Vista gets crammed onto a PS3. It's as bad as you think.

We can't in good conscience recommend trying this one at home for sake of your own sanity, but one enterprising PS3 enthusiast has thankfully gone the extra mile and installed Windows Vista on the console so you don't have to. As you might have guessed, however, it's not a pretty sight, with the OS running under emulation and requiring nearly 25 minutes to fully boot up. You can also add an extra five minutes and thirty seconds on top of that to load the start menu, and about twelve minutes to load up that most demanding of applications: Notepad. Head on past the break to see it for yourself, and hit up the link below for the installation instructions... if you dare.

[Thanks, Death_Coil]

[SirPasta117 @ Aug 5th 2008 12:17PM]

They should put better use to modding by making an ISO loader, not cramming Vista onto it.

[Steffen Jobbs @ Aug 5th 2008 1:15PM]

My avatar had this question:

Wasn't Vista bad long before it ever got jammed on a PS3?

Go figure. You never know when a lower primate is going to say something profound. And to think, he wishes MS would put Vista on a mobile handset.

[phinnvr6 @ Aug 5th 2008 2:01PM]

Well Linux runs great on PS3. I have it installed on mine and a bunch of emulators like Snes9x, MAME, etc. Running Vista through Linux sounds like a bad idea, and it looks like it is.

[Vanillacide @ Aug 5th 2008 4:11PM]

@ phinnvr6

Depends on your definition of "great" ... can it do email and browse the web, yeah, can it run Photoshop, nope.

The CPU component of the Cell Broadband Engine ("Cell") runs Linux not any of the six available SPE stream/vector processors.

Cell's CPU core alone is IBM's POWER4 architecture and is approximately equivalent to a dual-threaded and overclocked G4 PowerPC such as that seen in Apple Macs a few years ago.

The PS3 has legendarily tight memory space, so running Linux and then an emulator that has to simulator x86 architecture to run Windows is going to be extremely slow. Compare it to VirtualPC on a G4 Mac, which does the same thing, and that looks positively speedy and super-snappy in comparison.

[Haikibutsu @ Aug 5th 2008 5:35PM]

You do know how crappy Mac OS X will run on the PS3? That thing has 256mb of ram! What do you expect.

You are an embarrassment to mac users.

[MMisterio @ Aug 5th 2008 12:18PM]

but can it play Crysis?

[L @ Aug 5th 2008 12:23PM]

Sure - one frame every third day...

[initialxy @ Aug 5th 2008 12:26PM]

i think a better question would be... does it play minesweeper? or does it even get to the point of opening minesweeper in start menu.

[phanbouy fanboy @ Aug 5th 2008 12:30PM]

this is the first time i have found a crysis comment kind of funny

[Blaine Oliver @ Aug 5th 2008 12:18PM]

By god its faster than my current vista!

On a serious note, this is painful, why so slow?

[Matt @ Aug 5th 2008 1:20PM]

It is being emulated.

[Jamma @ Aug 5th 2008 12:29PM]

why so serious?

[L @ Aug 5th 2008 12:29PM]

Let's see - you have Vista running on an hardware emulator that runs within a hypervisor-crippled environment using only the main core of the Cell processor afaik (none of the SPUs, and none of the GPU stuff), which isn't fast at all on its own.
Also, the PS3 has awfully little RAM for such things, so I guess the HDD is probably a tiny step away from exploding because of all that swapping...

[Hamidxa @ Aug 5th 2008 12:30PM]

This is largely due to the fact that the Cell processor used in the PS3 is an In-Order Execution procssor and ends up wasting many potentially useful cycles just sitting there.

i.e. it ostensibly doesn't even know what to do half the time with the x86 code/processes/threads/etc running on an OS such as Vista that is designed around contemporary X86 OOE processors.

