A white paper published this morning by hardware analysis firm iSuppli, based on its studies of Microsoft Windows Vista running on multiple grades of computer hardware, has concluded that the software publisher’s stated minimum requirements for the system – which include an 800 MHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a 35 GB hard drive – may not be nearly enough. “Despite Microsoft’s claims that Vista can run on such trailing-edge systems,” writes Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst for compute platforms research, “iSuppli believes the reality is quite different.”
I’ve learned in the past with Microsoft that whatever it’s lowest minimums are, double or triple it. There’s no way that Vista can run in an 800 MHZ PC with 512MB ram. I found that you should have a minimum of a 1GB to start out with and a video card of 128MB or higher. On the CPU side, nothing lower than 2.5GHZ regardless of a Dual or Quad Core PC.
We aren’t considering Vista on the laptops because we have to get a whole new set of them just to meet Vista’s hardware requirements. We do have some desktops but we feel that we’re going to wait two years or more before we’re ready for Vista.
Sure I’d absolutely agree with what you say against a “recommended system” specification, but isn’t Microsoft just stating what the minimum are to just “get it running” and thus are accurate?
I do believe though that it would give people a false sense of assurance that their system can run it, but then is the problem that people are just not understanding that the word minimum truly means that?
Also, I don’t think this is a Microsoft centric problem.. this stings people in video games as well.
Being an old far that I am, many many many years ago the manufacturers used to never say ‘minimum system requirements’ based on a generic set of requirements
For example, Lotus would say, “you will need 40mb free disk space, 8mb free memory, and minimum 486 16mhz for optimium performance”.
The problem with Microsoft, when they mean minimum/recommended, they mean, bare minimum, it loads, but don’t expect to be able to multitask with ‘easy and teh snappy’.
Personally, I’d rather the software companies just came clean and say, ‘the more memory, the better’, then it’d be better for all concerned.
Sure, I understand what you’re saying and I’ll be honest I haven’t picked up a Vista box or even looked online at the requirements. I’ll assume that there’s a “recommended” column/section. Assuming this holds true, then I don’t really see what Microsoft are doing wrong.
From my perspective they’re saying, “These (x) are the minimum specifications to run Vista, but really we recommend that you use this (y) hardware for the full experience.”
I will still stand by what I said earlier. The question of what people believe when they read “minimum requirements” is the core of the problem. I’d suspect that people expect more from less in many things in life, and this may also apply to software.
It’s a fine line I think. You cannot advertise features along with a minimum system specification to run Vista but then some of those features aren’t possible on hardware that fits into the minimum category. On the other hand the features that seem to require the higher end equipment are just gloss from what I’ve seen and when Vista does have benefits other than that which will work fine, albeit slowly on older hardware, why would you not inform people of that lower end hardware support?
Well, I’m not ‘dissing’ the idea of minimum requirements, but at the same time, they need to define what they mean by minimum – does it mean that it *just* boots or can you do the basics like run a few light applications like word, mediaplayer and notepad, but don’t expect to run bit bulky memory consuming things like Matlab.
I see many end users go in, look at the minimum requirements, and assume that they’ll get the ‘full experience’ with their game as long as they have those ‘minimum requirements’ – when in reality the box should say, ‘this game will operate at this specification, BUT if you want the full experience, you must have atleast this [specification] or higher’ and many games companies now do that.
Your numbers are far too high, Vista runs fine here on an Athlon XP 2800+, and it runs just as well as XP on the same hardware, and it’s only 2Ghz, and 3 generations behind. an 800 Mhz with 512M may be a weak, but you certainly don’t need a 2.5Ghz dual core, that’s just crazy talk
Good on them for saying so. According to Microsoft, you can run XP on a 233MHz machine with 64MB RAM – but 300MHz/128MB is recommended. Yeah, that’d work really well…
To be fair, they’re hardly the only ones – a lot of game manufacturers have pulled similar tricks in the past. You get used to taking the recommended and adding a chunk, but I’m sure lots of people will get caught by this.
You make a good point regarding game companies. What MS is doing is saying you can boot Vista on that minimum requirement. They didn’t say that it would run well.
Game companies often do the same thing. You can run a game on the minimum spec machine, but you have to shut ever little detail off and even then, it still runs horrible, but it runs.
Ignore minimum requirements and look at the recommended requirements as a minimum for acceptable performance.
