okay so the skinny jeans didn't work out for me so well …

What good is running on 1 GB of ram when by the time this comes out 8 GB may be standard??

I’ve never actually purchased a version of Windows. I always felt that the OS was something essential that should just be a part of the computer. Then again I grew up with the OS either embedded into the system, as it was with many computers back in the eighties, or DOS or CP/M or some other system. I have fond memories of installing like Windows 1.0, but never actually thought about purchasing Windows.

This may be the first time that a purchase of Windows would be in order as compared to purchasing new hardware to run Windows on. I say that because up until now newer versions of Windows have always run slower than previous versions did on the same hardware. Having to have 4 times the requirements of what it took the previous OS to run at the same speed is nothing new with Windows, in fact it is quintessentially what Windows has always been about. Windows 98 ran slow on systems with the bare minimum needed to get by, which may have been like 16 MB at the time. Windows 98 was rarely, if ever, ran on a system in which it was feasible to also run stuff like anti-virus at the same time.

Pretty much every version after that has followed suit. Upgrading a Windows 98 system to Windows 2000 resulted in extremely slow performance. Likewise for upgrading an XP system to Vista, or worse yet, a system that ran 2000 just fine to Vista. Then something happened of course; people realized that Macintosh’s OS X didn’t have the stringent memory requirements that Windows had, ditto for Linux. Suddenly it was chic to pick up throwaways that you found at the thrift store or alongside the road on trash day and outfit them with Ubuntu.

Personally the 486 machine will let you get by with basic productivity, but still isn’t fast enough for your multimedia though burning CDs can be done. Try burning a CD on 486 running any version of Windows and chances are your computer locked up, froze, gave you the blue screen of death, or was non responsive for like 10 minutes at a time, particularly when the data was being written to the disc. It almost always happened to me running Windows 98 on that old Pentium 1 with like 48 MB of ram. But yes, if you can find an old Pentium 4 computer you can install Linux and have a complete system for like $300 these days.

Now look at it this way. Vista needs that latest dual core processor just to provide essentially acceptable performance, meaning that it doesn’t lag, or if it does just for a few seconds but not enough to completely lock up the computer altogether. There is much that isn’t said about Vista. For example you can go the ghetto route and install a 4 GB memory stick in it and use ReadyBoost to prevent it from crashing outright on 1 GB of ram, though chances are if it does lock up on 1 GB of ram even without that cache you can walk away from it for a few minutes and come back and resume what you were doing. That isn’t always the case on XP, though on XP it is the case far more than it ever was on say 2000 or 98.

There were many, many, situations XP told me I was just out of luck. So now Microsoft approaches us and says, essentially, that they have an OS that can run on 1 GB of ram, on a 1 GHz processor without crashing. That’s about a decade too late and far too little. They tell us that Windows 7 can finally do stuff with ease, like multimedia, syncing devices with the PC and handling peripherals, that the OS should have been able to do years ago. They were supposed to get the driver thing right with XP, but just now have figured out that they should all be handled through Windows Update.

Here is the biggest irony in Windows 7; the idea that the actual windows manager itself actually do what other OS have done for years and only allocate memory to the actual window that you are using, as opposed to every single window open as Vista and perhaps every other version of Windows has always done. Oh so that describes why Aero works so poor on systems with less than 2 GB of ram.

So a lot of this stuff sounds like what Windows Vista could be tweaked to do with service packs. Which is why there would be absolutely no reason whatsoever to upgrade to Windows 7 in 2010 when it comes out. If you’re a techie you have probably already found free tools to do a lot of what 7 promises out of the box just like users had done with XP when Vista came out. I’m still wondering what else Microsoft is spinning and marketing as new that Linux hasn’t done for a while now, in particularly Mac OS X.

Windows 7, though it would be to my advantage to install on this 1 GB, 2.8 GHz system, woefully underpowered system is something I’ll wait for. Microsoft now assigns an experience score to the OS, and mine is a 2.8. Quite honestly, when I first heard of that I figured there would be some serious performance issues with it before I ever got into it, because I don’t remember any other OS having an experience score or anything like it. It suggests that they knew that it would have some issues to begin with, and found that to be a nice way to get people to go out and buy extra stuff they shouldn’t need. If this is truly the revolutionary OS they claim that it is, it should be provided to those stuck with Vista free of charge out their own goodwill. I don’t need all of the bells and whistles; I just want the performance that Vista was supposed to have over XP out of the box …