Mind Architecture Happenings

Microsoft says Windows Vista will be out by January 2007. Is it time to upgrade?

Maybe - maybe not. On the plus side, Vista looks absolutely wonderful. The biggest question would be whether it adds anything that you need. Right now, for most people, that may be no. But then again, that’s what was said about XP when it came out. The difference being, most people were on Windows 98 and an upgrade to XP was a big improvement. This time it’s an improvement but not as much. That is something you need to decide. Check out the Windows Vista pages for more info.

One thing to caution everyone about is the minimum system requirements. They say it will run with a 1 GHZ machine. From my understanding it will run. But only if you turn off most of the pretty new looks and can put up with a sluggish machine. I wouldn’t want to try it on anything less than 2 GHZ for a fairly acceptable use speed. Also, go for as much memory as you can. Not hard drive space, memory.

I have heard of people using the final release candidate before going to manufacture. They say it is a resource hog. Using a 3.06 GHZ machine, with 2GB of memory and a brand new nVidia graphics card with 512MB of memory, Vista with all graphical enhancements turned on runs so slow as to be unusable. With the enhancements off it runs much better. So if you have a machine with less hardware than that, think again before moving up.

For developers, another issue to look at is the licensing. Right now you can install this on 1 computer and then later, transfer it to another. So if you get a new computer you can reinstall Vista on that new computer. That’s it. You can’t install this again, anywhere. For someone doing programming and coding, moving to new machines may be an issue.

This can also affect you if you use virtual machines. We like to setup a different OS under different virtual machines. We can then have different databases or development tools running. Better yet, we can have different versions of a browser on each VM, thereby testing developed web sites in many more browser versions. With the Vista licensing, we may not be able to do that. Something to look at and watch.

The last thing I want to mention is the security. Vista is supposed to be more secure, but it isn’t as secure as it could be. One issue is that people can write hooks into the actual kernal. This is where a lot of the problems come in with viruses being able to change the main kernal. Unfortunately, this is also how the anti-virus people work also. So turning off that ability also means the anti-virus doesn’t work. Since Microsoft doesn’t want to break your old software, they have allowed this to continue with Vista. With the 64-bit version they don’t allow this anymore. Everything needs rewritten to work with 64-bit anyway, so they made it more secure from the start. This is a good thing. It also means, if you are looking to go to 64-bit, be aware that alot of your hardware and software won’t work and you will have to wait for a 64-bit version.

So, what are our plans at Mind Architecture for this? We plan to continue using our 2GHZ machines with XP for at least the next year. Then we’ll re-evaluate and see how things look. We anticipate that in the next 18 month we will upgrade, but it probably will be to the 64-bit and not the 32-bit version.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Industry News, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.