> My efforts to get Media Center working highlighted two big problems
> with Vista. First, it's a memory hog. The hundreds of new features
> jammed into it have made it a prime example of software bloat,
> perhaps the quintessence of programmer Niklaus Wirth's law that
> software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster (for more on
> the problems with software design that lead to bloat, see "Anything
> You Can Do, I Can Do Meta"). Although my computer meets the minimum
> requirements of a "Vista Premium Ready PC," with one gigabyte of
> RAM, I could run only a few simple programs, such as a Web browser
> and word processor, without running out of memory. I couldn't even
> watch a movie: Windows Media Player could read the contents of the
> DVD, but there wasn't enough memory to actually play it. In short,
> you need a hell of a computer just to run this OS.
Is this really true? I've got 768 megs of RAM running Mac OS 10.4.8, and I've got Mail, Safari, the Dictionary, Firefox, Word, Excel, TextEdit, Xtorrent, iTune, SoundStudio, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Preview, and the ActivityMonitor running. Plus all sorts of stuff behind the scenes. Sometimes it takes 15 or 20 secs to swap the virtual memory, but I could certainly watch a DVD too. How can there be such different performance?
Doug