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By William Van Winkle |
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| In one sense, the best thing about February won't be the release of Windows Vista; it'll be the end of all this babble about "Vista readiness." It's like the calm in the air after a tactical bombing or the eerie normalcy of TV ads right after Election Day. Seriously—it's nearly 2007. What PCs are you selling that aren't ready for Windows Vista? If for some reason you're still not sure, let's recap. | |||||||||||
There are two fundamental levels of Vista logo. You've got Vista Capable PCs, which support the foundational Vista updates in security, file searching, and so on, then you've got Vista Premium PCs, sporting the Aero interface and all the nifty do-dads that most users imagine when they say the word "Vista." For a Vista Capable system, you need a minimum of a modern processor running at 800 MHz, 512MB of system memory, 20GB hard drive, a CD-ROM (don't laugh), and a DirectX 9-capable graphics adapter capable of 800x600 resolution. That's it. On this basis, we've been Vista-ready for years. But let's be fair. To get the Aero UI, a system needs a minimum of a 1 GHz processor (32- or 64-bit), 1GB of RAM, DX9 graphics with a WDDM driver, 128MB of graphics memory, Pixel Shader 2.0 with 32 bits per pixel, a 40GB hard drive, audio output (stereo is fine), and Internet access. The only curve ball here is the graphics stuff, right? Well, read the footnotes and you'll discover that the 128MB graphics memory is only if the GPU uses dedicated memory. If you're GPU uses shared memory, then nothing more is required than the 1GB of system memory...which would imply that 1GB isn't the real minimum, yes? As you may know, there are four Windows Vista visual styles: Classic, Vista Basic, Vista Standard, and Aero. Classic pretty much looks like Windows 2000. Basic looks very close to XP and does not require the Windows Display Driver Model, thus opening up a lot more backward compatibility with older graphics hardware. Standard is sort of a "why would you run this?" mode since it has essentially the same hardware requirements as Aero but lacks the next-gen glass effects, 3D effects (called Flip 3D by Microsoft), window animations, and other eye candy we've all come to know, crave, and associate with the name Vista. Similarly, there will be six editions of Vista: Starter (not available in the U.S. or Canada), Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Enterprise will be sold as part of Microsoft's Software Assurance licensing program and thus falls wide of our consumer and SMB focus here. (For the curious, Enterprise goes beyond the Business edition by offering BitLocker Drive Encryption, UNIX application support, and a multilingual interface.) Home Basic ($199 full, $99.95 upgrade) is much like XP Home. You get the fundamentals, but most of the extras get left out, including the Aero interface, media center functionality, mobile environment profiles, and collaboration tools. Quite simply, Home Premium ($239/$159) incorporates these features. Business Edition ($299/$199.95) pulls out the media center functionality and in its place adds "a new feature called Windows Backup" (apparently so old that it's new again), previous version rollback, dual physical processor support, Remote Desktop, and enhanced network management. Ultimate ($399/$259), as you might suspect, includes everything, even the Enterprise Edition features, and adds game performance tweaking, podcast creation tools, and other features including—contain your shock—enhanced customer support options. The underlying hardware spectrum here can be pretty broad. For example, Home Basic can address up to 8GB of system memory while Business Edition can scale to 128GB. The one very, very big gotcha in designing Windows Vista systems, particularly for consumers, is not to undersell the hardware. There are two reasons for this: 1) As per tradition, Microsoft drastically underestimates its minimum requirements. 2) Unlike prior Windows versions, the license key controls which version of Windows gets installed. Every version comes on the DVD. This means that Home Basic users can pay to unlock the Premium or Ultimate editions already on their disc through a Control Panel option called Windows Anytime Upgrade. So unless your buyer is emphatic about never needing anything more than Home Basic-level functionality, you want as much as possible to push for configurations able to support those higher versions. Not least of all, consider that each Vista DVD (except Starter) ships with both 32- and 64-bit versions of the operating system. When we say that versions can support up to 8GB or 128GB, this implies use of the 64-bit version. Just like with XP, the 32-bit edition can only address up to 4GB. In 2007, this still won't matter to most people—but you can tell we're getting close. When just the basic OS wants 2GB to run well, the need to surpass 4GB for heavy applications can't be far off. The catch is that the x64 versions of XP and Vista are not backward compatible with 16-bit code, so any businesses still using DOS- or