[imacmatt09 @ Aug 5th 2008 12:38PM]

I hope your not serious but I'll answer your question as if you where. The PS3 has 256 MB of RAM. That's enough for linux to run on. Vista alone on that would be very slow, but its not on that. It's running in emulation software so the RAM available to it is probably like 128 MB. You need at least a gig for vista to run with acceptable results. So lets see a OS that needs 1 GB of RAM using 128 MB of RAM in emulation software = slow as hell.

[MioTheGreat @ Aug 5th 2008 12:41PM]

imacmatt09: It has less to do with the available RAM and the OS running than it does with the architecture it's running on.

Even if you dropped a copy of Linux compiled for x86 in the exact same environment, it would be slow beyond all imagination. OSX would likely run about as well as Vista does on it.

[Maeztro @ Aug 5th 2008 12:44PM]

because it's running under an emulator...

[rv @ Aug 5th 2008 1:25PM]

Why didn't this guy just try to install xp then...

[happyface @ Aug 5th 2008 1:51PM]

Because XP has been done before. Look it up on youtube.

[Mark @ Aug 5th 2008 7:49PM]

I wager it does have a LOT to do with memory. Consider that every time your processor wants to grab something from RAM it has to sit for 20 to 60 cycles depending on the RAM. Every time it wants something from your Hard Drive it has to sit for hundreds and sometimes thousands of cycles doing absolutely nothing.

If our memory was faster we could run Vista on Pentium III cpus and not notice a difference.

[Graham @ Aug 5th 2008 12:21PM]

Why go through all that work for something like vista? Atleast put Ubuntu on there and it will actually be really cool.

[TSM @ Aug 5th 2008 12:24PM]

probably because it can already run ubuntu with nothing special

[CosterMonger @ Aug 5th 2008 2:39PM]

xubuntu is what is already running on this particular PS3

[ShadowKain @ Aug 5th 2008 3:24PM]

Yes, lets low rank his comment because it makes much more sense. Far more efficient is linux in this case. Morons.

[Carl Vitullo @ Aug 5th 2008 4:17PM]

actually, i think he was low ranked because he asked a question without checking to see if he could answer it himself.

[CraigJ @ Aug 5th 2008 12:26PM]

But I thought Mojave made everything OK again?

[Brad @ Aug 5th 2008 1:00PM]

The important thing to take away here is that Vista is at least twice as complex as Notepad.

[mcx @ Aug 5th 2008 12:27PM]

conscience, not conscious

sorry, i have a pet peeve for these things

[UltimateTOR @ Aug 5th 2008 12:26PM]

LOL - If they put OSX Leopard on there it'd be just as slow to boot up and open finder, but hell would Engadget be all over it.

Revised title: OSX gets crammed onto a PS3. Its a GOOD as you think.

Engadget is sooooo biased lol

[Hamidxa @ Aug 5th 2008 12:32PM]

Spot on.

[Zak @ Aug 5th 2008 12:35PM]

They're biased because of an imaginary scenario you concocted in your head? You're really reaching now.

[Good_Bytes @ Aug 5th 2008 12:37PM]

+1!
a gaming console is not design to run applications... it's not the same CPU. Example, look at the SNES, the CPU is much slower then the computer back then, but if you want to play with a today SNES emulator with back then computers, you still need 3 or even 4 times the console speed.
And to top things over, this OS runs under emulation.

[Andrew @ Aug 5th 2008 12:51PM]

Explain how it would be 'just as slow' please.

for 1) Leopard runs natively on PowerPC.. So 'technically' it would be easier to get running on the bare metal.

2) Good luck running Vista on an 867mhz computer w/ 768mb of ram.. My buddy runs the latest version of OSX on his 5 year old powerbook with those specs. Runs smoother than Vista installs on dual core systems currently on the market.

So, it would likely still run slow (since Linux itself runs slow on the PS3 because it doesn't take advantage of all the SPE cores), but wouldn't necessarily be 'as' slow as Vista. In fact, I guarantee that.

