Is Vista the End All of Operating Systems?

Microsoft officially released Windows Vista yesterday, along with its new Office system. Most of the “tech crowd” is apprehensive about the new operating system and for good reason. Even though the OS is stable and has an assortment of new gadgets such as Aero Interface, which essentially streamlines the desktop allowing for a glass like appearance. But on the downside, the more technologically sound aspects of Vista are only included in the higher end versions, which comes with the added bonus of paying even more money ($649 for “ultimate”). The other added bonus included the one license that come with any version of Vista. This means that a user can install the product only once on one machine. For those of us who own more than one machine, looks like we are SOL.

Vista took roughly five years to be developed, which led many of us to expect more from Microsoft. The added features are new, but are comparable to what many have called “Windows XP service pack 3.” In sum, the new features are not exactly worth the added cost. Speaking of cost, Vista comes with the joy of having to upgrade your current machine. For example, let’s take a look at my machine. It is a solid machine as far as Windows XP is concerned: 3.2GHz P4 with HT, 1GB of single channel RAM, 160GB hard drive, 128MB ATI Radeon graphics card, and various other aspects. After running a variety of programs that tell a user whether they should upgrade, the results suggested that the “home basic” version was adequate for me, which does not have the new components advertized by Microsoft.

For users with baseline machines like mine, the cost of upgrading the hardware is monumental. To operate the “ultimate” edition, I’ll tell you exactly what you need: either a Pentium D or Duo Core processor, 2GB of memory, at least 40GB of hard drive space, and 256MB of graphics memory. This is a case of false advertisement if you ask me, but welcome to the world of IT. The basic consumer really does not have any of this, unless they have happened to spend a pretty penny on a new computer in the past few months. Dell is already marketing Vista basic and home editions with their new computers, which will open the market up for the new OS. But for those of us who do not need to upgrade, Windows XP will suffice or MAC OS 10.4, which is about the same thing as Vista.