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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

Windows 7 was effectively just vista but enough time had passed that the required hardware to run it was easy to get a hold of.

The biggest problem with Vista is you had a lot of Windows XP computers running happily on 256 and 512MB of ram. That made updating to Vista REALLY painful to a lot of people.

I think people forget about how little resources 95, 98, and XP needed to run.

XP was also criticized for being a hog when it first came out. People viewed Windows 2000 as being the good windows right up until memory became more abundant. You couldn't run XP on a machine with 64MB of ram, but you could run windows ME and 98 on that same machine.

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>Windows 7 was effectively just vista but enough time had passed that the required hardware to run it was easy to get a hold of.

Not really, Windows 7 had a lot of work poured into it, fixing Vista issues. Even first public betas of W7 were more polished than any of Windows 8..11 releases. That includes work on minimal amount of "noise" notifications, driver issues, speed, design etc

Basically all of those fixes were applied to Vista before the 7 beta. There were some rough parts to Vista's released, but a lot of those were polished by SP1 and SP2.

The reason the W7 beta went so well is because it was already just based on later versions of Vista.

I don't think we should excuse Microsoft for bloating Windows because memory became abundant.

A lot of that bloat is due to compatibility and the 32bit -> 64bit transition.

Linux has suffered from the 32/64 bit problem as well for quite some time. The only difference is because of opensource it's been easier to slowly kill off the 32bit ecosystem.

That's not been an option for windows.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of RAM needed.

Absolutely it does, for 2 different reasons.

First up, the nature of dlls is that the same dll for multiple applications gets saved in memory just once. If you have 2 windows applications and one is 32bit and the other 64bit, then both of those applications end up loading up effectively the same dlls, but one is compiled for 64bit apps and the other 32. That nearly doubles the amount of ram needed in a mixed system.

But then there's just the fact that 64bit code by it's nature uses and passes around 64bit pointers everywhere. That's not quite as significant but it does have an effect.

The other part that ends up adding to the memory consumption is from XP on microsoft added compatibility layers. What those effectively did is distribute a different set of dlls based on the application being launched. So now instead of having 1 copy of the dlls like you did with 95, 98 and ME you can end up with potentially 3 or 4 different dlls. And that's ultimately exploded as more versions of windows have been released.

If you'd ever opened a directory of a program in windows you'd know that they always bring their own dlls, windows is not debian.

Usually, yes. Those aren't the dlls I'm referring to. I'm talking about common dlls that every windows app needs like kernel32.dll.

Every windows app relies on os provided dlls to some extent.

Then explain how Windows 7 64 bit uses much less memory than Windows 11.

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