Windows 7 or 8

[charby]

I didn't have the spec right in front of me, but I know from experience that 4gb RAM and a 300gb HD are more than adequate for Win7 (my first build was 8gb RAM and a 500gb drive, my work laptop is closer to what I posted above).  You can barely find <500gb drives these days (recently saw 2TB drives for $80) and RAM is cheap, so it's a moot point. 

Chris

My latest Win 7 build has 16GB of Ram with a 240GB SSD. Southbridge chipset.

[mtnbkr]

I haven't had a need for more than 8gb so far, but my home machine doesn't get tasked hard.   I need more storage than anything.  My 2tb drive is 75% full and my 1tb drive is 80% full.  I could compress them for more space, but I prefer not to.  I still have my original 500gb drive, but I use it for my VMs.

Chris

[AZRedhawk44]

You weren't multitasking with any amount of RAM in Win95.  Win95 was still task switching like Win3.1x.  At that time, NT, OSX, and Linux were the only multitasking desktop OSes available.  Mac maybe, I'm not sure if it was multitasking or task-switching before the BSD integration.

I was supporting a Win95/Win98 LAN with 200+ users and a half dozen NT4.0 servers back in the late 90s.  Win95 had many shortfalls in networking, security, stability, etc.  I migrated my power users onto NT4 Workstation so they could get work done.

No offense, but all of the Win9x flavors (including ME) were crap.  Hardware is cheap, it bothers me not at all that Win7 requires 4gig of RAM and a 300gb+ hard drive to run.  It's so much better than anything that came before, it is well worth the price.

Chris

I started out as a PC tech for a school district in 2000, and we had a 50/50 mix of PC's running Win9x and MacOS (pre-X).  

Depends on your definition of "multitasking" but no matter what the PC's were better at it than the Macs.  Even under Win9x.  Maybe you don't have a simultaneous multiuser environment like a *nix, but at least with a Win9x machine you could share clock cycles on the CPU with more than one task.  I could install software and minimize the installation app while running a different app, or I could print a large document such as a term paper and switch to my web browser while waiting for the 50 pages to finish printing.

Mac OS 8.x puts up a modal window (with no user interaction possible other than cancelling the print job) that blocks all user interaction with the rest of the OS when printing.  Srsly.  I guess it needed to monopolize 100% of the CPU to freaking print.

All of them have come a long way since then, but I still think the *nixes are far more memory efficient and forgiving to aging hardware.  I believe you can still compile a 2.6.x linux kernel against a 486 processor if you want.  Try installing Win7 on that, or an original 75mhz Pentium chip.

[mtnbkr]

Try installing Win7 on that, or an original 75mhz Pentium chip.

Why would I want to?    Considering the hardware that contained that 75mhz Pentium chip (my first new PC, BTW), it would be an exercise in frustration getting replacements for anything that failed. 

I don't want to run old hardware.  My desktop system is an appliance.  I use it for email, web surfing, some games, some light office tasks, etc.  In the era of $300 PCs, the ability to run my OS on a 5yo (or older!) computer is of little value to me. 

Chris

[Perd Hapley]

I didn't have the spec right in front of me, but I know from experience that 4gb RAM and a 300gb HD are more than adequate for Win7 (my first build was 8gb RAM and a 500gb drive, my work laptop is closer to what I posted above).  You can barely find <500gb drives these days (recently saw 2TB drives for $80) and RAM is cheap, so it's a moot point. 

Chris

Far from moot, really. There are scads of 40 and 80, and other sub-500 GB drives still in use. A lot of those are going to be, or have already been, used for post-XP Windows OSes. I have 4 PCs, myself, and none of them have a drive as large as 500 GB.

Besides, I think smaller drives are still readily available at retail, though I'd have to check on that.

[Ben]

I haven't had a need for more than 8gb so far, but my home machine doesn't get tasked hard. 

Chris

I have a data collector at work built on a FitPC running Win7 with 2gig RAM. It has two programs running 24/7 and actually handles them pretty well. I have more of an access lag on that computer from the remote VNC connection than I do from the small amount of RAM.

[mtnbkr]

Maybe, but why bother?  If I can buy a 2tb drive for $100, why would I pay $50+ for a 500gb drive?  Last time I saw a sub 500gb drive, it was more expensive than a 1tb drive that was on sale.

Not including my VMs, I have nearly 3tb of files, applications, and OS on my main home PC right now.  My backup USB thumbdrive for work is 32gb by itself and is 3/4 full.  A 40gb or 80gb is next to useless for me.

Chris

[mtnbkr]

I have a data collector at work built on a FitPC running Win7 with 2gig RAM. It has two programs running 24/7 and actually handles them pretty well. I have more of an access lag on that computer from the remote VNC connection than I do from the small amount of RAM.

I've heard Win7 manages memory quite well, but haven't run it on that little RAM.

Chris

[Ben]

I've heard Win7 manages memory quite well, but haven't run it on that little RAM.

Chris

I wouldn't want to do it on a home or regular work machine, at least for me. But it does show that Win7 works fine with little RAM for many applications. I'm typing this on a netbook with 4gig RAM and shared video, and it handles regular web stuff, including watching all the WTF Japan videos posted here, just fine. My main machine has 12gig RAM, but most of that is for VMs. What little work related modeling stuff I run at home is more dependent on having a big, heat freaking generating GPU than on MB RAM.