“What MS is doing is saying you can boot Vista on that minimum requirement. They didn’t say that it would run well.”
They even don’t say you can use it for any purpose. In most cases, you don’t use an operating system (directly), you are using programs. That’s more system load than just the GUI effects. If you set “Vista” on load using some application while running on the real minimum hardware, you can welcome every pixel on the screen personally.
(The minimum makes “Vista” surely run as fast as Geoworks Ensemble on a 286/12 with 1 MB RAM…)
“Game companies often do the same thing. You can run a game on the minimum spec machine, but you have to shut ever little detail off and even then, it still runs horrible, but it runs.”
Same thing there: “runs basically” vs. “is playabe”. The game runs, but you hardly can play it.
(The minimum makes “Vista” surely run as fast as Geoworks Ensemble on a 286/12 with 1 MB RAM…)
That’s not fair to Geoworks
A neighbour of mine had an old PC and asked me to take a look at it recently – it was an old Laser 286 with 640KB of RAM and PC/GEOS / Geoworks Ensemble installed. It was actually quite fast, considering.
The problem, if anyone’s curious, was that the computer had a battery pack with 3 AAs acting as the CMOS battery. The batteries were failing and it would periodically forget that a hard drive was installed (ah, the good ‘ol days before IDE auto-detection). It was the first time I’ve offered “buy a package of AAs” as the solution to a computer problem.
“That’s not fair to Geoworks
“
Please get me right: I like Geoworks very much and still use it for some purposes on my old laptop designated for amateur radio operations. Even my father uses the text editor of Geoworks Ensemble for data collecting in state or federal archives. And it’s installed on his 486 laptop – really fast.
Geoworks even has features “Vista” does not have (but many Gtk+ applications have), such as tear-off menus (the “pin needle”).
Edited 2006-12-09 00:08
(The minimum makes “Vista” surely run as fast as Geoworks Ensemble on a 286/12 with 1 MB RAM…)
My 286 ran Geoworks really damn fast. Fast enough that when I got a Pentium 75mhz / 8 MB with Windows 3.1, I thought something was wrong. The two machines were set up side by side, so I would do the same task on each machine, in its respective OS. The 286/GEOS combo would always beat out the Pentium. Putting Win95 on the Pentium just magnified the difference.
That experience began my hatred of Windows (which got magnified drastically when I got copies of the GEOS SDK and Visual C++). I just don’t consider Windows usable unless the specs are much higher than most people seem to tolerate.
So what exactly is the point then of publishing minimum requirements?
Microsoft and everyone else should offer minimum requirements for what they expect will offer an *acceptable* user experience. Any less than that is dishonest.
I told you so. Inefficient coding, pure waste of resources, should be punished and not rewarded by being used.
“No, the reason is the one that should be more obvious, were it not obstructed by the superficial ones: It’s just Vista, and it needs more processing power just to be Vista.”
That much more? Bl##dy H#ll.
The problem is in Microsoft’s commitment to backwards compatibility. Windows has to support about two decades worth of bugs.
I seriously doubt backwards compatibility is contributing much to this level of bloat.
Well XP will run pretty good with everything shut off on a 300, I know, I’ve done it, but it’s bare minimum.
I imagine, vista basic, in classic mode, all the effects shut off, looking like a half finished .msstyle would run ok on an 800 mhz pc.
but the whole shebang? effects, transparency… on that hardware?
nope, no chance.
but run… oh yes… it will run.
XP pro runs fine on a 133 p1 with 256mb of ram. I know, I’ve done it. ‘course I had to turn off all kinds of stuff and tweak it. (I’ve actually had it usable on a pentium 75mhz with 64mb of ram, but noone here will believe me)
I imagine a 450 p3 with 1gb of ram would run vista fine. the last RC ran on my p3-1ghz wit h1gb of ram and a fx5500 256mb pci card with aero glass fine.
for most people touting 2ghz + and such are those that install windows and then dont do anything to it. If that is what you do, then yeah, a really specced out machine is what you need.
