I could be accused of being a Microserf. Although I think most computer uses could to some degree. Only those of you using Macs, Unix, or Linux exclusively can claim to be *purebloods*. In my defense, I do own and use a Mac and I do have Linux installed on my laptop. I used to have it on my main computer, but I had some major dual boot issues when my hard drive crashed and I installed a new controller card and drive. However, this is all secondary to the main point of my article.

For those of you living in a cave, Microsoft's next operating system is called Vista and is *supposed* to be released sometime later this year. We'll see about that. :) However, I have been fortunate enough to get a beta copy of Vista and been able to play around with it a little bit. So far, I've been impressed with the changes I've seen. If you run it in its native mode with the Aero UI (opposed to the legacy mode without Aero), the experience is as different from Windows XP as Windows 95 was from Windows 3.1. It's pretty amazing! It is a much richer and *modern* looking interface. However, if you have used a Mac, you will think they lifted the interface. :) A lot of what I'm used to when using my Mac is going to be in Vista...go figure!

The bad news is that the beta version runs like a dog! I'm assuming this is because they have not been optimized yet and additional performance enhancements are coming. I was experimenting with a 3.6 GHz dual Xeon,2 GB of RAM, 128 MB video card, and 150 GB of hard drive space and it didn't run like the speed demon it should have. However, I'm sure that will improve as times goes on. Also, this was one of the older beta versions and I don't have access to that machine any more to test with. :( However, the aero interface is pretty snazzy. I'm curious to see what WinFS is like.

The other bad news is that aero is a huge hog on video processing. You are going to need some heavy duty graphics processing to get the full benefit of Vista. From what I'm reading, anything with less than a 128 MB video card may not be capable of running aero and that is one of the best parts. Oh, if you have one of those on board video cards, yeah, you'll be running in legacy mode w/o aero. One of my co-workers and I found that out today while doing more testing on an older machine with the newest beta version.

Oh well, so that's my $0.02 on Vista for the moment. It should be cool, but you will need a powerful computer to fully leverage it. Tomorrow...IE7…

Oh, here are some articles on Vista that are pretty good...
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1931913,00.asp
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/0,1206,l=&s=400&a=171997,00.asp
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1843945,00.asp

Posted by Curt at March 3, 2006 10:23 PM