By Sandeep Nair
Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista, saw its worldwide release on January 30 in conjunction with its usual brethren Microsoft Office 2007. Like its Office counterpart, the new Vista seems to be more of a graphical upgrade than a fundamental change in the Windows Operating System, an evolutionary change instead of the revolutionary one that Microsoft promised.
Vista requires at least ten gigs of free hard drive space for its install, making it the biggest operating system to date. Does Microsoft take advantage of this huge amount of space for a truly revolutionary experience? Not really, and Vista tends to look shinier than it actually is.
The minimum requirement of one gigabyte of RAM or 1024 MBs of RAM may seem like an easily rectified problem, considering how cheap DDR RAM is these days, or not a problem at all considering most desktops and laptops come with at least a gig of ram in the past two years, but the minimum requirement is just that. A gamer or hardware aficionado would require an ideal four gigs of RAM to run Vista at peak performance, as this user takes advantage of dual-core computing as they multitask. Four gigs of ram may seem far too much for the average user at this time, but may prove useful in the near future.
There are significant improvements over XP, but not anything Microsoft couldn’t add to XP through one of their infamous patches. More specifically, Vista debuts DirectX 10, a fundamentally different and dramatically improved version of the popular DirectX line of APIs (Application Programming Interface) used to render three-dimensional graphics. As of DirectX 10, the Windows community has stepped into the realm of Shader Model 4.0. This is where Vista hardware upgrading requires the latest and greatest hardware for full functionality. Shader Model 4.0 removes a software and hardware ceiling that capped a computer programmers ability to manipulate hardware for more resources available in newer graphic cards.
As of this Vista release the performance cap has been sent several floors above its DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3.0 limit. The problem with DirectX 10 is that like the rest of Vista it requires a significant hardware upgrade to witness its benefits, which may be a problem for the average user, who doesn’t care much for the leap forward in computer graphics.
After a few weeks of using Vista, it’s still easy to have trouble distinguishing it from XP. One could quite easily switch the themes to Windows XP Classic mode, which would remove the Circle Windows button with the traditional Start button as well as the all around softer, Mac like look of the Vista theme for the harder, visually unappealing Windows XP class mode. However, Vista does do some small things right in removing the “My” namings of various windows directories, such as My Computer for Computer and My Documents for Documents.
Though delayed by about three years from its initial launch, it seems the extra time in development didn’t give Vista enough features and shine to reflect the light of criticisms away from its glaringly obvious missteps. These failures to address Microsoft’s lackluster approach to modern computing in the face of competitors such as Apple, open source Linux and Microsoft’s own Windows XP are suprising. Simply put, Microsoft has failed to deliver on its into promise to revolutionize basic operating system use. It may seem like a case of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ but XP is broken and Vista is not an adequate replacement.
