What's Up With Vista

Just a quick update on the status of Windows Vista, Microsoft's forthcoming new version of the Windows Operating System.

Vista is now finalize and is on its way to manufacturing. It will be released to certain corporate customers at the end of this month, but won't be released to the general public until January 30. The completed version of Vista is now in the hands of many software manufacturers who are making sure it will work with their products.

It has taken nearly five years of hard work and lots of missteps to complete this new version of Windows. There have been many delays and missed deadlines, but as software gets more complicated and sophisticated this is bound to happen. The biggest disappointment for computer manufacturers was that it was not ready in time for this year's Christmas selling season.

On a lighter note, Windows co-president Jim Allchin said this week that Windows Vista is such a huge upgrade in terms of security over Windows XP that you can run it without any anti-virus software. He is so confident in his statement that, in fact, that his seven-year-old son's Vista PC lacks anti-virus software. He later said that he has installed stiff parental controls on his son's computer.

Of course, say several Windows experts outside of Microsoft, that if you lock down any computer from downloading or having e-mail, you don't need any anti-virus software. So, they are warning that if you do get Vista and are a normal user, you will definitely still need anti-virus software.

There are some good videos available to preview the new operating system on CNET-TV. You can also read more about it on the Microsoft Website and download a software program that will analyze your system to see if it has the capacity to run Vista. There are four versions of Vista: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate.

Personally, I plan to wait a little while before I make any move. Let's see what bugs it has in it and make sure those are taken care of. But more than that, new Windows operating systems have history of slowing down computers and requiring more memory. I just know that if I install Vista in my fastest computer, it would run much slower than Windows XP. And being that I spend most of my time in Photoshop, it doesn't matter to me what operating system I'm using as long as Photoshop works well.

All this was brought home to me (again) just recently when I was scavenging parts from three different computers to put together a new home computer for my own use. This computer is a Pentium 3 and runs Windows 2000 and works just fine. But, I know that if I installed XP into it, that it would be a much slower computer.

One of the computers I scavenged was a 7 year old system running Windows 98. And guess what...it flew. I had forgotten how fast it was. Sure, Windows 98 is not as feature-laden as Windows 2000, and nowhere near as good as XP, but the computer was very fast and worked very well for me for a few years. The point is that newer operating systems require newer computers with lots of memory.

Because of this, my policy is now don't upgrade an exisitng computer to the next version of Windows. Wait and purchase a new computer with the new operating system when the time is right. It has worked well for me.