Observations on Windows Vista

One thing that has infuriated me to no end in the last week is middle-aged, techie-wannabe folks asking me “So I should get Vista?”. You know the type…your friend’s parents that pretend to know something about computers or, for those of you who work in retail, the 45 year old guys that come in asking for copies of Vista without knowing what it is, hoping to run Microsoft’s new operating system on their Celeron 300s. I’ve spent about a week now with Windows Vista Ultimate installed on my laptop and my feelings are still rather mixed.

1. Oooo…pretty… Make no mistake, Vista looks great. The Aero interface, the gadgets, the flip 3D all look great. Vista looks like a next generation interface and I think with a few more months under its belt, it will be very customizable as more and better gadgets are released and people figure out what the heck is going on.
2. Looks come at a price. All that pretty doesn’t come cheap. With 1.5GB of RAM in my laptop, Vista averages about 30% memory usage right off the bat. That’s right, 450MB of overhead just to run it. It would seem that Microsoft’s new OS is a bit of a system hog so don’t even think about running this with less than a GB of RAM, a good video card with at least 256MB of RAM, and a Core2Duo, which you should have anyways. Microsoft lists the system requirements much lower than this and people like my managers at London Drugs might think you can get away with less but they’re crazy. Don’t bother with this if your computer isn’t near the top of the line.
3. Entirely useless! I haven’t found any real features of Vista over XP that can be considered must-haves…or even necessary at this point. Slap a OSX or Vista skin on your XP and you basically have the same thing. Until we see apps that require Vista, hold off on upgrading. Vista is like Jessica Simpson. Nice to look at but entirely useless otherwise.

So unless you are an alpha consumer and must have the latest in everything, Vista will be of nearly no use to you. You will most likely have to upgrade certain parts of your system to accommodate the new OS and it just isn’t a good idea at this point as XP runs stable. So tell your friends or your parents so they can stop asking me whether they “need” Vista. I think the answer is rather obvious.

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