With Vista's official launch less than 2 weeks away, the pundits are starting their diatribe why Vista is just OK. Today in the Wall Street Journal Walt Mossberg article titled "Vista: Worthy, Largely Unexciting" (subscription required) bemoaned the fact that Vista still needs anti virus software, however as much as he tried he had a harder time than usual making his point that Apple's OS X is better. I always find it interesting how Apple enthusiasts cling to a false sense of security. As Apple gets more popular, someone will spread some malicious code and unfortunately unprotected users will pay the price. Although Mr. Mossberg is still very much biased towards Apple and loves iPhoto (Mr. Mossberg; independent reviewers have found Adobe's Photoshop Elements 5.0 to be much better), he concedes that this is an excellent versin and the best Windows yet.
Although it has been a long time since Windows XP was released, the press is sounding like a broken record about having to buy new hardware for Vista. The thing they forget is that Moore's Law is a big reason Microsoft became so successful. As software becomes more complex, you need better hardware design to run it on. There is no need to cry about it, it has been a fact of life since the Eniac. Vista is no different, it's advances in graphics and security require more powerful hardware than was needed to run XP. The basic hardware design required for running XP is six years old, it is silly to think that Vista would use the same design. We heard the same thing back when XP was released, how individuals needed to buy new machines and that would make XP a bust. Well XP has been the most successful operating system ever. It is clear that individuals did not switch over night, but over time. The same will be true with Vista. As individuals and companies replace machines they will move to Vista.
The OS architecture in the bowels of Vista is very different than XP. It secures and segregates hardware and applications and will only allow well behaved applications and drivers to run. The big innovation is graphics and they are now handled by the graphics card General Processing Unit (GPU) in the way sophisticated games have done for a long time now. To take advantage of all the changes has necessitated a change in hardware design. Given my experience at this point, unless you are a techi, I would not upgrade an XP machine to Vista. Yes the upgrade works, but sorting out which vendors have well behaved applications and drivers is a pain. Buying a new system is simpler since all preloaded applications and drivers should work out of the box. I also found that the file structure is different enough that the upgrade process forces you to reorganize some of your files. One example is shared music and pictures are now under a folder called public rather than XP's shared documents.
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