Edited 2006-12-09 00:34
>>I’ve actually had it usable on a pentium 75mhz with 64mb of ram, but noone here will believe me
I believe you. I can’t comment on Vista because I’m never used it, but it sounds like Microsoft just lost its advantage. I say that because Windows XP and earlier are truly resource efficient. I hate Microsoft products for their pricing schemes, but every time I use Linux I am jealous of Microsoft’s snappy GUI and minimal system requirements. Windows 2000 is still a very capable OS, capable of running almost every modern software, and I used it extensively and found that it runs VERY well on a 233 Mhz beige box with 64 MB of RAM. It will work OK with 32 MB of RAM. It flies with 128 MB of RAM. Windows XP with the classic interface will also run great with 64 MB of RAM, as long as you don’t run antivirus software or install bloated junk like RealPlayer that keeps things running in the systray.
Where Windows XP does lie at a disadvantage is the huge amount of disk space used by a default install. I think it’s 6 GB if I remember correctly. A well equipped desktop Linux system hardly takes 2 GB. Fortunately, hard disk space is usually not as scarce as RAM on old systems.
I’m still curious though, is Windows Vista really that much more resource intensive compared to Windows XP if you turn off all the Aero junk? I can’t believe Microsoft would be dumb enough to alienate so many customers with older computers. Try as you may to forget about them, probably the majority of personal and business users are using computers that are underspec’ed by Vista standards.
Edited 2006-12-09 03:03
well, I used the last rc and even with everything turned off, it was using ~300mb of ram. i dunno how well the release version is doing ram-wise though.
I’m still curious though, is Windows Vista really that much more resource intensive compared to Windows XP if you turn off all the Aero junk? I can’t believe Microsoft would be dumb enough to alienate so many customers with older computers.
I daresay that not many users would be upgrading their turn-of-the-century boxes to Vista in any case. If they don’t have to money to upgrade to a circa 2002 computer (Pentium IV 2.x GHz/Athlon XP 2×00+, 512 MB), they certainly don’t have the money to purchase Vista.
I’ve got a Pentium 2 366mhz / 256 MB ram laptop that I recently installed XP on. It takes forever to do anything on it. Its barely usable once you start loading things like an antivirus program on it.
Expensive gadget just to “flip application windows around in full 3D rendering”
I ran Vista on a 1.8 ghz sempron with 256 mb memory….if you were just surfing it was more than fast enough…..and if you were listening to mp3s thru winamp while surfing it was still fine. I do agree though that 800 mhz is a bit too low. I would say the min spec if you are just looking at cpu speed shoul be like 1.5 ghz and memory should be at 512 so that you wont get annoyed by delays. Heck I have a P3 500 with 256 mb of ram running xp and it runs teh snappy! I am sure with a couple gigs of ram in that machine that would run vista fine…maybe not all the grpahics features but then I dont care. It hsould be enough for everyday usage.
One thing I found with XP at least, RAM and a decent GPU usually matter more than the CPU speed. I ran XP for a while on a P3 450 – having 512MB of RAM and a cheap Radeon in it seemed to make all the difference.
The system requirements (may it be minimum or recommended) is part of the sales literature. As such, you have to take it with a grain of salt. That’s why you should depend upon reviews, such as this one, rather than what is printed on the side of the box.
It is also worth noting that the true minimum depends upon your needs and expectations. If you just do email and web browsing over a modem, then you are going to need a lot less hardware than a person who is rendering complex scenes or compressing video. So even a report such as this one won’t be accurate for everyone.
I couldn’t get Vista Beta 2 or RC1 to install with anything less than a 80GB partition. That must be an RTM thing to lower the drive space to 35GB. There’s no way Vista needed all 80GB just to run.
I haven’t tried the RTM on my old pc, AthlonXP 1700+, but RC1 ran pretty well. I was playing GTASA decently on it….until it would crash. That’s when I learned to turn Aero off. Better that way, anyway.
I also thought XP’s minimum 300MHz requirement was wishful thinking. However, my Pentium 2 350MHz is running 2003 Server just fine. Of course I wouldn’t make a datacenter out of it, but it’s good enough for DNS and FTP.
I had Vista RC1 running on a 40GB laptop hard drive. It ran extremely well, actually. This was on a 2Ghz Centrino with 1.5GB DDR2 RAM. It was the quickest install of a Microsoft OS I have ever used. It used about 8GB after install.
Windows XP Pro, on the other hand, I have had SP1 running on a P2-233 with 220MB RAM. It ran decently if everything was turned off on it. However, SP2 has performance issues on anything short of a 1Ghz machine.
