Saturday, February 10, 2007

Windows Vista.

I had the chance to have my first good look at Windows Vista this week, this Microsoft's new operating system to replace Windows XP, I thou hgt I would give you some of my observations.
I think the first question that springs to mind, is Vista going to be full of security holes as XP was when it was launched, we shall see as the year goes by.
The general feel of the OS is more responsive and applications also launch quickly. Yes, there are some driver and hardware issues, but we should start seeing more stable and updated drivers appear soon. Like its predecessor Windows XP, Vista has improved deployment options and device driver detection; these improvements have proven to be very user friendly and reduced the time it takes to get Windows up and running.


Vista is available in 6 expensive flavours, both in 32bit & 64 bit versions, from basic home edition to the ultimate edition £330.00 here in the UK, I think that if Microsoft were not so greedy and priced competitively in the first place they would not have so many issues with piracy, and yes Vista has already been cracked by hackers.

You are going to need a minimum RAM (memory) of 1Gb that is what Microsoft tell us, the system that I was using had 2Gb and I think this is where I would start, the processor needs to be 800Mhz or above, I think the memory requirements would exclude any PC older than about 2 years.

So how does it look? The desktop in Windows Vista remains’ consistent but other parts of the OS have been extremely updated to feature a much cleaner, sleeker/professional look and feel that presents a more mature color palette called Windows Aero. Some elements of this new theme include semi-translucent window frames, window animations, transitions and high-resolution icons that are more life like and easier to understand. The Start menu panel has also been radically overhauled to provide a productive, logical layout when accessed.

The big question for many persons is, whether the move to Vista will be worth it, Windows Vista has brought the term operating system out of an antiquated era in computing of just being known as a traffic cop for your hardware and applications. Security is supposed to be one of Microsoft's main issues when developing the new OS, as I said earlier we will see as the year goes by.

I had about 2 hours with the OS so this is not going into any great depth, is it better? yes, is £150.00 - £330 better? No.
If you buy a new computer with Vista already installed, fine.
Upgrade? no definitely not worth it.


"Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it."
Maya Angelou

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

A minimum requirement of 1 Gb RAM... Oh, for the good old days, when they taught you that an operating system must put a minimum of strain on resources... when operating systems where just that...and MS-DOS was happily purring away using a fraction of the PC's 1/2 Mb of RAM!

They say a look at your kids makes you realize how old you've become. But I only need to look at my PC! ;)

Unknown said...

I think in those days Sabine programmers had to write code that would not tax the memory. These days there is no such incentive with memory becoming ever cheaper and RAM increasing in size almost on a monthly basis.
I remember the exitement when Windows 3.1 was released and the promise that it would cut out having to type all those DOS commands (well some of them).

We are only talking about 1993 here, not that long ago in the scheme of things.

Anonymous said...

I loved typing DOS commands - and tweaking batchfiles to do what I wanted them to do... gave me a feeling of power. Windows just gives me a feel of being used for some ulterior motive. Hmm. Once a geek, always a geek! LOL!!