[Colin Potter @ Aug 5th 2008 12:51PM]

its sad you can twist this to be pro-mac or anti-windows.... its about the fact that someone shoved a non-linux OS on the PS3, which is designed to run linux. grow up.

[Andir3.0 @ Aug 5th 2008 1:53PM]

Actually, it's the other way around... Linux was designed to run on this platform, existing platforms, and most likely any platform the engineers can come up with next.

[Ryan Karolak @ Aug 5th 2008 2:23PM]

OS X can run naively on the PowerPC architecture, therefore it would actually run much better if you were able to get it work.

[Zachary Waldowski @ Aug 5th 2008 3:49PM]

Someone should hack iPhone OS to run on the PS3 and Wii.

[Decoy @ Aug 5th 2008 4:03PM]

I'm all for OSX on non-mac hardware too, cheers.

[Fara @ Aug 5th 2008 6:34PM]

@Andrew. Then you and your friend are blind and very biased.

I have leopard, on a 1.5GHz G4 with 1.25GB ram, and it's dog slow. In comparison, vista on a 0.6GHz C2D with 2 GB ram is still quite snappy. Vista and leopard Both need oodles of ram (minimum 2 GB) and decent CPU's, and GPU's.

[Hamidxa @ Aug 5th 2008 12:30PM]

This is largely due to the fact that the Cell processor used in the PS3 is an In-Order Execution procssor and ends up wasting many potentially useful cycles just sitting there.

i.e. it ostensibly doesn't even know what to do half the time with the x86 code/processes/threads/etc running on an OS such as Vista that is designed around contemporary X86 OOE processors.

[Meccalangelo @ Aug 5th 2008 1:26PM]

DEJA-VU

[Zak @ Aug 5th 2008 12:32PM]

I can understand the "Why? Because I can" thing, but I can't imagine anybody actually trying this at home now, because the performance is so bad.

[weg @ Aug 5th 2008 1:52PM]

I just tried to run XP yesterday using Virtual PC on my Powerbook G4. In 3 hours, I didn't even manage to install an anti-virus program.

Of course, running software that was written for an Intel processor on an underpowered PowerPC is slow. That's neither the fault of Vista, nor the fault of Sony.

[phanbouy fanboy @ Aug 5th 2008 12:32PM]

how come no enterprising young hacker has installed vista directly onto the ps3? is the architecture just so completely different from a standard pc that it's all but impossible?

[Andrew @ Aug 5th 2008 12:42PM]

Windows* doesn't support PowerPC architecture...

[MioTheGreat @ Aug 5th 2008 12:42PM]

Unbelievably so.

It would likely take even Microsoft a very, very, very long time to get it working. (Years.)

[The Dude @ Aug 5th 2008 1:02PM]

As far as I know, even XP has only been run in Qemu. The PS3's hardware just makes it difficult to get it off the ground natively. As it was not intended to be a computing platform it really handles poor as balls when attempted to be used as such. Squandered hardware power that just can't be tapped. Linux can be adapted and get by, but I'm certain a butchering knife is taken to it. This guy is already running Xfce (xUbuntu?) for a reason.



Side Note: I like your math Engadget. 8 seconds into the video it says it took "24 min 6 sec Boot time to Start Menu." That somehow gets rounded up to "nearly 25 minutes" in the article. Kind of how I round up my 9 in. to 1 1/2 ft. when I'm feeling like a braggart in front of easy women. Very nice.

[phanbouy fanboy @ Aug 5th 2008 2:51PM]

low ranked for asking a question...? man, there are a lot of self righteous douchebags here on engadget. i don't mean you though, phanbouy.

[emagius @ Aug 5th 2008 3:05PM]

@Mio: Note that old versions of Windows NT *do* run on PowerPC (and a few other architectures). Microsoft dropped support for PowerPC when it became painfully obvious that the market would stick with x86 (and later x64, though Microsoft also offers Windows on IA64).

[HOOPER @ Aug 5th 2008 6:54PM]

Where's the real phanbouy?