DRAM Makers Suffer Due to Lackluster Vista Adoption 395
quixote9 writes "We've heard conflicting estimates of how widely adopted Vista has been. Now comes some hard data. DRAM makers ramped up to meet the huge expected demand for more memory needed by Vista. Except the demand hasn't materialized. Now they're suffering. Alternatively, maybe everyone's cleverly hacked their Ultimate Aero Glass Vista to fit on their old PCs."
Or maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
It
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HP drivers, for instance, are notoriously gigantic to the point that at least a few people refuse to buy HP printers -- on the order of several hundred MB just to print. The standalone drivers are often incomplete. The HP package insists on installing an auto-updater, too, because if anything needs a 12MB resident program to check for updates, it's your printer.
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Well, there's your problem - with only 4Mb of RAM your system is swapped out most of the time.
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This wouldn't be a good measure of Vistas success in the market place. Personally, I don't believe that Vista is breaking all that many sales records.
Re:Or maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
I cried almost as much when I heard that lackluster SUV adoption was cutting into oil company profits.
Re:Or maybe (Score:4, Funny)
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Based on that statement, I would assume that you have never worked in a large corp. environment...
Most of microsoft's money comes from corporate license agreement for Server level OS's, Exchange type stuff and the legions and legions of other business productivity software. Moreover, I don't see anything usurping Microsoft's complete and utter domination of the home PC market; as it stands both Mac and Linux are niche user groups.
Besides, in 18 months compute
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Um, IBM still has a whole lot of inertia.
-mtthew
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So? That just says that large companies like IBM and Microsoft doing go outo f business (or even significantly shrink) just because one product fails or becomes a "niche" product.
-matthew
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I'm not so sure. Microsoft's aggression and refusal to interoperate has forced their only real competition (FOSS) to build an entire software stack - Operating systems, office suites, drawing packages etc etc - separate from the MS software ecosystem. For the moment, much of that software is not being used by the larger community, but it is still being actively developed, and has m
Re:Or maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh? I thought most of Microsoft's money came from Windows and Office. With Windows, I thought most of that money came from license sales on desktop platforms, both for consumers and businesses. With consumers, most probably comes from OEM sales (Dell, etc.), and with businesses, most probably comes from site licenses.
MS is well-known to have a monopoly on desktop OSes, not server OSes. It would stand to reason that they make the most money, then, in desktop OS sales.
(On a side note, am I the only one blown away by the fact that Apple can get a way with saying that the iPhone is a revolutionary devise? The thing costs nearly as much as a laptop and the only "unique" function that I can see is the digital rotary dialing system....).
We'll see. After all, the original iPod wasn't received with much enthusiasm here on Slashdot, and look at where it is now.
Personally, I don't think it's going to be that much of a success (at least here in the USA), for the same reason mobile telephones in general aren't much of a success here (what I mean here is yes, everyone has one, but people don't bother with the premium features that much; they just get the cheapest phone available, myself included). The reason here is the locked-in nature of the cellular providers; you usually can't use your phone with different providers, the phone is locked in so you can't use all the built-in features, you have to purchase everything (ringtones, MP3s, etc.) from your provider at astronomical rates, etc. Because of this, Motorola actually is taking a big hit in their business, as is my company which is a supplier to them. Sure, the cellular providers are all doing fine, because people want/need cell phones, but anyone trying to make money on cellular technology (i.e. more powerful embedded processors, flash memory, etc. needed for premium features) is having a hard time since everyone is just getting the cheapest, most basic phone they can.
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Thank you, I'll be using that phrase against a few Ubuntu-users I know.
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Actualy, when you show the reasons it's not Windows, it's an easy sell. Yesterday I demo'ed Ubuntu. Our visitors wanted to know what made it diffrent and what's all the fuss about security. I was already booted up and online as a normal user. They were quick to note wow, it runs Firefox. I showed the menu and how it works like Windows and had much the same menu items such as accessories, games, etc. Then I explained the not so same as in Windows everyone is an administrator by default.
I turned over the computer and had them try to change printer settings, internet settings, display settings. I even had them go into another user's directory that was shared and asked them to delete any file. I then showed them the file permissions. I then explained these are the defalt permissions. I then showed how the common Windows exploits such as web pages with a Windows system error look very out of place on Ubuntu and hidden known file extensions are not a problem. There is not much exploitation of running a picture attachment on Ubuntu called MyNakedWife.jpg.exe and why it won't run if clicked on in Ubuntu. It asks if you want to save the file or what program to open it with. It just doesn't install a rootkit with no prompts like what happens to Windows users who only see MyNakedWife.jpg.
