2007-02-27

All the Vista You Can Eat...

...or at least stomach... Here's the roundup from Slashdot on the Vista news over the past week or so. Seems to be a regular plethora, and most of it still not encouraging me to consider an upgrade anytime soon...

4 GB May Be Vista's RAM Sweet Spot 2007.02.20
David Short, an IBM consultant who works in the Global Services Division and has been beta testing Vista for two years, says users should consider 4GB of RAM if they really want optimum Vista performance. With Vista's minimum requirement of 512MB of RAM, Vista will deliver performance that's 'sub-XP,' he says. (Dell and others recommend 2GB.) One reason: SuperFetch, which fetches applications and data, and feeds them into RAM to make them accessible more quickly. More RAM means more caching.

Vista Security — Too Little Too Late 2007.02.21
Thomas Greene of The Register has a fairly comprehensive review of Vista and IE7 user security measures. The verdict is: better but not adequate, and mostly an attempt to shift blame onto the user when things go wrong. From the review:
"[Vista is] a slightly more secure version than XP SP2. There are good features, and there are good ideas, but they've been implemented badly. The old problems never go away: too many networking services enabled by default; too many owners running their boxes as admins and downloading every bit of malware they can get their hands on."


Software Missing From Vista's "Official Apps" 2007.02.22
Microsoft has just released a list of 800 applications it says are 'officially supported' on Windows Vista. What's special about this list, however, are the programs that are not included: 'Popular Windows software that is conspicuously missing from Microsoft's list includes Adobe Systems Inc.'s entire line of graphics and multimedia software, Symantec Corp.'s security products, as well as the Mozilla Foundation's open-source Firefox Web browser, Skype Ltd.'s free voice-over-IP software and the OpenOffice.org alternative to Microsoft Office.' Another area in which Vista has found to be lacking is gaming, as discussed earlier on Slashdot.

Windows Vista - Still Fresh After 19 Months? 2007.02.23
"ZDNet blog Hardware 2.0 looks at the effect of having used Windows Vista for over 18 months. It Windows Vista the indispensable upgrade that Microsoft wants you to think it is? Writer Kingsley-Hughes says 'Having been using Vista for over 18 months I believe that it's a huge improvement over XP and even though I still use XP I find that I miss many of the features that Vista offers.' Just the same, he goes on, 'I wouldn't call any of the changes earth-shattering. When I'm using XP systems I miss some of the features but not so much that they push me to upgrade any faster.' He then goes on to give a feature-by-feature breakdown of all of the improvements Vista has over XP, and what long-term use of these features can net."
A possibly useful guide for gamers or administrators thinking about upgrading sometime soon.

And finally, on a more humorous note...

What Vista Is Really Like 2007.02.24
This waking dream has been making the rounds: what if you woke and found a strange and beautiful woman in your bed, and she was inscrutible, unpredictable, and dangerous... but oh so beautiful? That's Vista for you.

If you click on no other link, please do read that last tidbit. It is absolutely hysterical. Spoken like a true Windows user.


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