Windows Vista: All I need is…

With all the hoohah going on about Vista RC1, I thought that this gravity-inducing post was rather good.

	Windows XP (2001)	Windows Vista (2007)
CPU	233 MHz	800 MHz (1 GHz recommended)
RAM	64 MB (128 MB recommended)	512 MB (1 GB recommended)
Video	Super VGA (800 x 600) display	DirectX9 video card (128 MB video RAM recommended)
HDD	1.5 GB	15 GB

Vista requires 10x the drive space, 8x the memory, and 4x the CPU power. It also substantially raises the bar for video; most integrated video solutions are no longer acceptable. The increase in minimum spec is not unreasonable, considering it’s been 6 long years since the last release of a mainstream desktop operating from Microsoft.

Since I havn’t had the chance to download RC1 due to a non-existant broadband connection, I’ll jusrt go by Beta 2 that I’m using.

Running only Media Player, nothing else, Vista uses nearly 650MB of RAM. Thats still 200Mb more that XP with all the bells and whistles running in the background (i.e.Nortons, Getright, etc). I can’t even, and this is ridiculous, play a DVD becuase most of my RAM is taken up.

I actually like Vista. Its great. Totally rebuilt. Now i thought, and correct me if I’m mistaken, that rebuilding the OS was supposed to strip out all the ancient, slow code and replace it with somthing rather more efficient. Sure, there is alot of extras in Vista that makes it impossible to to a straight comparison.

The simple fact is that the more demands placed on a pc the narrower the market becomes ( in the sense that it alienates pople who are unwilling or cannot replace or upgrade a pc to the new standards). I have a 1996 era pc running at home that requires a rebuild. What do a I do? Wait for Vista? Or go ahead and reinstall Windows and only to have it crash quickely and loudly? Can’t Microsoft release somthing lightweight to run on pre-XP pc’s? We don’t need all the bells and whistles somtimes.  All I need is a computer to share the harddrive space to the rest of the network.

Maybe Google can take up the slack?