Windows 3.x-based applications will find themselves cut off. Also, the x64 version of Vista requires all drivers to be digitally signed. This means that if you've made a habit of clicking "Continue Anyway" when installing new software, you're out of luck. Microsoft made this change to weed out shoddy drivers, which allegedly remain the leading cause of system crashes. Real Requirements Yes, we've seen it before...several times. With any new version of Windows, the rule of thumb is to take Microsoft's minimum requirements list and double it. We're not just being sassy. Every distributor we've spoken with has been spending weeks to months working with Vista beta code and confirms this view. "If you go to Microsoft's Vista site and look at the requirements, they're very basic," notes Jason vonCordesen, general manager for distributor Bass Computers. "But we've done extensive testing with [Release Candidate version] 1, and we've found certain things where their requirements are too low. Laptops will have a Vista sticker on them, but like with the Durabook we evaluated, it'll only load up with the Vista Basic interface. It's a bit misleading. Everything you see from channel partners is all the bells and whistles so people say, ‘Oh, boy, I want that!' But if you go buy a ‘Vista-ready' machine expecting it to do all that and it doesn't, that's pretty disappointing. So here in-house, we're building all of our Vista machines to be Ultimate-ready. In the first release, you're going to have the enthusiasts getting it, and they're going to want Ultimate." At the minimum, according to vonCordesen, a Vista system should have 256MB of video memory and a 2 GHz processor or higher, especially for handling video tuning, encoding, and editing. If your configuration uses integrated graphics, a 256MB memory allocation pulling from 2GB of system memory is essential, and even then performance will be choppy when running Media Center, Gadgets (see below), and similar enhancements. "There's a risk of being disappointed with integrated graphics," says Michael Schwab, vice president of purchasing for distributor D&H. "That's why I think we're going to see a big upswing in discrete card sales with Vista. I think resellers should go for playing it safe, not sorry here. Double the memory, go up to discrete graphics, get the larger hard drive. Put in a faster, dual-core processor. That hits on all cylinders. Following spec is not the way to go-to-market on this from a hardware perspective." Vendors (AMD excepted) and distributors rarely throw jabs at Intel, but no independent party we spoke with had a kind word for Intel's IGPs under Vista, even the new X3000 core in the G965 chipset. When we asked, ATI side-stepped the issue by overlooking integrated graphics and proceeding right to recommending a discrete controller. Only NVIDIA's Andrew Fear, senior product manager for software, gave us this curiously atypical response: "Our IGPs run Windows Vista. And that's with the Aero interface. I mean, we've purchased $800 laptops from HP, and they run Aero beautifully with our graphics processor. This is like a 1.3 GHz CPU, with a gig or gig and a half of memory—not $5,000 type of PCs. These are affordable machines everyone's going to be using."
Something here doesn't add up. Given Intel's 60%+ hold on the entire graphics market and ample development partnership arrangement with Microsoft, the thought of none of Intel's latest chipsets supporting Aero looks like a train wreck in the making. Obviously, we weren't the first to notice. "For consumers, there certainly are multiple options, both IGP and discrete, and people will choose a variety of solutions as always," notes Intel North America channel marketing manager Todd Garrigues. "But the reports of new graphics engines not supporting gaming, interfaces, or whatever are much the same as every generation. Rumors spread like fire. The reality may be less exciting for headlines, but the fact is that we've publicly demonstrated Aero support under the G965, and our IGPs are very ready for the launch." We'll suspend final judgment until we get the chance to spend a decent amount of time with shipping code on our bench. Until then, we remain skeptical of Microsoft's stated requirements and most claims from IGP vendors, although driver patches will surely help. The fundamental display model with Vista has changed from using bitmaps computed in the CPU to having the GPU render vectors. Microsoft Tech Strategist Nigel Page even publicly stated last year that he felt 256MB was a middle point of sorts, but Vista would benefit from more memory. This level of horsepower and resource consumption clearly begs for discrete graphics—and probably not of the $49 variety. That said, ATI spokesman Chris Evenden told us: "Even an X1300 will give you plenty of headroom. Developers of business applications have never had an installed base of 3D hardware before, and they've now got the opportunity to add 3D features to differentiate their offerings—I doubt they'll be able to resist. In this case, you'll see graphics requirements start to grow, so it makes sense to get at least an entry-level card now."
