Early Thoughts on Vista
Everyone knows about the high system requirements to run Vista. Some might assume that it is the result of eye candy, but most of those effects can be done with add-ons to xp or beryl in Linux without such high power requirements. Yes, Vista supposedly handles a lot of back-end stuff more effectively (not more efficiently), but that doesn’t make up the difference. So what is causing the high system requirements?
My theory is that M$ wants to make windows the 4th gaming platform. By mandating that all Vista users have gaming PC’s, maybe they can convince grandpa to buy a new game since his computer supports it anyways. This strategy can also be seen in the new “games for windows” kiosks at many gamestops, the new game console syle game boxes, and with the compatibility of 360 controllers in Windows. They are also rolling out live for windows as well, hopefully they won’t use XNA to make a live arcade on PC where you would pay to play the kinds of games that were previously free via flash. Oddly enough, I have never seen any of this mentioned in connection with Vista and its high requirements.
Ironically Vista preforms worse in nearly all cases with gaming than XP does.
As for myself, I don’t have a single good reason to switch to Vista. True M$ is keeping DX10 from us XP users, but its not like my 3 year old FX5900 ultra supports it anyways. In fact my aging PC would have trouble running vista in general, though it has no problem running a 1.5 year old install of XP64, with a ton of other programs too. The biggest reason I am not excited to switch is the DRM. The built in DRM is downright scary. I’m not talking about the fact that they can now disable computers that they suspect to be pirated, though this is scary and has very scary ramifications for viruses, etc. I am talking about how they can disable high def output from my video card (which doesn’t support bullsh!t HDMI) to my recently purchased HDTV, (which also doesn’t support bullsh!t HDMI). I don’t like an OS that I [I]purchased[/I] telling me what I can’t do with the computer that I personally built.
Speaking of this, Vista goes overboard in restricting what you can and can’t do. Nothing pisses me off more than getting an “access denied” message on my own PC, and this happens very often on Vista. If I want to mess with system files I should be able to, I shouldn’t need to take control of the file (who controlled it before I did this?) first. And don’t get me started on the more than 6 “are you sure” prompts one gets when trying to run a program that installs from a rar file.
In conclusion, I’m glad I got a Xandros Linux dual-boot running. More and more people are seeing M$ becoming over confident in their monopoly and infringing on PC users rights, and people are beginning to not stand for it. If worst comes to worst, I won’t either.
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