Darth Wong wrote:Pure theory aside, is there any particular reason to believe that this will be the first time in history that Microsoft's claims about limited system requirements for a new version of Windows are not bullshit? Or have we forgotten that they always make the same-sounding promises?
Minimum system requirements are literally the bare minimum. I have a lot of problems with Microsoft, but how they advertise their system requirements isn't one of them. Hell, Vista is coming with a new ratings control panel that tells you just how well your current computer will run Vista. They may even be releasing such a utility as freeware to help consumers get an idea of how well Vista will run on their box.
Other than that, I've used Vista on a fairly modest 2.4 GHz P4 with integrated graphics. It scores a 2 or so on the performance rating, but the GUI is still plenty responsive.
From a security perspective, if Windows Server 2003 is any indication of Microsoft's new attitude toward security, Vista users will be a lot better off by default.The implementation of least-required privileges and a sudo-like authentication method shows that they really want to move away from people running as administrator all the time. The problem is that they've got a whole lot of legacy software that requires administrator privileges to run for no real reason, andthat's due to an attitude of laxness about security that Microsoft themselves helped create. "Hey if the user's going to be admin by default anyway, let's just work from that assumption and write our software this way." That stuff is going to break.
Vista is only a first step toward better security for Microsoft. They have to drag their developers into a new model of programming whereby a program should have the code that executes privileged operations factored out into another application.