Longhorn could be tough sell for Microsoft

[+virtorio MVC]

I'll be buying it, I can't resist its charms.

[Samoa]

Windows XP x64 will do me nicely.

[jerry]

But I do hope it does, because I won't spend money on a video card so soon (or at least don't plan on doing so).

Someone please tell me if I'm talking jibberish here :)

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So soon ? You are expecting a little too much out of your 5200. Longhorn is slated for late 2006. You could give the 5200 a proper burial by then and move onto Nvidia's GF7 series. :p

[mr_daemon]

I will probably still run Linux by then anyways, and unless longhorn becomes a requirement for games, I don't see myself upgrading the "gaming" hard drive in my machine.

[InternalStorm]

I wouldn't say it was a waste of money just yet. By the time it comes out, all of you big mouths will be drooling over it. After all, this is a huge new upgrade to a 5 year old Windows XP. Did you see people sticking with Windows ME or 98 after Windows XP came out? I don't think so, this will be the same thing. It's the novelty spectrum and the new features that will blow you away once they are finished. Nothing you have seen is finished yet, and the new screenshots are showing us that this really will be a great upgrade.

I will probably still run Linux by then anyways, and unless longhorn becomes a requirement for games, I don't see myself upgrading the "gaming" hard drive in my machine.

I'm pretty sure that new DirectX replacement w/e it's called will most likely mean you will have to upgrade for gaming purposes maybe for the newest games. Or maybe it will just carry over to XP too and you won't have to :p who knows.. hard to say.

[jerry]

I wouldn't say it was a waste of money just yet. By the time it comes out, all of you big mouths will be drooling over it. After all, this is a huge new upgrade to a 5 year old Windows XP. Did you see people sticking with Windows ME or 98 after Windows XP came out? I don't think so, this will be the same thing. It's the novelty spectrum and the new features that will blow you away once they are finished. Nothing you have seen is finished yet, and the new screenshots are showing us that this really will be a great upgrade.

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You might not know that some of the features of Longhorn will be offered as free upgrades to Windows XP. Avalon, IE7 etc.,

[Menge]

So soon ? You are expecting a little too much out of your 5200. Longhorn is slated for late 2006. You could give the 5200 a proper burial by then and move onto Nvidia's GF7 series. :p

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unfortunately, i don't have that big a fortune to be spending on a new expensive video card every 6 months :( i don't like the idea of spending 200 dollars on something new every 6 months....

[Winston]

Agreed.. with Avalon, Indigo and WinFS being backported to prior OS's, the impetus is not there to buy a new machine and buy LH.

Let me tell ya, LH runs barely passbily on HT 3.06 machines... It would be good on dual procs with 1GB+ of ram...

I have noplans of buying it...

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The APIs are backported, they mean nothing to the end user, you can't even take advantage of the entire engine. It's back ported for a reason, and it's one of the smartest ones of all, to allow developers to start deving in these pillars so by the time Longhorn goes RTM, there would be at least some Longhorn ready applications.

[Cyrilix]

people will definately buy longhorn when they see how pretty and nice the new WGF enabled UI is. That's 1/2 the reason people buy macs now for christ's sake, because "it's so pretty". I seriously doubt microsoft is gonna have a hard time selling longhorn. For those of use who have been around for a while, we all remember the windows 2000 zealots when whistler was in beta (whistler was xp's codename) who said, you can do all this on win2k, etc etc, no one will buy whistler, it's gonna be slow, you're gonna need a 1 Ghz Computer to run it, etc etc. None of those things were true, and the same applies to LH.  ;)

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Windows XP does take a lot of RAM though. My computers struggle with it still, but I suppose my computers are outdated.

[DirtyLarry Veteran]

wait a minute...

you mean to tell me that people here actually buy their operating systems? :ninja: ;)

[raskren]

No probably will not buy Longhorn when it's released.

1. Can't afford 4 GB of RAM

2. Can't afford a PCI Express Video Card with 1GB of RAM

3. Can't afford a Pentium 4 / 64Bit @ <3.8GHz

but if I somehow get invited to play with Longhorn in a Microsoft beta test, and get it for free - then I will happily test it and maybe even attempt to use it. For me Windows XP does everything I need.

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Do you really think those are the minimum specs for Longhorn? Do you really think most people can afford those things?

LH rumors show 3 different display modes depending on the hardware in your system. It is likely that most of the GUI effects will be optional.

[eminem213486]

this thread is making me sick, a bunch of people saying misuninformed specs of an operating system thats not even out yet. jesus christ 64 bit only? why would they do that? microsoft is all about legacy devices and 32bit isnt going yet.

longhorn 3718, 4074, 4029, 4051 ran FINE on my ****ty p4 1.8 ghz machine. with nvidia 5200 card, total budget card and yet it runs DCE/DWM perfectly. im sick of all these retarded comments. there is a memory hole in explorer right now that makes it use so much memory but before when i only had 256mb it wasnt all that bad anyway

[aristotle-dude]

Damn, I cannot believe you guys are arguing about what it will look like. I don't give a rat's ass about Longhorn and I don't think my employer will buy longhorn if it is as bloated and buggy as it appears to be so far. Windows XP is "good enough" for business.

