SMB IT | Curtis Franklin » Vista Hardware: What to Buy Today for Tomorrow's OS

June 05, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Vista Hardware: What to Buy Today for Tomorrow's OS

TAGS: SMB Hardware

When you're talking about a 20,000-user enterprise, doing a desktop operating system upgrade generally gets tossed out. Even with smart deployment and OS push tools, dropping a new OS with fully tested application support on several thousand desktops just costs so much in extra man-hour dollars that most CIOs simply let their next PC purchase take care of things for them.

Servers get upgraded first and as the leases on desktop hardware run out, the new desktops coming in have the new OS already pre-installed so sys admins only have to deploy and test the required business applications before sending them out into the field. Your users may wind up using the previous-generation operating system for a year or more, but that's a small price to pay for not breaking the budget or your CIO's blood pressure.

SMBs, however, can be a different situation. A smaller number of machines coupled with (sometimes) a competitive need to be right out there on the bleeding edge mean these organizations sometimes do take the trouble to perform company-wide desktop OS upgrades.

So with this in mind, we started testing the Vista Beta 2 software out here at the ANCL Lab in Honolulu. I'll talk about Vista's coolness somewhere else (probably the Enterprise Windows column), but here I want to talk about what we think the hardware requirements for Vista really are. That way, if you're buying XP desktops today that may be turned into Vista desktops tomorrow, you know you'll have enough hardware stuff to make the conversion work.

So Redmond's recommended hardware specs go like this (and this is straight from Microsoft's Get Ready for Vista Web site):

*512MB RAM (1GB for Premium)
*A 'modern processor (at least 800MHz)", which later becomes more specific for "Vista Premium" as 1GHz x86 or x64 processor
*A graphics processor that can run DirectX 9 with support for WDDM, Pixel Shader 2 and 32-bits per pixel as well with 64MB of video RAM to support a basic desktop monitor resolution 1024x1280
*A 40GB hard disk with 15GB of free space
*DVD-ROM drive

Okay, no offense Microsoft, but after playing with this OS for a while, that's a fairy tale. And for the record, we did try this with a 900MHz CPU-equipped PC that also had 512MB of RAM, a 40GB hard disk (with all 40GBs free) and a 64MB Intel-based graphics sub-system. The only thing that probably came up short here was the Intel graphics card. But even so, that configuration was pitifully slow.

Our next try was a converted Acer 9500. This is a behemoth Windows XP Media Center Edition notebook with a 17-inch screen, a 128MB ATI Mobility video system with all the bells and whistles, a 2GHz Pentium M CPU, 2GB of system RAM and a 80GB hard disk.

Much better. Our video card definitely had an impact on the Windows Aero desktop performance, and it should be able to support DirectX 10, which is expected to ship with Vista as well. 2GB of RAM also seems to be our recommended minimum, not 1GB.

While the system will run inside of 512MB, you're grabbing almost 400MB of system RAM simply by starting the operating system. That leaves you next to nothing to run multiple applications. 1GB leaves you more room, but business users with five, six or more applications open simultaneously as a matter of course are going to want 2GB--and pretty much right away.

We also installed Vista on an AMD 64-bit Opteron machine that's really specced out as a server. We swapped the video card with an nVidia GeForce 7800 holding 256MB of dedicated RAM, however, and things really perked up. This system had 4GB of RAM, which we simply left installed, and two 200GB SATA drives in a RAID 1 configuration.

This machine rocked. Installation went even more smoothly than on the Acer and performance was slick. We even installed some Office 2007 beta discs that we sneaked from...somewhere...and started surfing and opening applications like crazy. Everything zoomed along, except for the usual hiccups you'd expect from beta software.

Overall, I don't think you need the specs of the Opteron machine. That's a server box that we temporarily turned into a pretty meaty workstation. A config like the Acer machine seems more reasonable and most likely enough to handle day-to-day business desktop stuff.

However, there is a kink. Buying systems with 2GB of RAM and a 128MB-256MB video card isn't a big deal. The question mark happens when you consider CPUs. Purchasing a a 32-bit CPU vs. a 64-bit CPU is the issue. 32-bit silicon is enough to run Vista, but we definitely like the 64-bit performance. Only trouble is, if you buy a 64-bit CPU today, you're either wasting it on Windows XP 32-bit, or you're dealing with loads of driver issues if you opt for Windows XP x64.

My advice is to buy the 64-bit CPU now, run it in 32-bit mode and then move up to a 64-bit OS with the swap to Vista. You suffer for a bit, but it'll be a sunny day when you finally do the upgrade. The only caveat here is that if your desktop users rely on a specific XP-compliant application to get their work done, make sure you've spoken to this vendor(s) about their Vista plans and release dates before doing anything.

Posted by Oliver Rist on June 5, 2006 05:16 PM

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