Wednesday, March 28, 2001

Mega-Minimums for Windows XP -- 2:59 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

CNet News is reporting that the minimum system requirements for Windows XP will be a huge leap up from WindowsME. Here's a snip:

Microsoft's Web site recommends a minimum 300MHz Pentium II processor and 128MB of RAM to run the Windows XP beta, up from a 133MHz processor and 64MB of memory for Windows 2000. Although many PCs come with 128MB now, machines sold a year ago, especially budget PCs, typically came with much less memory.

A 300 Mhz processor and 128M RAM just to run the freaking OS? Why is it that the only things that seem to be making use of the latest and greatest processors are games and Microsoft's OSes?

The Master comments: And Excel, and Word, and Outlook, and any other form of Windows BloatWare^TM you'd care to mention . . .

J.t.Qbe comments: If you don't want to buy a new system just because Microsoft Tells You To, just remember that Linux and BSD have much more reasonable hardware requirements.

A.t. brings up a good question though. It's pretty simple--with both Windows and games, you need the extra hardware to push the pixels around. Most other user software simply doesn't need the horsepower. However, PC sales have been in a slump since December (because most users simply don't need the latest and fastest machine) and this is, I suspect, the first of many attempts to get sales going again. If you want to run Micro$oft's latest and greatest, you're going to need a superpowered machine, so you'd better go buy one! Go! Spend! Be a good consumer! Make M$ happy! That's your reason for existence! Ok, I'm done now--back to my FreeBSD install.

News for 03/28/2001

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