Vista Is an Stopgap Release

I had the pleasure experience to work with Windows Vista a bit the other day. Let me tell you all now. It’s a stopgap release. It seems to work well enough, if you don’t mind the screwy approval dialog boxes and the lack of hardware and software vendor support… It’s the new ME. Windows ME, that is…It’s no secret that Microsoft pulled the plugs on failing software projects that were to be the much-touted guts of something previously named Longhorn. Their vaporware is almost as amazing as their shake-and-repeat Office products. As for their ever-morphing naming schemes, they (and SUN, Sony, et.al.) would do just as well to borrow the acronym-of-the-month from American public schools.

But what’s wrong with Vista? Well, not a lot. It’s mostly a new skin on XP. A skin that sucks so much of a system’s resources that only high-end gaming desktops sold now are truly adequate to use Vista with any real applications. Other than that, there’s just nothing there that you can’t get now with XP, if you must have Windows. The interface itself is little more than an over-done version of the Gnome desktop, with splashes of copied-from-Apple-as-usual thrown in to the mix. There is even an Exposé-like tool. That’s actually useful, but the implementation is really more like the usual application switching keyboard combination…

Summary: Don’t buy Vista. Don’t even buy a machine with it pre-loaded, unless it comes with an XP install disk or you plan to install another OS. It’s not really worth it. For the cost of a truly Vista-ready machine with long legs, you can get that Mac you always thought was too expensive, and install XP on it using either dual booting or Parallels or VMWare.