The rantings of a beautiful mind

On life, society, and computer technology.

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Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

I live in the Fortress of Solitude. I drive the Silver Beast. My obsession is justice. I used to be a Windows software developer. I retired in 2000 when my stock options helped me achieve financial security.

Monday, January 29, 2007

Vista Wars

And you don’t think Microsoft has the economic clout to resist the IP owners? C’mon.

I bet Apple won’t kiss their asses...


Now here’s the $64,000 question (literally):

How much are you spending to upgrade all your computers to Vista? Or are you leeching off your company (i.e., pirating)?

Assuming you’re upgrading to Home Premium, you’re spending $180 CDN per computer. Three computers, $616 (tax incl.).

If you’re upgrading to Ultimate, you’re spending $300 per computer. Ouch! Some people have more money than sense.

R


On 1/29/07 1:46 PM, "Ajith Shanmuganathan" wrote:

Many of Vista's DRM technologies exist not because Microsoft wanted them there, they were developed at the behest of high-powered intellectual property owners.

I have no problem with WGA, if you don't authenticate the software it'll go into safe mode. If you have to re-install the software, your old key should work.

In general Vista is a big improvement over XP. I installed Vista Ultimate x64 in less than 1/2 an hour and it detected all my hardware flawlessly. My 3 year old Lexmark printer is the only thing that is waiting for drivers. The Aero interface is clean and efficient, the font is much easier to read than in XP. The rotating blue/green busy-cursor is really cool. I like the predefined gadgets for the weather, time, and RSS feed on the desktop.

Security is much better, it is now possible to run all the time in non-admin mode and just sudo into admin mode to do maintenance. The filesystem seems more locked down and IE seems more secure as well.

32 bit apps run fine, and I haven't seen any issues with compatibility.

Performance is much better than XP. Programs load almost instantaneously and feel far more responsive than XP. The base O/S uses about 600M of RAM, but upgrading 1G of RAM costs about $120.

File & program navigation and searching is a bit clunky. I like the adaptive menus, but it is not initially obvious how to add menu items. The program menu expands down and not sideways, which I don't like.

I plan on upgrading my other computers to Vista in the next little while. I find it difficult to use XP on my laptop, now.

- Ajith

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