Bloke charts rise of Windows bloatware

...someone besides me notices this "bad habit" of Microsoft. 

When will people learn that they are only wasting their money, for the most part, by buying/building a new, more powerful computer - then installing the latest, greatest from MS and ending up with not much (if any) speed/computing power gain. 

Then, they go on all the forums and put their requisit system specs in their signatures, showing off to the world how ignorant they really are. LOL

"What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away." There is so much truth to that statement.


was just thinking last eve after reading new tranisotr counts toward gamecard 100. That perfecting transistor useage with XP Now & its high counts from XP first intro show real power of hardware/software, yet it seems ULTIMATLine of Perfection Diviates from entire XP design & some FUNDUMENTAL changes are happening, both in number assigned to gamecard & its transistor count to move to Ultie, let alone inside stuff gpgpus for harvest, gpgpus' shaders',core lanes,WOW...
Ultimate is 6 times larger than XP, so in end, starting point is actually likely 1/6 of total, in sense this is final stage of XP & vista should require quite bit more before perfected.

Larger bit string is probably fundumental diffence in software useage in hardware thas being first & must be ajusted to, then better hardware of today, MUCH more complete than 6 years ago, with XP start. So if its just needed rearrangement or will handle ongoing absorbtion of newer/faster equipment, VISTA ULTIMATE is Number ONE.The Only ONE.#1,except that other one.
thomas vondrashek 


You know, back in 2000, videogames had minimum specs of 16-32 MB of RAM and 4 MB graphics cards, 200 MHz CPUs and the like. 7 years in the future, it's not uncommon to see them demand 512-1024 MB of RAM, 128 or 256 MB graphics cards, and 1500+ MHz CPUs. OMG, RUN FOR THE HILLS, VIDEOGAMES ARE BECOMING BLOATED.

Um, well, not really. Any idiot can tell there's a big difference between games from 2000 and those from 2007. 

Sound, visuals, AI, level size and detail, physics interactions, EVERYTHING has gotten better. It doesn't necessarily make you a better gamer, persay, but the improved hardware is used to improve the usage experience.

That's exactly what's happened to Windows and Office, too. These days, Windows comes with a more aesthetically-pleasing and less boxy look, anti-aliased fonts and windows, real time scaled window previews, custom thumbnails for images and other documents, "instant" search through document contents and metadata, and so on. 

Office has real time font/formatting previews, anti-aliased text and graphics, a feature- and graphics-rich user interface, etc. It's not like each version of Windows and Office are getting progressively larger and having FEWER features... those lines of code are actively added in order to let you do more stuff than you could in previous versions.

While I don't doubt that Windows and Office could be coded more efficiently (let's be honest, most things probably could be further optimized given the time and resources), it's utterly foolish to act as if all Microsoft software is just getting slower and more resource-hungry without offering anything to customers.

I personally would be more upset to find out that I've got CPU cycles just waiting to be used while I'm running an application than find myself with none to spare. 

If the computer isn't at 100% load, then the software designers are basically saying there's NOTHING you could possibly want that they could add which would make it look or work nicer than it does now.

Let's put it this way. If nothing was "bloated", why would you feel the need to upgrade? 

No, really. If you've got a 1 GHz Pentium 3 and 128 MB of RAM and a 32 MB TNT2 graphics card and a 20 GB hard drive, what's compelling you to ever replace the hardware, short of it breaking? 

Applications become more resource-hungry, especially games and other media-rich programs. New software solutions arise, be they parts of the next Windows or stand-alone things you install on the old Windows, which add functionality that you, the consumer, find to be useful (for example, Google Desktop Search or an app for organizing pictures or music). 

Resolutions and sample qualities for audio, video, and imagery improve, leaving you starving for more storage space and the processing power to manipulate and play back that content.

In short, basically EVERYTHING ends up benefiting from faster and larger devices. That's just the nature of things. It doesn't mean you have to single out Microsoft stuff as being "bloated" more so than anything else. Sure, they use the performance that Intel & Co provide for us... it'd be a mighty waste of expensive hardware if your software didn't.

And cases where you can't put the new stuff on the old hardware, because it's so "bloated", really just means that the average level of performance has become so commonplace that applications are designed to run on that sort of hardware, and features become so integrated that you can't just disable them on lower-end hardware.