I have also successfully used Windows Server 2003 SP1 with a P2-300 with 320MB RAM. It ran incredibly well. Microsoft should have released a workstation version of that OS.
For Microsoft OSes, I have found that if you double the RAM for the minimum requirements, things will work decently.
A friend of mine had a eMachine that the motherboard went out on it, so I tried to find a cheap replacement (college student) and accidentally ordered one that used PC133 memory. Damned if I could figure out why anyone would make a Pentium 4 motherboard (it was a socket 478 for her Celeron 2.7ghz) that had PC133 Memory.
Anyhow, long story short, I only had a 128mb memory stick for it, so I slapped that in until I could order more ram. Windows XP after having a antivirus installed (Avast) literally crawled. It would take about 15 minutes to load. Ubuntu Dapper Drake ran just fine on it, although it too was quite long in the tooth to load things, it was usable, unlike XP.
XP in my experience pretty much requires 256mb of ram, unless you spend a lot of time tweaking it so that it uses the very minimal of everything. Which is ok for me, since I hate the default theme in it anyhow, I always switch it to classic or use the CrystalXP.net Themes (which look pretty cool, but it’s always been the case with XP that whenever I try to use a theme, it feels like it takes away from performance, even though I have an amd64 3400+ with 3gb of ram.)
It may run vista… but NOT any programs, and especialy not cpu and gfx intensive programs on their FULL SPEED when it needs so much resources just to run itself! (industrial stuff, GAMES)! and it definetly can’t run them on speed of windows xp!
MS might be telling the truth. I believe that the starter edition wont even let you use more than 256MB of RAM anyways…800Mhz seems plausible. It’ll be really slow, but it will run.
Of course these minimums are for running Windows only. As soon as you install other apps I doubt these requirements will hold.
Oh and lets not forget service packs. Those always seem to add an extra layer of crap on top of the whole thing, boosting system requirements (like the false-sense-of-security center in XP).
I’ve diverged. Back to my point. 800Mhz, 512MB of ram, 35 gigs of ram: sounds ok, just barely.
… saying:
It’s just Vista, and it needs more processing power just to be Vista.
I was wondering, suddenly, if this is a trend that will forever continue? Vista may be the champion, but other popular OS’es (OpenSuse, Fedora Core, Mac OS X, Gentoo) like their share of heavy hardware to run nicely too.
There was some “news” that due to Vista’s more advanced power management (arguably, fixes of things not working so well in XP), Vista will save a lot of energy because it is good at sleeping and hibernating if applicable. But will the same effect be, simultaneously, killed by Vista needed all the power it can get its bytes on? That would be too bad.
It is not unlikely that hardware will simply continue to get more powerful for the next decade. I am guilty of liking some of the bloatware myself, it’s called Gnome, among others (anybody ever met Beagle?
)
It can do all sorts of things, and that’s the trade-off. But isn’t it so that bloated code also means more bugs, less stability, etc.? In the long run, the great programs will still be the lean and mean.
It’s kind of ironic, I once had an Apple Macintosh ii, which booted quite fast, and yet it had a full working GUI. Now the iBook takes a lot more time to even start up the simplest application.
So I don’t think we can blame it solely on the MS developers, it’s sort of all around, really. And since resource waste is good for the economy in the short run, everybody’s happy, so far – the CPU, RAM, graphics corporations, they’ll be having a great time.
I was wondering, suddenly, if this is a trend that will forever continue? Vista may be the champion, but other popular OS’es (OpenSuse, Fedora Core, Mac OS X, Gentoo) like their share of heavy hardware to run nicely too.
I don’t know about the others, but even my old P3 450mhz with 128mb RAM could run Gentoo just fine. Compiling stuff is a different matter, but well, compiling apps is Gentoo’s thing. Win2K runs just fine on the same hardware, but when it comes to running applications, Gentoo beats pants off of Win2K.
They hide behind the word “believe” .
This “article” drifts off into off-topic hardware cost issues .
The only reason for this “paper” is because of company interest – this being a reply to someone else .
OMG they managed to find out the dead ovious – that took them a while – the Windows bare minimum has always been what it said on the tin – the absolute mimimum – complaining that the minimum wont give the user the Aero “experience” is like suddenly finding out that men can’t get pregnant – its a pointless dumb statement – & just advertisment for this company .
The article IMO is of close to no informational value – reg the headline .
The paper isn’t suppossed to be about increasing hardware costs – off-topic .