They were concerned about replacing Windows due to the many Windows only programs. I then gave them the directions on compressing the Windows partition, repartitioning after booting Ubuntu and dual booting.
In short, being like Windows by having familiar menu's and running Firefox is a plus. Being not like Windows in default security was the selling point. I think they will be dual booting by the end of the week.
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Linux is not "Windows, only free", [oneandoneis2.org]
and those of us answering questions in the IRC channel would appreciate it if you'd stop saying that.
Thanks.
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I just bought a new machine for the younger kid. Its not a high end machine by any stretch. Dell upped the RAM from 1Gb to 2Gb for free.
The bigger problem for the DRAM manufacturers is the 32 bit limit which means that the most RAM you can squeeze onto a personal computer tod
Re:Or maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Crikey, it's just unix. Can you imagine saying that it's not possible to do real POS or finance on unix? You'd be laughed at. That stuff was being done on unix before Windows had any presence in the business world. The first unix system I ever saw was a Xenix POS system. Our good friend SCO specialized in POS systems.
Maybe you can't find any commodity small-business applications in these areas for unix platforms, but don't pretend that your bargain-brand applications are "real" and the unix ones are non-existent. If you want a real POS system that runs on the unix of your choice, I know of two, and it's not even my field. You can expect to pay 5-6 figures, though. If that's not real enough for you, just phone up IBM tell them you want to pay 7 figures for some Websphere monstrosity. They'll fix you up with something so real your eyes will bleed.
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check out prism, counterpoint, Viewtouch GNU, Volante, brainstorm, etc, etc. Linux has a very strong presence in point-of-sale, several national retail and service chains use it.
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Thank you for your lack of insight into our tribe. Otherwise, you're pretty right about Windows.
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Listen... I've got a couple DBAs, people that struggle daily with Oracle RAC HP-UX, DB2 and MSSQL wastin' 2 business days hunting down drivers for an HP "Vista Ready" business (read, humdrum) laptop... and they're still dissatisfied... and these machines woul
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And if they upgrade, will try to scrimp by on the existing amount of memory. Most people don't know that they'd probably get a dramtic performance increase for the price of a single stick of RAM.
type in the article (Score:4, Funny)
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Par for the course (Score:5, Interesting)
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It does? Tell that to my mom. Her new Vista based 1GB RAM laptop uses ~700MB of ram (not including cache) with no major apps running. From what I understand it ran great for teh first couple months but eventually it just started slowing to a crawl... from swapping as f
Re:Par for the course (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think it's fair to look at the RAM utilization of an idling box and declare that using x% is bad. What would be the point of the OS not using the RAM that's sitting there? If I were writing an OS and knew I had RAM to spare and was idle, perhaps I'd be pre-loading the most used applications into RAM for faster startup. I think a good OS would almost always be using the RAM available in some way. It saves nothing to let it sit there.
OTOH, I have no idea if windows RAM utilization is due to the OS being smart of dumb. I simply don't like to see the idea of idle RAM usage propagate as a valid metric of an OS.
Re:Par for the course (Score:4, Insightful)
I know that part of the "problem" is Vista using large swaths of RAM as a file cache, meaning that just like with Unix people see all that RAM being used and think it's the system but it's just a cache that will be dropped on the floor as soon as an application needs that memory.
The part that bothers me is that this "problem" only started showing up with Vista. Maybe they just changed how the counted 'free' RAM. Or maybe, and this is the worrying part, Vista is the first Microsoft OS with built-in file caching?! I had just assumed that XP had this feature. I mean, I may knock Microsoft, but I also granted NT and progeny "modern OS" status and figured file caching was part of the package.
Re:Par for the course (Score:4, Informative)
Mem: 1891M Active, 5131M Inact, 240M Wired, 257M Cache, 214M Buf, 243M Free
In this case, the vast majority of "Inact" is made up of cached file data, but such cache will also be spread around "Active" (can be swapped, but would likely to be swapped back in soon after) and "Cache" (rarely used pages which can be freed quickly because they aren't "dirty"). Depending on how you define "memory use" you could say I'm using anywhere from 2.3 to 7.5G. Even these are rather blurry since the lack of memory pressure means the various lists aren't being cycled very aggressively.
