andy
Nov 22nd, 2006, 5:44 pm
For all of those who know me for more than 5 minutes I don't have to state the following for but the rest: I am not exactly known to love M$ products, and hence the the following short review should be taken with a grain of salt. Actually it is ot going to be a real review, just a few comments on what I have seen of Windows Vista RELEASE, mind you not any beta or RC.
Which one of the news would you like to hear first? The good? OK. Vista seems to be quite intelligent, the upgrade process from XP SP2 (only 32bit!!) works and after you waited for roughtly 7 hours (no kidding) you have a PC that runs Vista, has alomst all the program back in place, looks nice, and seems to work a tad faster. At least on the PC's I left Vista running. The new UI is .... new. Not bad, but noting to make a song about either, some cool touches with graphics effects are implemented, some things changed where to find them. (It took me a few minutes to find where to change the resolution of the monitor) Going to sleep and coming out of sleep seems faster for the laptop I installed it on.
Now for the negative: Drivers: You will need new ones. XP drivers will NOT work. Vista is a bit wasteful with memory. XP runs in 128MB, Vista NEEDS 512MB RAM, and for serious work you should plan to up that to at least 1GB.
Things to mention that are neither positive or negative, just remarks. Vista is the first OS that I am aware of that INSISTS on having a graphics processor(GPU) in the system(videocard) If you do not have a supported GOU with MINIMUM 32MB RAM Vista will not run, and even if it does on the low end graphics cards, the performance will be absolutely abysmal. Now OTOH if you happen to have a nice graphics card with a good 3D graphics processor (ATI, NVIDIA, ...) with 128MB or more you will see some visual tricks come alive that make working visually more interesting, like the transparent window borders and other stuff.
For those of you that are in the process of thinking of a new PC for X-mas if you think of EVER upgrading that to Vista, you better make sure you have the best graphics in there you can afford, otherwise VIsta will not be happy, and neither will you. And upgrading one of the run of the mill current PC's no matter how powerful the CPU, if you don't have a decent GPU ... fugetaboutit!
Which one of the news would you like to hear first? The good? OK. Vista seems to be quite intelligent, the upgrade process from XP SP2 (only 32bit!!) works and after you waited for roughtly 7 hours (no kidding) you have a PC that runs Vista, has alomst all the program back in place, looks nice, and seems to work a tad faster. At least on the PC's I left Vista running. The new UI is .... new. Not bad, but noting to make a song about either, some cool touches with graphics effects are implemented, some things changed where to find them. (It took me a few minutes to find where to change the resolution of the monitor) Going to sleep and coming out of sleep seems faster for the laptop I installed it on.
Now for the negative: Drivers: You will need new ones. XP drivers will NOT work. Vista is a bit wasteful with memory. XP runs in 128MB, Vista NEEDS 512MB RAM, and for serious work you should plan to up that to at least 1GB.
Things to mention that are neither positive or negative, just remarks. Vista is the first OS that I am aware of that INSISTS on having a graphics processor(GPU) in the system(videocard) If you do not have a supported GOU with MINIMUM 32MB RAM Vista will not run, and even if it does on the low end graphics cards, the performance will be absolutely abysmal. Now OTOH if you happen to have a nice graphics card with a good 3D graphics processor (ATI, NVIDIA, ...) with 128MB or more you will see some visual tricks come alive that make working visually more interesting, like the transparent window borders and other stuff.
For those of you that are in the process of thinking of a new PC for X-mas if you think of EVER upgrading that to Vista, you better make sure you have the best graphics in there you can afford, otherwise VIsta will not be happy, and neither will you. And upgrading one of the run of the mill current PC's no matter how powerful the CPU, if you don't have a decent GPU ... fugetaboutit!