[Hawkmoon]

I've heard Win7 manages memory quite well, but haven't run it on that little RAM.

Three years ago, in anticipation of a somewhat extended trip of unknown duration for which I wanted to travel as light as possible, I went to Wal-Mart and bought an Acer Aspire One netbook. It came with the Atom processor, Windows 7 Starter Edition (which I have never seen even mentioned in any other context -- I don't think an end user can even buy the Starter Edition), and one (1) GB or RAM.

I know netbooks are intended to be used much the same as tablets, as portable platforms for light web surfing, checking e-mail, etc. Nonetheless, I installed the complete MS Office 2003 Professional suite on it, along with an older version of AutoCAD LT. It all ran just fine. I've never been much into multi-tasking so I'm sure I didn't tax it as heavily as some of you younger power user types would have, but I was favorably surprised that it would run those programs at all in 1 GB.

[mtnbkr]

Hawkmoon, I completely forgot about the Acer Aspire One, and later a very similar Dell netbook we owned for a while, both with 1gig of RAM.  I think the Acer had a different flavor of Windows, but the Dell certainly had Win7 Starter.

I recall it ran things reasonably well for such a small amount of RAM.  It was a bit slow, but that was as much the processor as the memory.

Chris

[MillCreek]

I remember when I bought my first IBM 8088 clone, a Leading Edge Model D.  It came with two 5.25" floppies.  I paid something like $ 400 for a 20 MB hard drive on a card, and thought I was living large with a hard drive.

My previous computer, a Texas Instruments 99/4A, used a tape recorder with cassettes as the data storage.

[mtnbkr]

Grandpa MillCreek, tell us more tales of the olden days! :D

Chris

[Tallpine]

Grandpa MillCreek, tell us more tales of the olden days! :D

Chris

"My" first computer required an entire room and cost several million dollars 

The memory was a separate room full of tapes.

[MillCreek]

I remember in high school dropping my stack of a few hundred punch cards on my way to load them into the punch card reader.  It was then that I learned to number them all by hand, and this saved me a lot of time on a couple of subsequent occasions.  We used to try and make each other drop our stacks for the lulz.

[mtnbkr]

I never worked with a mainframe or punch cards, but do remember desktops with cassette tapes for storage.  The first PC I owned, a used Tandy, had a 20mb drive on a card and two low density 3.5" floppy drives.  It ran DOS, but had decent sound and graphics.

I upgraded from that to a shiny new Quantex P75 with 8mb of RAM and a harddrive of some capacity I can't recall.  That machine cost me $2000 in 1995 and was a good deal at the time.  It wasn't top of the line though.  Top of the line back then would have cost $2500+.

Chris

[Perd Hapley]

Maybe, but why bother?  If I can buy a 2tb drive for $100, why would I pay $50+ for a 500gb drive?  Last time I saw a sub 500gb drive, it was more expensive than a 1tb drive that was on sale.

Not including my VMs, I have nearly 3tb of files, applications, and OS on my main home PC right now.  My backup USB thumbdrive for work is 32gb by itself and is 3/4 full.  A 40gb or 80gb is next to useless for me.

Chris

I'm not saying anyone should buy the smaller drives. I'm just saying they're still very much in play, because people already have them, and there's not a lot of money going around, these days. (That the smaller hard drives are available for sale is more of an academic point.)

[mtnbkr]

If money's so tight they can't buy a larger hard drive, then they probably aren't buying a new copy of Windows (hint, a full install CD for Windows costs more than a new hard drive).  They're probably sticking to XP (or 95, I hear it's teh bomb).

Chris

[Fitz]

People get pretty bent out of shape when a new OS has requirements greater than the hardware they currently posses.


BRB, going to complain to nintendo about how their new Metroid game coming out isn't playable on my game cube.

[Ben]

That's it. If we're playing "old guy" I'm in.

10th grade computer class in High School, punch cards and rolled paper teletype style terminals. I played a lot of "Hunt the Wumpus". By the time I had graduated, they moved to actual video terminals.

My first computer was a Timex.

[Brad Johnson]

That's it. If we're playing "old guy" I'm in.

10th grade computer class in High School, punch cards and rolled paper teletype style terminals. I played a lot of "Hunt the Wumpus". By the time I had graduated, they moved to actual video terminals.

My first computer was a Timex.

And your first modem was a couple rocks you banged together?  

Brad

[Ben]

And your first modem was a couple rocks you banged together?  

Brad

I'm not THAT old. It was a modified telegraph key.

[charby]

I never worked with a mainframe or punch cards, but do remember desktops with cassette tapes for storage.  The first PC I owned, a used Tandy, had a 20mb drive on a card and two low density 3.5" floppy drives.  It ran DOS, but had decent sound and graphics.

I upgraded from that to a shiny new Quantex P75 with 8mb of RAM and a harddrive of some capacity I can't recall.  That machine cost me $2000 in 1995 and was a good deal at the time.  It wasn't top of the line though.  Top of the line back then would have cost $2500+.

Chris

My first computer

[MillCreek]

^^^ The TI 99/4A!  My first computer, too!

[Brad Johnson]

I'm not THAT old. It was a modified telegraph key.

-.-- --- ..- / .- .-. . / ... --- / ..-. ..- .-.. .-.. / --- ..-. / ... .... .. - .-.-.- / .-.. --- .-.. .-.-.-

Brad