Windows Vista Beta 2 Preview / hardware requirements

[Nemesis11]

Vista beta 1: that's so August 2005

Just weeks after releasing Windows Vista Beta 1, Microsoft has shifted our paradigms again, unveiling a preview of beta 2 at the TechEd 2005 developer conference this morning.

McDonald was presenting on a raft of topics, but everyone was really only there to see one thing: a first look at Windows Vista beta 2 (build 5219). McDonald revealed that copies of Beta 2 would be released at the Professional Developer's Conference in September

Among the breakthrough new features shown to the 2,000 developers paying $2,000 each to attend TechEd: Solitaire with new background images, a scrolling Alt+Tab bar and Microsoft's version of Mac OS X's Expose function, which allows all the open Windows to be viewed at once. (Microsoft has done a 3D thing that shows the windows stacked side by side, rather than spreading them out in miniature across the desktop as Apple has done.)

Security wouldn't be a problem in Vista, according to McDonald. "You can be confident in the system from day one it is going to be secure."

But then immediately after that comment, he added, "I'd love to say we are going to get rid of every security issue that comes up in a Microsoft product it's probably not going to happen in the near term."

Kleef admitted that the security model in all previous versions of Windows pretty much sucked, or at least that's how it came across to us.

"What we find in enterprise is that just about all users are running as local admins on their machine because otherwise they can't do simple tasks like adding a printer. In Vista we have added much more useful least user privelege accounts," he said.

" and IE7 runs at an even lower context than the rest of the system. If something [like a malware process] comes out of IE7, you have to elevate privileges manually," McDonald added.

Even the elusive WinFS got a look-in. Microsoft's next generation file system that's supposed to do away with files and folders and instead rely on file metadata has been pumped up, then cancelled, and now it's being pumped up again ... sort of. "You'll see a line on the bottom left hand corner of that slide, 'WinFS' and we'll have an early beta of that coming out," he told the bemused audience.

http://www.apcstart.com/teched/pivot/entry.php?id=5



Hefty hardware requirements for Windows Vista

Nigel Page is a strategist with Microsoft Australia. He told APC today that Vista would work best on a video card with more than 256MB RAM, 2GB of DDR3 memory and a S-ATA 2 hard drive.

"One of the things you'll notice about Vista beta 1 is that it runs dramatically quicker than Windows XP. The reason is the GPU is now doing a lot of work that the CPU used to have to do. There are a couple of gotchas though. The GPU needs a very high speed bi-directional bus to communicate with main memory. That has not been the case in the past, and what it means is that AGP will not be optimal.

"The reason is that one of the things the LDDM can do is allow a video card to back stuff off into the PC's main memory if it has a particularly intensive task and needs the video RAM to work in. That's an intensely bi-directional type of communication.

"The GPU will need a plenty of room to operate in Vista. The more memory you put on a video card the better really. We want the least dumping back to main memory because that's slower than graphics. If you have 128MB that's good, if you have 256MB that's better, but I expect that video card memory will go up a lot when Longhorn is released.

"S-ATA 1 has now evolved into S-ATA 2. The link speed has gone from 150Mbit/s to 300Mbit/s but despite what people think, that's not the big deal.

"Native command queuing (NCQ) is standard in S-ATA 2 and that cannot be done on S-ATA 1 drives that were simply S-ATA to P-ATA bridge drives. NCQ means drive tasks can be reordered in the most efficient path for the heads to move.

"That means Windows Vista desktop PCs will be able to have asynchronous completion – the operating system won't have to wait for one task to complete before going on to something else – the same way SCSI drives work today.

"In order to get the real benefit from dual or multi-core chips you'd think that we have to have very well threaded applications. We don't have very well threaded apps today; in fact Outlook is probably the best [Microsoft app] in terms of doing things in the background.

"But if you look at a standard desktop machine, there are a lot of separate processes running in the background, which can now be split across multiple processes, so you really are going to see performance improvement for OS support for multicore.

"The industry needed something much better to deal with the piracy problem. Studios said in a high-def world, we're going to have to have a very different way of viewing content.

"In Longhorn, the computer determines that a video card is not faked or being intercepted, so there's a lot of onus on the writers of the drivers. It also checks If there are digital or analogue drivers. If only digital outputs are in use, it will then check a display has HDCP capability – high bandwidth digital content protection. The communication between the video card and the device is encrypted and only decrypted by the display device itself. If all that is true, the operating system says, "ok, gotcha, we are running on a protected video path which is OK for premium content… HD-DVDs, BluRay, or a video file that someone has marked."

"If you don't comply with PVP, we're going to downscale the quality upon playback… you're going to get a lower quality version; you're not going to get the high def content the way it was intended to be viewed. You'll find that most plasma displays have HDCP already. But this isn't available in computer monitors. I have not been able to find a single monitor that supports it. We are going to see a lot of change in this space.

"The hardware vendors all know about it but aren't yet making monitors with it built in, so now it's up to you [the users] to say, "where's my HDCP?"

"There's a LOT of encryption and decryption going on. We communicate on the PCI Express bus in a fully encrypted format because it is considered a public bus.

"The downside is that all your existing flat panel monitors and projectors aren't going to work with high-def videos in Vista. Bad news."

