Windy wrote:
I'm sure that if someone builds their own PC that is true because they are making a custom setup. Kind of like building a high performance vehicle that uses parts from different manufacturers to get the ultimate performance. However, to my knowledge, when one buys a PC from a store, internet etc., the company that sells those PC's tweaks them for different levels of performance. For example, they will have different processors, video cards, RAM and other components that will hamper the performance depending on how much you pay. The newer the components are, the more likely they will perform better than the older PC that used less RAM, power, and lesser need of processing speed i.e. XP vs. Win7 and to my knowledge, the newer OS use more processing power, RAM etc. than the previous ones.
Every single person I know, and a myriad of others that I've read about, had major problems when they upgraded their OS. Microsoft assured them that upgrading from XP to Vista would be no problem. They said the same thing about Vista to Win7 and Win7 to Win8, and of course, we all know that wasn't so. It didn't appear to me that it was solely a driver issue.
I guess it would be akin to comparing a Porsche 914 to a 928.
Here in the states, they had a famous bumper sticker that owners of 914's would actually place on their cars that read: “My Other Car Is a Porsche”! The 914's were at least in part made by Volkswagen, and were not well-liked because of lack of performance.
My worries are that it would be like swapping the engine from a 928 to a 914 that won't work out so well! It simply wasn't designed to work with that vehicle. My analogy of upgrading the OS.
It's up to you whether you want to believe me or not, of course, but you're simply wrong.
Of course, there are always special cases and exceptions, but... no, you're wrong.
First off, let's differentiate "manufacturers" from "assemblers".
The former is an outfit that actually 'manufactures' stuff. Again, here we have two (unofficial) sub-categories: designers and utilisers. The 'designers' club is quite exclusive and as hardware gets more exotic, the fewer the outfits. For example, there are only 2 (and a half) CPU manufacturers: AMD and Intel (and Cyrix). That's quite a private club and it takes a LOT of money and resources to design and manufacture something like that. Same goes with GPU designers, where we have AMD and nVidia, but here there are some others as well, like ARM, Qualcomm and a few others, but their products only come embedded inside mobile CPUs. Then you have WiFi, audio, LAN, RAID, SATA, all sorts of controllers. ALL of these guys design and manufacture chips and then send them off with a reference design, and here is where the 'utilisers' category comes in. These guys (mostly) get the reference designs from the former guys and just... manufacture them. For instance, most graphics cards are just using the AMD or nVidia reference design. There are very few manufacturers who have the people to actually *design* a card, and even they use the reference design as a base and just improve on the power distribution circuitry or the cooling. Even motherboard designers get the reference designs from all the components they want to integrate in a given motherboard and then just try to squeeze all the circuits in. Basically, there are VERY VERY few manufacturers that will actually invest and use third-party chips to create something unique with its own firmware and ROMs. That's why drivers from the designers/chip manufacturers almost always works. It's because the chips are used in accordance with the reference designs and the firmware they use is the firmware that the designer provided. It would indeed take enormous expenditure in both manpower, talent and support crew to create something really unique *and* write special drivers for it *and* keep supporting it for, say, five years.
The latter (assemblers) is pretty straightforward. These just get components and put them together, doing little more than just connecting cables and screwing screws and *maybe* getting someone to make them bespoke cases and boxes. Goes without saying that they change absolutely *nothing* from reference designs.
To my knowledge, the manufacturers who will get chips from designers and design their own circuits and write their own code and drivers are *zero*. None.
The most they do is have some other outfit (that already does that) design them a motherboard, and then pay the designers to change the firmware, not in the actual code, but just the vendor and device IDs, so that the generic drivers won't detect them and won't install. Then they get the very same drivers that the designer releases, add their specific PID/VID strings and repackage them so that they show their logos instead of the original designer insignia. Of course, they just release new drivers (infrequently), as the original designer releases them, for the first year or so and then stop altogether. In fact, if people knew how, they could get the original generic drivers, add the PID/VID strings themselves and use the newest drivers without any problem at all. But that is not something these bozos advertise -- and if you ask, they'll deny it.
Now, just because you mentioned it... going from XP to Vista was a huge leap. Windows XP were released when there were no 64-bit CPUs, the average RAM was 256MB, GPUs weren't even called GPUs, CPUs had one core and there were no PCs with more than one CPU, hard drives were around 2GB (average) etc. Vista came out six years later and, of course, apart from being a mess to begin with, they naturally needed more. A LOT more. You just can't expect a laptop made for Windows XP, with the requirements of XP in mind, to actually be enough for Vista or 7. Not to mention that the driver architecture changed, and not many manufacturers were interested in bringing up new Vista drivers for old hardware -- besides the "mandatory" drivers they made and gave Microsoft to include in Vista.
However... going from Vista to 7 was a breeze. They used the same driver architecture (mostly), they actually required LESS RAM, LESS CPU power, LESS hard disk space and that's why people use them still.
Again, going from 7 to 8... yes, same story. Windows 8's core is actually *lighter* than 7's. Of course, Windows 8 has the tendency to run background processes like a sonofabitch and it'll happily bring your PC down to its knees, just on the premise of being a bit faster *if* and *in case* you decide to do... something.
All that, however, has nothing to do with drivers or system compatibility and, believe me, designers and manufacturers do NOT design PCs using components that *hamper* performance, like you seem to believe.
Of course, wanting to have models in all price ranges, they will use components of lesser performance and price in budget models, in the same way they'll use mid-range components in their mid-range-price models and they'll put the cream of the crop in the high-end and gaming models. That's not "hampering" performance; it's not like the components themselves *can* perform better but they *somehow* won't let them. It's just cheaper stuff that's not as fast. For example, putting in a Celeron instead of an i5 isn't "hampering" performance. It's just using a cheaper CPU for a cheaper model.
Again, however, the hardware of the last... maybe 7-8 years is more than enough to run *any* operating system. Even if you've got a dual-core i5 from 2009 you can still run Windows 8.1 and the upcoming Windows 10, no questions asked. Same for a graphics card, say a Radeon 5000, is WELL more than enough to run *anything* (not talking about performance in games, of course) OS-wise. RAM speeds have been stagnant for more than that time and 4GB of RAM has been more than enough since I can't remember when and still is. You can get a PC, desktop or laptop, from 2008 and it'll still be good enough to run Windows 10, right now. Hell, I've got my girlfriend's laptop from 2006 or so, "Designed for Vista" supposedly, that's purring along just fine with Windows 7 -- and Windows 10 would be fine too, I'm sure.
Once again... it's up to you if you want to believe me or not. Don't have a clue about Porsches but I do believe I know a bit about computers.