Initial Vista Impressions

Just in case you’re wondering, the Acer Ferrari notebook with Microsoft’s Vista has not arrived at the Lab of Doom and Pepsi. Perhaps the boys out in Redmond realize that Bill and I can’t be bought that cheaply, or that we love to bash Windows, and link to our corner of the Linux world. Be that as it may, I’m still following the Vista launch, which should be later this month. As Windows XP has aged gracefully for the last 5 years, there is a ton of excitement over the new Vista OS.


I will say that the one really cool feature, the Aero glass interface looks like awesome “eye candy,” but truly adds not one iota of functionality to the operating system, while being graphics resource intensive. I found it more than a little interesting that as Tom’s Hardware is looking at Vista, they reset the appearance to a classic Win XP look. I think they call it familiarity breeds content. As for the rest, I’m not hearing any true must have application that behooves me to upgrade ASAP.

The threat that they want us all to buy a new copy of Vista with every motherboard change is also onerous. Who wants to have to keep on buying a new copy of Windows just to upgrade a motherboard to get the next generation of processor? If Microsoft wants to push the power users, and the magazine writers (not to mention bloggers) to reexamine Linux, then this is the perfect way to do it. I won’t even get into the legions of followers that will go where these key influencers head.

I’m sure that despite all of this, almost all of us will end up with at least one PC running Vista. As there are always some hiccups in any launch, I personally won’t be jumping on board until the summer, if that early. We’ve done enough beta testing for Microsoft already, and I’d rather not do any more.

--Jonas

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