Tired & moany
IMO
There are two sides in Windows requirements: First it can be made to be usable, albeit barely, on minimum specs. And it’s really optimized for the recommended one.
What I mean is, for example it’s possible to use a “single tasking” Windows XP on a 64M machine without problems. However when you try to multitask, say Office 2003 with Firefox you’ll immediately see a crawling system.
And for the recommended one, it really works better than previous versions. According to my experience, Vista runs faster than XP on a 1GB ram machine that has a over the average GPU. (Think like an application optimized for speed or size, a size optimized application will run faster on smaller machines, while the speed optimized will run faster on bigger ones).
I could not find a study on Vista, but some people tried to push the limits fr XP, and it could be useful as a reference:
http://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm
>>What I mean is, for example it’s possible to use a “single tasking” Windows XP on a 64M machine without problems. However when you try to multitask, say Office 2003 with Firefox you’ll immediately see a crawling system.
I agree with this. Firefox is a bloated pig. But if you were to use Internet Explorer concurrently with MS Word, Excel, Outlook, and maybe Windows Media Player, there would be no major problem. (That is, not until your system gets compromised due to a Windows security vulnerability…)
All of the native MS programs make good use of shared components that are already loaded into memory. Linux/Open Source could learn a lesson from that. Things like OpenOffice and Firefox might as well include their own graphics drivers, printer drivers, and a kernel if they like bloat so much.
Same can be said for *NIX as well; all the GNOME components share parts with each other same with KDE as well.
There is a *REASON* for the way Firefox and OpenOffice.org were designed; they were *DESIGNED* to be multiplatform from day one – in the case of Firefox, you have XUL and its wrapper around native widgets, in the case of OpenOffice.org, you have the Software Abstration Layer (SAL) which allows one to simply port SAL and voila, the whole office suite is now running on the said operating system!
Before maeking such *STUPID* rants in future, maybe its best you put your brain into gear, closed the mouth and researched the reasons as to why such decisions were made rather than making clueless posts on osnews.com.
Yes, of course Firefox and OpenOffice were designed to be multi-platform. But that doesn’t negate the fact that they are drastically more resource intensive than their single-platform integrated counterparts. The question here is performance on old hardware, not code portability.
Edited 2006-12-10 03:11
Which again, you completely neglect to take into account; they’re more resource hungry because they’re designed to be multi-platform; when you make something multiplatform, you have additional overhead than if you were to use the default shared components that come with the operating system itself.
If you load GNOME and run GNOME based applications (only) then the amount of resources used will be no higher than Windows XP – if you were to load a KDE application whilst running GNOME, then SURE there will be a spike in resource use because a whole new LAYER of libraries have to be loaded to support the KDE application running on a foreign desktop!
What should I start doing? bitching to Microsoft because their copy of Microsoft Office 2003 uses more resources when running on Linux under wine? of corse it’ll require MORE resources, its not using the already loaded shared resources which the default desktop provides!
Edited 2006-12-10 04:07
Well, MS never claimed that you can also work productively on such systems. They just claimed “you can run” respectively boot Vista on such systems.
Is 800 Mhz/512 MB recommended? No
Does it run Vista? Yes
——-
Hence, MINIMUM requirements.
Is 800 Mhz/512 MB recommended? No
Does it run Vista? Yes
——-
Hence, MINIMUM requirements.
Well paper is patient.Personally i perceive XP prof is running slow on my AMD64 2.2GHz 1GB RAM raid0 station much less Vista.All those resident programs such as antivirus firewall and so on are a real drag on resources.Disabling the stupid unwelcome system restore feature constant monitoring the HD’s does give a slight relieve.So does disbling the Toys R Us theme.
Running a native 64-bit linux OS with running only that what i have choosen to run comes more closely to my expected perception.Even with all bells and whistles turned on the system is more responsive,day in day out.
Quite frankly the minimum Vista specs are rediculous.
The above mentioned system would be a more realistic minimum spec and any dual-core regardless Intel or AMD and 2GB of RAM is recommended.Unless a lot possible experience goes down the drain.
Edited 2006-12-09 12:42
Running a native 64-bit linux OS with running only that what i have choosen to run comes more closely to my expected perception.Even with all bells and whistles turned on the system is more responsive,day in day out.