Count one more strike against IGPs and most current discrete cards, too: Vista's HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) support. This is an extremely hairy issue still rife with ambiguity and changing positions. However, the essential facts are that Vista integrates new DRM technologies, in particular HDCP and the Image Constraint Token (ICT), to prevent piracy. HDCP locks compliant, protected content from the media all the way out to the final display. If any device in the display chain doesn't support HDCP, then the ICT downsamples or suspends the content playback. The guidelines for HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc state that when an ICT flag is present, resolution will be downsampled to 960x540, or DVD-quality. Note that most studios are smartly omitting the ICT flag on their titles until at least 2010. The upshot is that if either your display adapter or digital monitor (DVI or HDMI interface) don't fully support HDCP, the user will be unable to view protected content in high-def, and the number of compliant card and monitor SKUs on the market in advance of Vista has been slight. But if your customer cares at all about home entertainment, finding HDCP-enabled parts is a must. "You can cobble together a forward-looking video solution now," says NVIDIA's Andrew Fear. "There's nothing stopping you today from buying a GeForce 7600 or 7900, an HD DVD or Blu-ray drive, the correct software from CyberLink or InterVideo, and an HDCP-compatible monitor. But a lot of customers want something that's clearly an integrated solution. Mainstream users in particular don't want to worry about piecing together an upgrade. They want a new system able to tackle this task, and that new system should be running Vista. Resellers need to present this as a cohesive whole, not bits and pieces." Interestingly, HDCP doesn't pop up on any Vista requirement list until June 1, 2007, as part of the Windows Vista Premium logo-compliant PC program. Yes, on top of the four user interfaces and six versions, you can also worry about whether your boxes will earn the Basic or Premium logos. At launch, the only Vista version that won't comply with the Premium logo requirements is Home Basic. But who wants to sell a "Premium" system in February that fails "Premium" compliance in July? For complete details from Microsoft, see http://labs.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/WLP30.mspx. Be warned: The 3.08 .DOC file on hardware requirements is over 300 pages long. Among the highlights of this literary treasure, you'll find that hardware-based H.264 decoding is required right alongside HDCP. Multi-monitor support is mandated—any monitor vendors touting this yet?—as is jack-sensing HD Audio (5.1), remotes with the Vista Green Button, booting from USB flash drives, and support for SATA "2.5". SATA 2.5 support is primarily about leveraging the benefits of Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which we had with nearly all second-gen SATA drives, but 2.5 adds in specs for port multiplication and port selection, so you can have multiple point-to-point paths to the same SATA device. Even Seagate's Barracuda 7200.9 was 2.5-compliant; the trick is finding controller hardware that takes advantage of all the new 2.5 features. There was a Premium requirement to have 50MB of non-volatile cache on hybrid hard drives (see below), but because of zero hybrid drive market presence prior to launch, this requirement was recently pushed back to 2008. Another 2008 (June 1) requirement is for all integrated video adapters to offer at least one digital video output. A final note on Vista's real hardware needs. If you've spent much time looking at the Windows Task Manager's CPU Usage History chart, you know that XP isn't terribly multi-thread-optimized, regardless of Microsoft claims. Vista is expected to be much more mature in this vein. At last, you should be able to make a convincing case for improving general system performance through Athlon X2, Core 2 Duo, or Core 2 Quad upselling. More cores will finally be better no matter what applications the user runs. ...more |
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