A commenter on Scoble’s site asks an interesting question:
I’ve got a 4 year old PC running (barely) XP. My graphics card is a 64MB card, it’s an AMD duron 850, 256MB of RAM. It runs XP fine now, why should I upgrade it to Vista and won’t my upgrade costs be a little more than $10-20?
He points to a couple of PCs sold to the masses at Wal-Mart and wonders whether Windows Vista will run on those PCs. One is a $548 notebook with a 1.2GHz AMD processor, in the clearance section. The other is a 3GHz Celeron-powered Compaq Presario.
I see no reason why Windows Vista wouldn’t run on both of those machines, after a memory upgrade. The integrated graphics might mean that some of the whizzy 3D graphics would be missing, but all of the features of Windows Vista would work, and I suspect it would be pretty speedy.
He continues:
That’s what Microsoft has to overcome. It’s not that people have to fork over $20 to upgrade, it’s that a lot of them have to buy an whole new computer to run Vista. My parents have a computer purchased in the last 3 years, yet I can’t get them to fork over $100 to get XP Home on their PC because it runs fine with Windows Me for what they want to do. I’ve seen OS X running on blueberry clamshell iBooks and iMacs for cryin’ out loud. Not fast, but as fast as my XP install at home. Why doesn’t Microsoft release an OS that scales backwards as well as forward?
My experience with Windows upgrades through the years is that any PC built within two years of the launch date will deliver a pretty decent experience, especially if you’re willing to upgrade RAM. A PC that’s three years old should run acceptably, especially if you don’t demand a lot from it. Anything older than that is a science project, not a serious technology investment. Windows Vista is more graphically intensive than any previous Windows version, so the graphics subsystem will be more of an issue for mainstream users than it has been in the past, but not an insurmountable one.
I think a lot of this concern is a red herring, though. Most people who will buy a bargain-basement PC from Wal-Mart are not the sort who are going to be salivating for a Windows Vista upgrade. If they were that concerned with flashy new technology, they’d spend a couple hundred dollars more and get a system that will deliver some of that flash right now.
In the past five years, I’ve helped dozens of people buy new PCs. With virtually no exceptions, they upgraded to Windows with the purchase of a new PC. When you work out the economics of upgrading (extra RAM, bigger hard drive, retail/upgrade version of Windows), the cost of a whole new PC is usually not that much more than the upgrade. And that’s the way the market has worked for 10+ years. For every copy of Windows sold in a shrink-wrapped box, there are 10 copies sold pre-loaded on a new PC.
To return to the commenter’s original question… Why should he upgrade his four-year-old PC (which will be five years old next year when Windows Vista is released)? He shouldn’t. It makes no sense. If it’s performing acceptably for the tasks he performs, there’s no need to upgrade. If it’s falling short, four or five years is a reasonable life for any piece of technological equipment, and the arrival of Windows Vista would be a good reason to replace it.
Ed Bott 
My 5+ year old Gateway Pentium 350mhz with 96mb of RAM runs Windows XP Pro just fine for surfing the internet, sending email, and some other basic tasks. Its a little sluggish at times, but this setup is well below what Microsoft says I need. This issue is so overblown.
No, this issue is definitely not overblown.
Ed, I’d buy your argument except for one thing: IE7.
As long as MS ties security fixes to only the newest OS, I don’t think your argument holds water.
A basic user who is only interested in web surfing and email, who’s Windows 98/2000 box serves his/her needs perfectly, cannot avail themselves of MS’s most secure browser, (hell, they can’t even use IE6SP2) unless they upgrade their OS to XP. Which in most cases will also require completely new hardware. Oh, and they can’t use MSAntiSpyware either.
Now, I fully understand it’s a stretch to want a 7 yr-old OS to be up to current security standards, but the precedent has been set. It’s not that MS can’t make these backwards compatible (hell, Giant’s antispyware that MS bought already worked with 98/2000) but they choose not to.
So what happens once Vista is out and MS makes another step forward in securing IE. And only makes it available for Vista?
Joe Blow XP user, on a basic level XP-capable machine, who doesn’t want to learn to find an alternate browser, (assuming he even knows they exist) is denied a secure machine because the only way to get it is a new OS, which will require new hardware. So he doesn’t upgrade. So he has massive problems with his machine. And becomes an attack vector for thousands of other users on the web.