Re:Par for the course (Score:5, Insightful)
See car analogys can be good, but you have to have magic gnomes to make it work.
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Honestly, I this is why I now recommend Macs to anyone who won't actually enjoy solving the interesting problems Windows throws up, on their own, without endless hours of unpaid tech support from me. I finally sat down, totted up the shocking amount of time I was wasting on other people Microsoft problem and decided that if people aren't willing to spend a few extra bucks for a higher quality machine with better integrated software and a decent service plan, I certainly wasn't going to suffer the conseq
Half of expected value. (Score:2)
It's been well acknowledged here that Vista sales are roughly only equal to XP over the same time measured. ... What did they think would happen?
It's also well known that estimate is generous but only half of the expected value because there are twice as many computer users as there were in 2001. Worse for M$, XP sales were disappointing because they had 98, ME and W2K to compete with. That makes Vista a real bomb like ME.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - Vista is not selling.
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It's selling 95% as fast as new PC's are. In the PC world, people tend to just use the OS until it's time to scrap the machine. Apple people upgrade OS's every year or so because they have money to burn and Linux people upgrade seeming daily... actually, I don't know why. Vista is being sold on 95% of all new PC's like always. Vista will be just as successful as Windows XP has been.
But are people running out to buy the new OS for no p
Re:Half of expected value. (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe they could make Wii chips instead (Score:2)
Lower prices? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't know what prices you've been seeing, but personally I recently upgraded my RAM because I saw the prices had dropped off quite a bit the past few months in my local shops.
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Ahah! Hahahahaha! Hehehe! Ah.... Good one. Last Time I read anything about ram prices it was an article about a few companies being fined for price fixing.
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Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sometime compare the responsiveness of the NeXTStep GUI on, say, a Turbo Slab (which is what, '040 at 25MHz, like a low-end quadra?) to OSX on a Dual G5 2.0 GHz, and then tell me again how it doesn't come at the cost of a performance hit.
OSX on modern hardware is less responsive than System 6 was on, say, a IIci (68030@25MHz).
The overhead of OSX provides numerous features, but the overhead is by the same token enormous.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
It will come, don't worry. (Score:5, Insightful)
RAM getting cheaper is always a good thing, mainly because on 95% of most people's machines, the biggest performance bottleneck is RAM (or lack of) forcing apps to swap.
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Never quite understood that one though.
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Don't take this as gospel, but my understanding is the way Windows manages VM.
A UNIX machine starts allocating VM when it needs it. Windows allocates it when the programs are loaded. An idle program, even when you have gobs of free RAM, will get swapped out even if you have unused memory.
I have definitely observed that with a lot of free memory, switching to an idle app is slow. (Though, admittedly, I've never
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Absolutely great system for everything but windows. Windows seems to drag it down.
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Accor
Re:It will come, don't worry. (OR...) (Score:2)
Go Linux, GO!
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eventually people will be moving to Vista when it becomes the sole option on new machines.
Or the pain has become so much that they look for alternatives.
When XP was introduced, there really weren't any. Apple wasn't, and Linux on the desktop was a joke. Today, Linux is still way behind, but it's reached the "useable by non-geeks" area. And OSX is clearly superior to Vista, both in technology and (especially) user experience.
Sure, lots of people will buy new machines with Vista. But monopoly-lockin requires a strong monopoly, and MS is losing that. As soon as Word is not a safe format to send to
I'm sure people haven't stopped buying computers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm sure people haven't stopped buying computer (Score:2)
Will Reverse (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course this was to happen! Microsoft showed its investors and key manufacturers that the OS release will be on par to its Windows 95 explosion, which everyone knew was not going to be the case. Times Square ads, articles, and lots of other forms of attention only brought a weak demand in the market. Windows XP was good enough, and consequential events like these show that.
However, I'm pretty sure that, as the article points out, this falling trend will reverse itself when back-to-school season starts and people need to upgrade their old machines to keep them running or up-to-date.
Memory prices (Score:2, Interesting)
I used to pay X amount for 256KB memory upgrades, the other day I paid similar for 1GB.
Maybe this is more to do with lifespan of memory than anything, changing design and automatically expiring themselves from the market.
I have just had to throw away a whoel gig of memory because I got a new motherboard, there was no chance I could have purchased another gig of the same and just expanded on what I had.
