According to Gamespot who did a 4 part Vista preview thing a while ago ( http://www.gamespot.com/features/6143883/index.html ) the person the interviewed about Vista said that its recommended to be run on a system with 512MB RAM in order to get that new "Aero" look. Anything less than that might only get Vista without the looks and this is all course assuming you havea DX9.0 compatible card, and if you want to watch movies on Vista with its max resolution you will also need a HDCP compatible monitor and video card (and you'll probably need the card to be DX10 ready).

That was part of my senior year in college. You don't do the whole thing because you couldn't fit all the concepts needed to do an entire OS into one course, but you do major parts of it and plug it in with code the teacher prepares.

Yeah, we had a very basic kernel, and the projects involved implementing such things as paging & virtual memory, file systems, messaging, scheduling, etc. Specifically, the first 2 mentioned were hell. Easy concepts to understand, pain in the ass to implement.

2GB is crap. 512 is completely understandable. If my starkingdoms would be up, I'd post the requirements from there that were posted.

Basically recommended I believe was:

512 RAM
3.0 GHz
DX 9.0 video card

I'd suggest having 2GB though, for running a few "high-end" apps and having smooth performance.

Oh, and I just got XP recently (screw you Battlefield 2) and it was hard to go from 2000 to XP. :(

(Yes I'm in Classic Mode)

This sounds all too familiar to me. Now you also have to consider the fact that you were using Linux which is relatively easy to work with. Take a look at API for the NT kernel and you will cry your eyes out with tears of blood. Things tend to be a bit bloated looking and overcomplicated in my opinion. Process control isn't as simple as just using fork() in Windows. Nope... it's gotta be like 15 lines of code to do that one simple task.


Am I correct in assuming that Vista will be coming bundled with DX10? That's a feature that might be something worth looking forward to. I'm also being hopeful like Eleo and wishing that their main problems are modular and not the core of the OS... but yeah, that's probably just wishful thinking.

I remember hearing that DX10 won't be compatible with DX9 and lower hardware/software APIs, so that means your shiny 7800GTX won't be able to run DX10 games (though I assume you'll be able to install DX9 alongside DX10).

Last I heard was that Vista is to come with DX9 and DX10, the things that use DX10 will make use of it, but it doesn't support DX9 applications (games), so when you run Half Life 2 or whatever, it'll use DX9. When you use Halo 2 or something like that, it'll use DX10. The issue I see that could come up here is if they have a weird implementation on DX9, or it's emulated in some way, that your 'legacy' software won't all run right. Again.

Also, that DX10 will only be available on Vista, so in time you DirectX requirements will get you to switch platforms.

So the average users of Steam (HL2 is still considered a relatively high end game?) use 256-512MB of RAM. So they'll only have to have 4-7 times that number to get about the same performance if they upgrade to Vista. Sounds a bit stiff as an estimate. I expect it'll be a resource hog, but I really hope that is overstating things.

This is what the guy posted:

Aero Glass

Aero Glass is built on the new Desktop Compositing Engine, adding support for 3D graphics, translucency, animation and other visual effects.
Intended for mainstream and high-end graphics cards.
64 MB of graphics memory recommended for 1024x768, 128 MB for 1600x1200+.
At least 32 bits per pixel.
3D hardware acceleration with capabilities equal to DirectX 9.0c.
A memory bandwidth of 2 GB/s, and as much 8 GB/s can be supported.
Capable of drawing ~1.5 M triangles / second, one window being ~150 triangles.
A graphics card that uses AGP 8X or PCI Express x16 bus.
Windows Vista Display Driver Model (WVDDM) Drivers.

It is likely that such a configuration will be an average configuration by Vista's release in 2007. During Vista's early alpha testing stages, the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and the nVidia GeForce FX 5900 were the only cards compatible with Aero Glass. Since then, support has been extended to most DirectX 9 Graphics cards. At this point, the nVidia FX family and up, and ATI Radeon 9500 and up are supported.

What was M$ thinking when they deemed an Xbox1 game Vista-exclusive?
[slightly exagerated] Some emulator might be running it earlier on PCs and then on W2k, XP or maybe even a non-Windows OS... [/slightly exagerated]

They must've wanted to gain some sort of support for Vista this way. With Halo 2 being as popular as it is, it's easy to assume that some might buy Vista just to play it on PC. (At the very least, this seems to be Microsoft's reasoning.)

I will actually install a copy of Vista just to play Halo 2, and if it doesn't suck I may even use it as my primary OS. The Aero skin is sexy, admit it.

Pretty much the only thing bothering me is Vista being over DRMed to hell, and being so "user friendly" that you cannot actually configure anything right because its hidden behind too much bloat.

On top of what XP uses, what sevices will Vista add to the pile? I'd be surprised to see what they add to Vista.

If I ever do use Vista (I might install it just to try the OS, like I did with XP back in late 2001), I'm going to dual-boot (so I don't have to worry about breaking programs that work in XP). Is anyone else going to do this? I'll just download a copy of Win98SE and run it in tandem with the 64bit version of Vista. I might as well, I have too many DOS games aching to be given another try.