What a lot of tech experts don’t seem to be taking into account is that, for the average user, the functionality of an 800mhz or 1ghz machine with 32 megs or so of integrated graphics is ALL they want or need in terms of capability. They don’t WANT to upgrade their hardware. They LOATH the idea of having to do so, especially if just because they need the security but none of the features of a new OS.
As your quoted passage points out – it is possible. Mac has been doing it some time. Many of their new releases are actually faster than the previous one.
I’m a power user and pro photographer. My hardware needs are dictated by the power required by my applications, not by my OS. But the general user has looong since passed giving a rat’s ass about whizzy 3D graphics and most of what Vista’s bringing. They’d be far, far happier with a new version of Windows that runs on existing hardware and fixes most of the egregious security flaws and UI faults of current versions, and costs $40 or $50 to upgrade.
I’m glad Microsoft continues to attempt to innovate in its software (and this definitely applies to Office too) but I really think its time to stop pretending this is of benefit to the general user. Joe Blow simply doesn’t care. It just gives him a huge load of headaches to deal with, until he can get back to securely using the same 6 or 8 basic functions for which he uses a computer.
I guess my point (assuming there is one?) can best be summed up in response to Aaron’s second-last sentence. Why the hell is Microsoft telling me what I need, instead of giving me what I need?
Ligh & Dark -> MS do offer patches for older Windows versions. Look at Windows 2000, not a current version ow Windows, but still gets the security updates. What it doesn’t get is anything considered an extra feature, and I suspect IE7 would be considered more of an extra feature. Coupled with the fact that it relies on underlying OS technology that’s found in XP and Vista, it would be even more awkward to port it back to anything else anyway.
As for Ed’s original post, my PC is currently doing fine. I really hope that there’s worth upgrading to in hardware terms because I want Vista. However, Intel and AMD see to have stopped making processors and all that seems to be happening with graphics cards is more memory being added. With a couple of exceptions, a PC bought now wouldn’t feel much different to my 3 year old Dell. Thinking about the upgrades I’ve done before, 486 90Mhz -(3 years)> P2 300Mhz -(what will now be 5/6 years)> P4 2.5Ghz, I’ve at least doubled the processor speed. It doesn’t feel as though that will happen this time. It feels like processors just stopped at 3.8Ghz.
It’s not upgrading software that’s my current issue. It’s convincing myself that the numbers are worth it.
L –
Good points. I’ve complained about some of the same issues in the past. I think Microsoft has unjustifiably left some users behind on some key security improvements.
But there is a logic behind it. Windows 9X is inherently insecure. There’s nothing you can do to make it safe or reliable. If you try, you end up with Windows Me. Windows XP and Vista have cores that are inherently securable. So Microsoft’s insistence that they will deliver some improvements for XP and not for 9X is logical for architectural reasons.
IE7 will indeed be available for XP. It’s in beta right now. There will be differences between the feature sets of the XP and Vista versions, but those differences will be tied to the feature sets of the two platforms. The primary difference will be that IE7 for Windows Vista will support a low-rights mode that can’t be implemented in XP because the OS doesn’t support it.
Some of the problems with bring the old version of windows up to speed relates to decisions made back when the Internet was not the savage and dangerous world it is today. These decisions relate to very core OS functionality. Even IE 7 in XP SP2 will not have all the features of the Vista version because the two do not share the same code base any more. In July of last year the development of Vista was moved from the code base of XP to that of Windows Server 2003 this is a significant change. The problem that will arrise is that certain functions at the core OS level are handled in very different ways between XP and what is now the Vista code base.
Why did MS do this? One can only speculate but I would imagine that they ran into a brick wall where they would have had to compromise something that they were not willing to compromise.
Mark
Isn’t it somewhat disingenuous to claim that mainstream users won’t salivate for Vista? XP is dogged with security issues and to the extent that Vista provides a more secure operating system, coupled with an improved user experience, why wouldn’t they want to switch?
I’ve recently spent time in a couple of Apple stores and overheard PC users weighing whether to make the leap. Anecdotally, their primary complaints are security, usability and compatability. When I’ve worked with OS X, I’ve been extremely impressed by its intuitiveness and speed. XP by comparison feels archaic. Vista can’t arrive soon enough.