Windows Vista
Windows Vista is now released. I am in the process of evaluating the
product which was rolled out sometime in December, 2006 for businesses and
January, 2007 for personal users. Microsoft has a long history of missing
anticipated rollout times, but they adhered remarkably well to
schedule after all the initial delays for the publication of this software. I will be updating this web page as I find out
more information and have had more time to use it.
In order to evaluate this product, Hein Computing, Inc.
initially purchased an HP dx5150 with a SATA 80 gig drive, 512 megabytes of memory
and an integrated video card (ATI
Radion Xpress X200 video adapter). Three things were immediately clear: 512
megs is not enough memory for Vista, you need a large hard disk drive and you
need an excellent dedicated video card. I immediately bumped my system to 1
gigabyte of RAM. That is a good absolute minimum: 2 gigs of
memory is really what is necessary. Secondly, an 80 gig drive is not enough either. I put
very few programs onto the computer and, between them and the operating system
it had already consumed 40 gigs before really getting started using the OS. A 160 gig drive would be a bare minimum
for a real user.
The integrated video card got the lowest rating of any part of my system, a 2.1
in a scale of 1 to 5.9 (there is a program within Vista that evaluates your system for compatibility and
responsiveness). Gaming graphics got a 3.0, Disk transfer rate a 5.5,
memory operations per second a 4.5 and my processor got a 4.1. The fact that my video only workined
at a rate of 2.1 indicates that for a Vista machine to be truly efficient,
a much better video card must be purchased.
That being said, even with the low scores for my graphics setup, the video was elegant and truly beautiful. The best analogy would be that the difference
between older Windows versions and Vista would be the difference between a
regular television and a high end High Definition television (HDTV).
There are a number of other things that I have found to be most interesting in
early experimentation: one of them is the
Sidebar and Gadgets. Here is technical info on creating
Gadgets
and a listing of Gadgets.
First impressions:
The interface is visually stunning. Here is most appropriate definition of Vista: [Italian, from feminine past participle of vedere, to see, from Latin vidēre.]. It is clear that the operating system is being built from the ground up to be visually beautiful. I initially used Release Candidate 2 (RC2). There are a few missing things that I can see right off (no graphical disk defragmenter, even though you can defragment your hard drive).
I will be updating this page on an ongoing basis, so please bookmark and come back to it as things change.
Various Links to Vista-Related Information:
Here is information from various forums by Microsoft
regarding
Vista. Here is more from
Microsoft.
Here is a
screenshot showing an expanded Start bar, Windows Gadgets and one of the
default Desktop pictures. It is from Paul Thurrott's
Vista SuperSite. Here is
his Windows SuperSite.
Wikipedia article on Vista.
Hidden Costs
of a Vista Upgrade, and
More,
which explains that if you buy a new PC with Windows XP anytime from October 26,
2006 through March 15, 2007, you can upgrade to Vista at a nominal cost.
Here is a breakdown of what it will cost to upgrade.
Vista Tips and Tricks, and
here and
here.
My recommendation (Oct. 29, 2006):
You cannot purchase Vista yet. Businesses might be able to get it sometime in
December, individuals in January. I, like most IT people like to hold off
on putting production computers into a new program or, more importantly,
operating system, until at least some kind of a service pack or major group of
updates have been delivered. I don't know when I'll move to this OS, since
there are a lot of possible slipups to its wide implementation. That being
said, it is a real throwback to use anything other than Vista after having seen
what it will offer.
The first
thing I do strongly recommend is that users who would consider an upgrade should
purchase all new computers that have at
least a 3 gigahertz or equivalent processor, at least 1 gigabyte of memory, at
least a 160 gigabyte hard disk drive and at least a 256 megabyte video card with
good specs. Here is a link to the Microsoft
recommendations.
Update (June 20, 2007):
I have gotten a new computer, an HP dc5750. It has 2 gigs of RAM and an ATI Radeon X1300 with 256 megs of memory. It has a 220 gigabyte SATA hard disk drive. It is running a full copy of Vista Business. It feels stable and I'm starting to recommend it to various home users. The office users are another thing. I've not recommended it to anyone yet who is working in a business environment. One user running in a business environment set it up on his computer and it appears to have caused problems with Timeslips. There is a workaround (changing a setting in the Borland Database Engine (BDE) to MAXFILEHANDLES =255. Timeslips in any version prior to 2008 is not recommended for Vista, but I think it will be as people get more used to it and are able to set up parameters tailored to using it.
All in all, a most auspicious beginning.