I know you guys can find better stuff to report on than this...

...yes, it's clearly evident that we can accomplish no more now than we could in 1983.

People would have a lot more credibility without a bearded, suspenders-wearing basement-dwelling agenda. OMG t3h m1cr0$$$ux0rs!$%$ Yeah, yeah, give it a rest and show me another OS that supports a thousand motherboards, fifty CPUs, ten thousand video cards, and god knows how many apps while retaining a hint of reliability.

It may be bloated compared to what it could be, but this sanctimonious whining about how modern OSes should still be 1mb is idiotic.

The only reason everyone thinks Windows (95,NT,98,98SE,ME,2000,XP,Vista) is good is because most has ZERO experience with anything else. 

If they only knew how slow it really is. "Vista Rules" , as far as the hardware companies are concerned. Ohya cannot forget the CIA, they love it too.

I don't see how you can compare apples to oranges, and mix software and OS on the same charts.
.. 
I think we all know that Office2k on Win2k is faster than Office 2007 on Vista, nothing new here... If you think you really want those shiny new features than thats the price you pay.

What i think would be interesting to see is different windows versions running the SAME software.

I think it is spelled "Fistula" which is also a medical term. Here is an example:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/imagepages/19291.htm

best, Art

Amen brother. While it is all true, what effect will the truth have, even when it is spoken out loud, when the children of IT worship false gods?

Here is a thought experiment, if the truth is an articulated lorry aka juggernaut, what effect will it have when it collides with the mountain of 'fudge' which is Microsoft? My guess is a faint plopping sound while the juggernaut vanishes.

The question becomes what forces can change the status quo for the better. Punitive legislation does not inspire programmers or improve management systems though it has curbed MS's corporate-megalomanic excesses to an extent. 

The best answer as ever would be a competitor operating system which undercuts and out performs Vistula, it can't be that hard. The real obstacle to this seems to be psychological, essentially technophobia. If a rival OS gets to run games & other software faster then MS will be matched and encouraged to make the hard decisions it is currently unable to make due to internal politics; in precisely the same way that Intel v AMD rivalry has benefitted CPU technology and brought the best out of both companies.

There is evidently a lot of money in it and I am amazed noone has realised the incentive to try for a slice of that pie. It seems like a prime investment opportunity just going begging. But it may be that moves need to be made in govermental circles to encourage this by ensuring a cross platform standard for compatibility between all OS and all software. 

MS is a pseudo-bully, a corporate Big Daddy being driven by a legal & financial AI. Its behaviour & sloppy product is the inevitable outcome of corporate strategy under weak and visionless leadership.

No experience with anything other than Windows?

Sorry: I've tried Linux and OS-X, and wouldn't touch those steaming piles of shite, without a gun to my head.

If I had a timemachine, I wouldn't mind travelling 15 years back, and running an Amiga... Those were great!

Overall though, I remember what PCs were like 5 and 10 years ago, and wouldn't trade my two gigabyte-loaded-dual CPU-smoking Vista system for anything. 

If you disagree, go ahead... 
Downgrade to a 128 MB Pentium III, and work in Win 98SE/Word 7.0... See how wonderful that is, unless of course you were just MS-basing because that's the in-thing to do, and because you're bitter over the obscure marketshare your OS of choice has...
I swear... Sometimes it feels like IT has more than its fair share of too-nostalgic-for-their-own-good-geezers.

While I agree that the current state of Vista is not useful to people who have working installs of XP, I recently installed the 64 bit edition of Vista Ultimate on my new rig, and I found that my games and software still works. I am a little concerned about switching to Vista now, but I know that in a few years gamers and then businesses will switch over en masse when the less touted features of Vista get some notice. Vista supports new technologies like HDR displays and it has a new color management engine that makes working with the new JPEG-XR (HD-Photo) standard seamless. Also while Intel and AMD strive to push quad-core to the masses, Vista has better a scheduler to handle mulitple threads, and for some machines it has builtin NUMA support. For people who need to troubleshoot broken installs of Vista, the Vista installer makes it easy to use whatever storage device you have connected to install drivers for hardware not included in Vista. Also as someone who had worked in IT and is now a programmer, I have to be familiar with Vista since eventually most of the Windows market would have adopted Vista and Microsoft would address the major concerns.