I have made the move to 64-bit XP, and there is no going back. Try for instance to press Windows+E (opens explorer). In XP64 it’s instant, in XP32 there’s a noticable delay.
Two years from now, 32 bit versions of Vista won’t be around – simply because of the memory limitations.
I have made the move to 64-bit XP, and there is no going back. Try for instance to press Windows+E (opens explorer). In XP64 it’s instant, in XP32 there’s a noticable delay.
True
I would like to see though a review on OSAlert on what hardware you can actually (as an experienced user) make Windows Vista run reliably on rather than only reading about microsofts “minimum requirements” and what analytists think about un-configured PC configurations for the average home user..
I wrote a small how-to on getting windows 2000 run on very old PC’s with small CPU’s and only 32MB RAM.. The guide works well on Windows XP as well (although of course you need more than 32MB RAM)
It is at:
http://www.nexle.dk/daniel/win2000-32mb/
I wonder if someone has/would try somehow and see if you can get away with “current” and “not-so-current” hardware and Windows Vista (I know for personally Vista will not make me upgrade its simply does not seem worth it)?
I think it should be able to run rather well with Office 2003 etc. on 650+ Mhz, 256+ MB RAM as long as you turn of fancy graphics, file protection, disable services etc. etc.
?
Cheers,
Daniel
Strange. Some years ago I’ve tried to install windows millennium on a pentium 133. The installation program didn’t let me do it cause my system didn’t meet the minimum requirements. And Windows Xp can be installed on a pentium 75?
And even if you’re right, you know what? As long as you can install an operating system you can always work with it even if it’s dead slow. You don’t have ram? Well you disk will starting to swap like hell but it will work. So it’s a really PERSONAL statement to say “this software with this hardware is ok”.
The question is: what are you measuring? what do you mean by usable? I’m quite sure that my idea of usable is different from yours..
Oh, so it won’t run with 640K of RAM … ?
SCNR, someone had to make this joke.
I’ve got Vista Running on my Laptop, 1.8Gig Proc, 512 Ram, shared video.
I’ve got the usual stuff installed, office 2007, VS 2005, .NET Frameworks, FTP proggies, and even though I can see 1Gig of ram being a sweetspot, the system runs more than decently!
Firefox is very bloated because in order to be portable, it was designed to be compiled with compilers that didn’t support many features. So for example the code doesn’t use exceptions in c++.
The original code was also made by a lot of people (Netscape). So they made the code too modular with lots of interfaces.
see
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2006/02/fresh_xpcom…
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2006/10/mozilla_2.h…
http://dbaron.org/log/2003-01#l20030109
http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/coding-introduction.html
Now the layout code has changed a lot, a lot simpler. But according to Brendan Eich they will need computers to rewrite the code. He says it will work-we’ll see
kaiwai you make a good case why the linux desktop will continue to be bloated as long as they refuse to be unified. And by unify i mean kicking off either kde or gnome completely. Unify by having kde being compatible with gnome is extra code.
I thought of an idea: an OS with a XUL native UI.
Or better yet, if Trolltech, or some noble ecentric millionaire bought Trolltech, licenced the whole stack via the LGPL, the reason for GNOME existing would become a non-issue.
The free software treehuggers would have what they wanted; and software vendors hanking to create proprietary software without needing to pay a licence fee could do so.
Personally, I find KDE a more ‘complete’ environment; one only needs to look at Amarok compared to the joke that is Rhythm box which seems to be absolutely clueless to the needs of the average ipod/mtp syncing, heading banging end user who wants minimum fuss and bother.
That’s taking things a little too far, methinks. The reason for Gnome’s birth may no longer exist, but as a desktop environment, KDE is not across-the-board superior to Gnome. In fact, while I’m a fan of neither DE, I find the look and feel of Gnome to be much nicer than that of KDE. Admittedly, there’s very little else about Gnome I care for, but is not that alone a reason for its existence even if QT was LGPL-licensed?
At Computers for All we give computers to those that cannot afford one — Vista adoption will cause a real increase in the specs of discareded commercial computer – Put Linux on those machines and it will fly – We now get good performance out of 500mzh systems – just think firms will be giving us computers of 1ghz or better as soon as they start upgrading to Vista.
I’m not sure businesses will be upgrading to Vista quickly enough for this to be a factor, but I wouldn’t mind seeing this happen, either. (My organization also does some similar charity work.)