I’ve been playing with Windows Vista Beta 2 recently on my home computer, and my overall impression is pretty blah. I must agree with many other reviews I’ve read that it’s really XP SP3. The eye candy is nice (taken from Apple and the OSS world), but nothing worth upgrading over. The new Start menu is better laid out, but again – not worth upgrading for. User management is a bit better, and the side bar is a spiffy feature – but you can already get that for free with either Google Desktop or Konfabulator.
I kinda feel sorry for the engineers at Microsoft who’ve poured millions of man hours and years of effort individually into this new edition of Windows – there’s no compelling reason for anyone I know to buy it.
When you factor in the minimum system requirements (and you lose a lot of eye candy if you go with the minimums) – 1.5G CPU, 512M RAM, 64M video card, 16G free drive space – the system is hogging all the basic resources of any new computer. Budget-minded consumers who snag Dell’s latest weekend special won’t have enough oomph to run Vista. XP Pro runs fine on a system with 256M RAM and a 1G CPU (I should know – one of my home boxes is such a beast). I do not see any reason why this “upgrade” has to be such a resource hog.
Sure, power users, gamers, and businesses will buy machines that can run Vista well – but Vista is going to be sucking the life out of those systems so those self-same buyers will end up needing even beefier hardware to get the “most” from their computing experience.
It’s sad when I can install any other desktop OS (distros of Linux with heavy or light window managers, XP Pro, OS X, Zeta, etc) on a system with 256M or 512M of RAM and expect it to run acceptably – along with all the apps I need to use – but Microsoft has to push its customers into machines formerly relegated to true heavy users (gamers, developers, etc).
Maybe some miracle will happen in the next several months and Vista won’t demand so many resources – but I’m not holding out for one.