"In a 32 bit environment, half a gig of RAM is heaps. It's going to fly. For 64 bit you're going to want 2 gigs of DDR3 RAM.

"If you move from 32 to 64 bit, you basically need to at least double your memory. 2 gigs in 64 bit is the equivalent of a gig of RAM on a 32bit machine. That's because you're dealing with chunks that are twice the size… if you try to make do with what you've got you'll see less performance. But RAM is now so cheap, it's hardly an issue.

http://www.apcstart.com/teched/pivot/entry.php?id=6

Boas noticias, algumas promessas e uma beta que me parece que vem mais cedo que o previsto (Setembro).

As restrições das contas dos utilizadores e o apertar do cinto no IE são boas noticias. Isto tinha mesmo que ser feito.

Quanto ao hardware e apesar de no fim do proximo ano isto vai ser mais comum, ainda me parece muito pesado. Vai depender de como é que ele se porta sem o hardware recomendado.

Quanto ao HDCP, estou para ver como é que eles vão conseguir vender isso ao consumidor. Ter que comprar um monitor novo para ver videos com DRM não me parece aceitavel.

 

[_zZz_]

pk é k cancelaram o WinFS? e agora voltaram ?

semprei pensei que seria uma das grandes novidades do novo windows

 

[da Fohz]

Quanto ao HDCP, estou para ver como é que eles vão conseguir vender isso ao consumidor. Ter que comprar um monitor novo para ver videos com DRM não me parece aceitavel.

DVD Jon to the rescue

 

[Nemesis11]

pk é k cancelaram o WinFS? e agora voltaram ?

semprei pensei que seria uma das grandes novidades do novo windows

Não foi cancelado. Foi atrasado para depois do lançamento do Vista.
E acho que o plano continua o mesmo. Há uns dias quando foi o anuncio do Beta 1 do WinFS continuaram a dizer que viria depois do Vista.
Não dá para perceber se mudaram de ideias agora ou não.

 

[JPgod]

"2GB of DDR3 memory"

LOL?? Nem existem nem boards e cpu's ES por ai com isso

 

[Slider]

Quando ele sair já deve existir, é essa a ideia.

 

[flak]

o WinFS, tal como a tão falada sidebar, e mais umas cenas que n me lembro, foram tiradas de certas builds (não sei porque, a versão beta do WinFS já anda por aí ) por alguma razão que eles devem saber, tal como as builds 4xxx do longhorn não traziam o aero activo, etc.. mas o desenvolvimento não parou, a sidebar parece que vai ser um sítio para acomodar 'gadgets' a la desktopX... tá com bom aspecto o vista, lets hope they don't screw this up

 

[eyeliner]

É engraçado dizerem que o Vista é mais rápido que o XP.
Com a máquina que pede, pudera!

 

[Nazgulled]

então e por isto num portatil ta fora de questão não? comprar um portatil agora sera um erro? tendo em atenção que se pretende actualizar po windows vista qd sair ou sera que mesmo qd saia os portateis ainda não vão ser assim tão avançados quanto eles querem que os pcs o sejam?

 

[MaTreCo]

Atenção que essa fonte não parece ser muito fidedigna. Li algo muito diferente em http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_5219.asp.
Só pela maneira como ele descreve as novas features desta build, dá ideia de que deve de ser mais um cruzado anti-Micro$oft. E o Vista vai escalar as features consoante a máquina que tiverem. Senão, sempre podem comprar uma versão à vossa medida >> link

 

[blastarr]

então e por isto num portatil ta fora de questão não? comprar um portatil agora sera um erro? tendo em atenção que se pretende actualizar po windows vista qd sair ou sera que mesmo qd saia os portateis ainda não vão ser assim tão avançados quanto eles querem que os pcs o sejam?

Qualquer máquina (e isso inclui desktops, laptops, tablet pc's, etc) que corra o XP, correrá também o Windows Vista, mesmo que seja apenas na versão Aero Express (think "themes do XP com mais uns pózinhos"), ou Classic (o desktop do Windows 2000/Win ME ou XP com os themes desactivados).

O Vista é mais estável do que o XP, mesmo na Beta 1 já se nota isso.
Os benefícios do Managed Code generalizado e dos device drivers a correr fora do Kernel Mode são evidentes já nesta altura do campeonato.

As spec's que eles recomendam são para terem o eye-candy e algumas funcionalidades bem interessantes, pelo que, para portáteis, basta terem uma gráfica dedicada com pelo menos 128MB de memória e ser "DirectX 9 compliant" (nada de gráficos integrados made-in-Intel).
Uma Geforce Go 6600 ou Radeon X700 são o mais indicado, 128 ou, de preferência, 256MB.

Edit: Se querem ter uma ideia do que esperar, sugiro que vejam estes vídeos, em particular este, ou este, ou este, ou este... Enfim, é um mar deles.

 

[Nazgulled]

pois, mas ideia é mesmo tirar partido de todo o eyecandy. eu sei que o poderei usar sem eye-candy todo ms ja que é possivel ter algo + bonito pk não? se gostar dele claro, só irei saber se realmente gosto dps de usar por uns tempos a versão final...