The newer fabs (from other companies) got
It's a rollercoaster market (Score:5, Informative)
In fact they have NOT. Memory is, more than any other component in your PC, a true commodity, and it can be a volatile one at that. Like the market for gasoline it can sometimes be open to manipulation in the same way, though the major players are less apt to participate in collusion as petroleum refiners are notorious for doing.
I distinctly remember an incident involving a fire at a major DRAM manufacturing facility which produced a step change downward in global production capacity--this at a time when demand continued to grow at a healthy clip. Prices spiked even faster, and with a greater magnitude by far, than fuel prices did when hurricane Katrina took out all that refining capacity (we are talking doubling and tripling of prices here). In another incident it wasn't a drop in supply but a surge in demand sparked by the first Christmas season with Windows XP-equipped PCs for sale--inventory dried up and DRAM prices doubled.
aybe this is more to do with lifespan of memory than anything, changing design and automatically expiring themselves from the market.
That can have an effect on DRAM prices actually, except that the effect is opposite to what is happening today: when new memory formats come out it usually fuels demand and raises prices. Demand instead has been flat and prices have dropped. The problem is overcompensation to deal with the release of Vista (they were trying to avoid what happened when XP came out). Memory makers are lousy commodity managers in comparison to how those who produce gasoline, grain, metals, etc and really botched up--but MS also botched up and made the problem worse:
* Vista missed Christmas--it was in limited, corporate-and-developer-only release until January. Not only did this mean the vista launch couldn't take advantage of the shopping season, it also meant that the shopping season for computers itself was blunted as shoppers turned elsewhere for gift ideas (why buy a PC with crufty old XP when spiffy new Vista will be out and pre-installed on machines within weeks?). No demand there
* Though XP needs a relatively modest increase in resource requirements compared to its direct ancestor Windows 2000, the vast majority of the first XP adopters were moving from the DOS-based line of Windows (95/98/Me) and of all things what XP wanted the most over DOS-based Windows was RAM. DOS-based windows couldn't even properly use RAM over a certain level and most machines got to a certain level and stayed there because performance was maxed out. With XP, an old Win98 box could be make quite usable for a cheap price by simply plugging in more RAM. This fueled demand, which raised RAM prices.
* XP has been out for a VERY long time, and between all the service packs, updates and the demanding games and applications released in the past 5 years the demand for RAM has increased gradually even as the base OS is little unchanged. As Vista was released the minimum requirements were already met by most PCs up to a year old. This wasn't the case with XP, where so many crufty old PCs running Win98 were not up to the task of running XP.
* Vista is not different enough from XP to matter - turn off aero glass and to the casual user you have XP with a new UI theme--not much immediately useful comes right to mind. When XP came out it was targeted at legions of 98 and Me users, and 98 and Me were great stinking piles of crap compared to XP. Vista IS meaningfully better architecturally speaking but these advantages are only understood by computer scientists and software engineers. Furthermore, in the cutthroat market of PCs most new PCs are equipped with the featureless "home basic" edition, and that is what most users see, and that edition is well served by existing memory configs.
DRAM prices are like rollercoasters--they might have started at the top and will end up at the bottom, but all these external forces introduce "waves" that go up as well as d
Should an OS require 1GB minimum? (Score:2)
The laptop I'm writing this on (Vista Home Basic) is currently running at almost 600MB used, with Firefox, Thunderbird and AVG running!
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An OS should require next to nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
(Though that is not strictly true. You can divide these up into independent components that could run in parallel on today's processors. On a cluster, you could also drop components that aren't needed on a specific node.)
On a normal system, I see no reason why the OS kernel should take more than a megabyte or
I love cheap RAM (Score:2)
Re:I love cheap RAM (Score:5, Funny)
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This could be taken two ways... (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Vista isn't being as widely adopted as has been declared.
2) Users are opting to buy cheaper boxes and disabling the heavy RAM features (automatically done by Vista if the system requirements aren't up to Aero Glass par).
It may even be some combination of the two. Now, I didn't go into any great amount of research as to the offerings of OOB PC manufacturers, however, I did note that Dell's website still does not offer XP in any flavor (although there was some talk of this eventually becoming an option). From this, I make the careful and qualified surmise that new Windows-preloaded PCs are getting Vista. Knowing the user base, it is unlikely that they are replacing the OS themselves.
As far as I know, most people's personal budgets are still a little tight, so it is likely that people likely to buy PCs from Dell (casual users for the most part) are going to opt for the cheaper models, which, upon a little further inspection, don't have the horsepower or the RAM to run full Vista rendering.
