Misplaced Floridian
No Ferrari douche bag here.
SF Moderator
Friend of Don Panoz
Posts: 1508
Unfair. Unbalanced. Unmedicated.
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« Reply #5 on: December 17, 2006, 12:39:53 pm » |
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Bill,
Well, it's different than XP, I'll say that. Although I'm running it on some powerhouse machines at work, I'm writing this at home on an IBM T40 laptop - 1.3 GHz CPU, 1.5 GB RAM; ATI Mobility 7500 video. It runs just fine, but I don't have some of the bells & whistles that the higher-end machines have - for instance, I can't run the Aero desktop, that's the 3-D desktop enhancements. So far I haven't found any problems with application compatibility, although the jury is still out on how well the Windows Defender (anti-malware/spyware) program will function.
Microsoft has done some good work with security, which many will probably find annoying. We all used to install Windows our machines, and then either run as the administrator account (with all permissions to do anything) that was installed or build an administrator account (with all permissions to do anything) and use that day-to-day. That made it very easy for a virus, spyware or malware to infect the machine and do what ever the bastards that coded it want. Well, the administrator account in Vista is disabled out of the box, and although any accounts you create have admin permissions, there's this little thing called User Account Control - before any system wide change is implemented (i.e. installing a new program) the system stops and provides you with a confirmation dialog. That's turned on by default, and I haven't yet turned it off - like I said, it's annoying, but I'm learning to deal with it. (It can be turned off by deselecting a checkbox.)
Also, Windows Explorer as we knew it has a completely different look and feel. It's similar to the Explorer in XP/2000, but there's still some settings I'm trying to figure out.
Drivers, too, are an issue - although I'm having decent luck with what Microsoft installs, I don't know if the various hardware manufacturers will bother writing drivers for their older hardware. The ATI video on the laptop, for instance - I'm using the XP drivers, just edited the .inf to make the driver think it was running on XP.
Would I recommend it? Probably, but only on a higher end machine. Minimum 3.0 GHz processor, 2 GB RAM, high-end video with at least 256 MB RAM. The security alone make it worthwhile, but until the vendors driver base catches up with the hardware, I'd probably wait before plunking down $$$ for the new OS.
Cheers,
Scott
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