it screwing my girlfriend. Which do you think I'd rather do? If you end up having to use your expertise (which already took years and years of study and experience to accumulate) to constantly fix things then something is really wrong: you're serving the computer instead of having the computer serve you.

Sure, it's _fun_ a lot of the time. I like tinkering around with computer internals. Hence why I'm a professional software developer. :) But there's a stark difference between "I feel like tinkering with this right now" and "crap, sound in Youtube videos stopped working _again_, and my friend isn't interested in watching me spend 30 minutes tracking down what broke this time; he wants to watch the funny-ass video clip I just said I'd show him."

This laptop has not stopped working once in any way (save for a bad a driver update a few days ago – that was not fun) since I bought it in September. My Linux desktop has kernel-paniced twice in the last week, Firefox crashed on me this morning, Youtube videos really aren't playing sound (but everything else is), and I've spend at least 8 hours tracking down the cause of a Fedora mkinitrd bug over the last two months. That's just the recent Linux problems I've had. I could mention how Ubuntu wouldn't print using proper margins to my printer without manually hacking the PPD files (a bug Fedora didn't have because Fedora shipped an up-to-date Ghostscript), how the very next release of Fedora then stopped printing because it introduced a totally different bug in the printer's PPD, or how Ubuntu can't even boot on 4 out of 6 of the machines I've tried it on (Fedora and Windows XP both work fine on it), how Fedora couldn't start X on my old desktop with an integrated NVIDIA controller, or how NO Linux can get fully working accelerated display, on my current desktop with an integrated ATI controller, or how NO Linux can get fully working accelerated display even on the "golden poster child" Intel drivers because the whole Linux video acceleration stack is an antiquated piece of crap that is still (two years after the process started) "about to come into the modern age any day now."



There are add-ons for this. Sure, they're not built-in, but technically neither are virtual desktops built into Linux. ;)



Vista had these working in a stable form long before any Linux WM had them working worth half a crap. Compiz was out first, true, but it didn't get a stable release (and Linux/X didn't get accelerated indirect rendering) until well after Vista's release.



Fair enough. I'm just bored and drawling on for lack of anything better to do… I'm working late tonight as I have to do server maintenance and can't do that in the middle of the day. Have fun on your trip!



Older version of Windows maybe? Could also be a mobo. Or maybe I'm just wrong. It's happened before, once or twice. ;)