Wednesday, January 31, 2007


Windows Vista

This week the biggest news in the world of computing is that the new Windows Vista by big OS Microsoft has been released to the public. It can be purchased in, currently, four different flavors. Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Business, and Windows Vista Ultimate. Prices for the oem packages, which can be found on Newegg, is fairly reasonable. Ranging from 94.99 for the Home basic version to 199.99 for the Ultimate edition. Information on which version best suits you can be found at newegg

Vista marks a new milestone for Microsoft and the PC industry, and is one of Microsoft's largest projects.

According to Microsoft, Vista is a new breakthrough in computing technology. More than just a pretty upgrade to XP, Vista is touted as an OS that makes navigation easier with it's
Flip and Flip 3D desktop, backing up critical data a cinch with it's Backup and Restore Center, larger than life graphics for the gamers with DirectX 10, Networking painless with it's Network and Sharing Center, and that's just scratching the surface.

Why aren't you buying it already?

Well, given that Vista was such a large project and brings about so many new features, bundled apps, etc. Why isn't everyone going out there and purchasing it right away? The answer to that is two folds. Windows XP, which frankly, is probably Vista's biggest competitor right now, was and still is a very adequate and efficient. When XP was released, it was a big deal for every other consumer release of the Windows OS between 95 and XP seemed like minor upgrades to Windows 95. Aside for NT and 2000, which were more enterprise level Os's anyhow. XP, however, brought with it the stability and network capabilities of 2000/NT technologies and added the user friendliness of the 9x Operating systems. This was a big deal to consumers that were just sick of the same old 9x upgrades, and led to many users adopters of XP. The second reason is due to the vast visual enhancements that Vista brings to the table. Which means that there is a higher system requirement standard to not only run Vista, but also to enjoy what it has to offer. To run it's core functionality, your computer must have a clockspeed of at least 800 mghz, 512 mb of RAM, and 15 gigs of free hard drive space. Inorder to enjoy what Vista offers at all, here's what you must have:

  • 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
  • 1 GB of system memory
  • 40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
  • Support for DirectX 9 graphics with:
    WDDM Driver
    128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
    Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware
    32 bits per pixel

Personally, I as well as many of you, have a system that can handle Vista. However, I plan to wait for some of the bugs to be cleared up, better driver support, and games designed specifically to take advantage of DirectX 10 to arrive before I jump onto the Vista bandwagon.

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