Quote:
Originally Posted by boe
That quote scares me - I hope they don't mean the same way that Vista does. There are still some people saying things like Vista runs fine on my home machine - not realizing it can be significantly faster with XP. I'm not saying well designed code can't use more powerful hardware to be even faster - it definitely can - unfortunately MS tends to make code that requires new hardware just to do what the old OS did at the same speed on old hardware.
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Well, the problem with Vista was that they didn't completely rewrite it for new hardware. Think of how much better OSX was than OS9. Complete rewrites run the risk of problems with backwards compatibility and when you have the vast majority of the business and home market under your belt, you can't risk people losing productivity because their old software or hardware doesn't work. You think there are issues with Vista now? Imagine a whole new OS written from the ground up. Apple's OS has the benefit of a very limited hardware base to write drivers for but Windows is installed on all kinds of configurations and the driver base has been building for years.
I think a proper rewrite from the ground up would be great if it established some standards that hardware vendors could use when designing their hardware. That way it might cut down on the driver issues and make for easier development. In a way, the mobile market is less fragmented with fewer common chipsets so this might be easier than on the desktop/server side. Also I would hope they learn their lesson and not let big hardware makers like Intel dictate what it has to run on. If not for Intel throwing its weight around, Vista may have properly demanded modern hardware and not stuck MS selling crappy stripped down versions to keep Intel selling weak chipsets.