Vista: get used to it 60 million and counting

Stan Beer
Sunday, 29 July 2007 17:24

Opinion and Analysis

We've all heard the heard horror stories of people attempting an upgrade to Vista. We've heard about it's hunger for memory and system resources, the lack of drivers, and so on. However, people I know who have been using it for a while now, say it isn't too bad and we better get used to it anyway because we really have no choice.

The fact is that most of the new brand name PCs being sold off shelves now are Vista boxes and, whether we like it or not, XP is being phased out. However we choose to interpret Microsoft's figure of 60 million Vista copies "shipped" in its first five weeks, for Windows users Vista is the future.

Well of course we could choose to get a Mac or attempt to make the jump to Linux (anyone heard how Dell's going with Ubuntu?) but if we want to stay in the Windows world, we will have to eventually move to Vista.

I don't for one minute believe that Vista will be inherently more secure than XP. I know it will require much more hardware resources to run than XP. I don't care about the eye candy. I'm hoping that I won't have to reboot the PC as often as the others around the office but I'm not holding my breath.

The fact is, however, that despite a surge in Mac sales in the past year, Windows has a stranglehold on the personal computing market and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Steve Ballmer expects that there will be 1 billion installed Windows systems soon. Discounting the fact that many are pirated, he's probably right.

That being the case, Vista is going to be the most used operating system within a couple of years like it or not, so we better get used to it.

I'll be getting a new work horse office PC in a couple of weeks from my local white box dealer. It Will have a high-end dual core processor, plenty of memory, a dedicated graphics card, a big hard disc - all round plenty of grunt.

As he did when I got my last PC a few months ago, my dealer will give me a choice - XP or Vista. Last time I said XP; this time I'm going to bite the bullet and say Vista.