Since they are only including the flashy crap apparently in the first release and WinFS will not make an appearance until about a year later, there is no point in upgrading business machines until winfs comes out.

I'm looking for more stability, not bloat and pretty graphics.

At home, I'm a mac guy and I'm personally looking forward to to Tiger which should hit the shelves in a couple months.

:D

[raskren]

I'm looking for more stability, not bloat and pretty graphics.

Ever try the Linux command-line?

At home, I'm a mac guy and I'm personally looking forward to to Tiger which should hit the shelves in a couple months.

That's great - here's a cookie...I mean a latte. Cookies aren't good enough for a Mac user. And the new groundbreaking user interface in Tiger is what? And the brand new filesystem is what? And they're backporting it to OS 9? Oh wait, they're not.

[kaffra]

nice, this is just like the old days :D will win98 topple 95, MEvs 98 .........

[DXPetti]

this thread is making me sick, a bunch of people saying misuninformed specs of an operating system thats not even out yet.

longhorn 3718, 4074, 4029, 4051 ran FINE on my ****ty p4 1.8 ghz machine.

Is it just me or are you going against what you said yourself. You claim that people are whinging about an OS that isn't out yet and then you claim that THIS OS THAT ISN'T OUT YET runs fine on your PC. :rofl: Hmmmm. Maybe you should wait till its closer to release date before you talk about 64bit support ONLY!

and I don't think my employer will buy longhorn if it is as bloated and buggy as it appears to be so far. Windows XP is "good enough" for business.

Hmmmm I bet they said the same thing when Windows XP was around the same stage as Longhorn is currently. "Oh we will never upgrade yadda yadda yadda", and look 90% who had Win2000 are now on WinXP. :pinch:

[Fighter-X]

They shouldn't release Longhorn so early. I think XP is still pretty fresh and stable. Maybe another 2 years of XP and then im ready to spend money on a new OS.

[raskren]

So early?

Win Xp was released in 2001 and Longhorn isn't slated to be released until 2006. That's 5 years for the math impaired.

So early? :huh:

[IK47]

longhorn?

my school's computers run win95.

My school wont be seeing longhorn until 2016.

[sundayx Veteran]

what is longhorn?

;)

[Normality]

hm ... well I'm happy with xp, but then again i was happy with win98 ...

Anyway, one thing's for sure : if they make the prices for longhorn as high as for xp (well i find it pretty expensive) then few people will buy it and dl it from w/e source freely(illegally) instead. I'm no economist, but I think that if prices are lowered, than more people will buy, and in the end MS will make more profit.

[Porsche Design]

If it requires a new system, it would give some users a chance to switch to Apple.

By then they would have Tiger and New PowerMac's and PowerBooks

But again, not many people know enough about Apple.

[Hexlord]

Windows 2000 still runs fine on thousands of machines in businesses and some still have NT 4.0, moving to Windows XP didn't make much sense because it didn't really offer anything that serious business users wanted accept maybe security features.

Longhorn though may have some new and tempting features that will attract business users.

Home users will probably not be swayed, most can't use the features in Windows XP or have no real use for many of them. It will be hard to convince 90% of users that they "need" something that Longhorn has.

It reminds me of ACDsee 3.1 versus 7.0, 3.1 had all the features I wanted or need in a image viewer, it's launches fast and has the neccessary plugins to do all the things I want. ACDsee 7.0 has some new stuff but launches slower and is bloated with stuff that really belongs in a photo editor.

Longhorn will undoubtly have some features that will belong in an office suite but some users will take advantage of them.

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I would agree totally with you although I am curious to know if there are any issues of 3.1 for ACDSee running on XP? I had some problems that is why I deleted it...

[strekship]

No probably will not buy Longhorn when it's released.

1. Can't afford 4 GB of RAM

2. Can't afford a PCI Express Video Card with 1GB of RAM

3. Can't afford a Pentium 4 / 64Bit @ <3.8GHz

but if I somehow get invited to play with Longhorn in a Microsoft beta test, and get it for free - then I will happily test it and maybe even attempt to use it. For me Windows XP does everything I need.

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So, um where are you getting your info from? I think you have been misinformed. While noone at this point knows for sure what the minimum specs will be, i think that its safe to say that they won't be that demanding. I think at the very most, 2-3 times the Windows XP minimum.

[Cyrilix]

hm ... well I'm happy with xp, but then again i was happy with win98 ...

Anyway, one thing's for sure : if they make the prices for longhorn as high as for xp (well i find it pretty expensive) then few people will buy it and dl it from w/e source freely(illegally) instead. I'm no economist, but I think that if prices are lowered, than more people will buy, and in the end MS will make more profit.

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I don't know about you guys, but after half a year, Win98 would start giving me random BSODs. As for WinXP, I never get a BSOD, no matter what I do, unless I overclock past the safety threshold (which causes a BSOD following a reboot). My impression of Win98 is that it just wasn't very stable...after a long time.

About the profit, also note that MS makes money selling OEM copies of its software to major distributors like Dell.