These really aren't "hard numbers". It is difficult to determine anything concrete with this indirect indicator.
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2) Users are opting to buy cheaper boxes and disabling the heavy RAM features (automatically done by Vista if the system requirements aren't up to Aero Glass par)."
3) People who upgraded their computers to Vista already had enought RAM (at least 1GB) and aren't buying more
4) People are buying new Vista computers with enough RAM already in them (1GB or more)
5) People are using their new Vista computers as is (with stock 512MB or 1GB RAM) just like
Does that mean (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh me oh my, this is tragic (Score:2, Funny)
So are there any actual numbers? (Score:3, Interesting)
So, can we really say how Vista is faring in the marketplace?
Not my preferred indicator of systems "in use" (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, what I'd deem a very good indicator would be the sales numbers of the different licenses. I.e. how many of the "minimum" Vista licenses have been sold vs. some of the "useful" ones. We all remember WinXP Home and Pro, and how "useable" Home was. Generally, whoever got the "Home" edition of XP got it 'cause he couldn't get his PC without any license and tossing Home was cheaper than tossing Pro.
So it would be fairly safe to assume that a considerable fraction of those "force-fed" minimum licenses have been bought because there's no way to get the computer without any OS and the first command issued on the new crate was fdisk. So, pants down, how mand licenses of what level have been sold?
Vista will overtake XP sooner or later (Score:2)
Or... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah, that'd be pro-M$ bullshit. I must be a plant, paid by Bill himself to spread these lies!
The obvious reason for lackluster profits must have nothing to do with the market, overproduction, resources, or anything else. It's all Vistas fault.
It's the economy , stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't have expected to see a lot of interest in warmed-over XP systems. If you want the tech in Vista you probably also want the hybrid hard drive, DX10 video, integrated ReadyBoost flash, etc., that is still high-end.
Could it be many people have moved to 1gig already (Score:3, Insightful)
So, since most people were already at 1 gig on reasonably modern machines, and older machines just didn't have the CPU and GPU power to run Vista well, there hasn't been a real NEED to upgrade. Many of us moved to 2 gigs of memory over a year ago, not for Vista, but for games and other applications.
I replaced vista with xppro (Score:3, Interesting)
Last week I bought an xppro OEM and reinstalled it on the machine. What a relief. It is just incomprehensible that this crap vista is being forced down everyones throat (most people that buy a new PC now). The arrogance of MSFT has reached new limits if they think they can get away with it.
If I were a dumb user and not able to reinstall xp myself, I would revert from windows alltogether in disgust and probably buy a mac now. Really, people keep telling that everyone will get used to it and will be using vista sooner or later since there won't be an alternative. I doubt it, I think this time they have gone too far and have overestimated there market power. This may well be the beginning of the end and cause further and larger scale defections towards Mac OSX and maybe also linux for some more advanced users. I cannot imagine that vista will really replace all other windows version, even with MSFT's power, this product is just too crappy even for them.
Most companies will wait till 2010 when the last commercial support for XP expires, and then who knows what is available in the market. I think there may be enough alternatives by then to being forced to 'upgrade' to vista in 2010.
DivX (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe end users aren't that dumb. Maybe they recognize the value of DRM and WGA? Of course Microsoft will view this as a PR problem and throw a billion dollars at a Vista advertising campaign. Microsoft won't recognize the fact that legitimate users don't want to be treated like criminals.
All Windows users I know dislike WGA. Who wants to called a thief after purchasing a computer? Are there any slashdot Windows users that actually like the fact that WGA is running?
As evidence that absolutely means nothing, this year I've upgraded two desktops and a laptop to XP from Vista (speed issues). I upgraded four different XP desktops and a Vista laptop to Kubuntu (laptop owned by me). So far, no requests to go back to Windows. I wasted four hours of my life fixing the printer problems caused by a Microsoft/HP automated update to a XP Media Center Edition computer (Both companies blamed the other). If Ubuntu had better HP All-In-One support I probably could have upgraded that family as well.
Food for thought,
Enjoy.
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Have you stopped beating your boyfriend?
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f u nub
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so 'tons of vista' could just be 'some vista' and 'some retail sales'.
also, customers accepting sub-par performance when a cheap and easy upgrade will
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That's the point: dividing RAM sales by some FUD-driven fantasy about how much new RAM Vista users will need is stretching "Now comes some hard data" a bit.