Monday, June 26, 2006

Windows Vista - Beta 2



Well, for those of you whom are anxiously awaiting a new upgrade to the Windows XP operating system, your time is coming. Windows Vista, the next version of the Windows operating system, is in limited beta and I've been lucky enough to get a copy of it. The download from Microsoft was short lived as the word spread about this highly anticipated beta release.

I loaded this up on a Dell Latitude C640 laptop (P4 1.8Ghz with 512Mb of RAM) a few weeks ago. The install is lengthy (took maybe an hour using the DVD) but worth it. The Dell laptop didn't have too many issues. I did have to manually insall the network card driver as well as the video driver; once that was done, I was able to get an even newer driver for them through Windows Update.

This laptop is a decent machine for Windows XP but unfortunetly this is not a prime candidate for Vista. Rating a "1" on a built in performance rating application natively built into Windows Vista, It lacks the advanced video card capability to run the Aero feature of Vista. (Aero is a nice GUI that makes Windows more exciting to look at).

Overall, Vista is pretty dang cool. I would say it a cross between Windows XP, Mac OS X and a linux flaor, such as Ubuntu; right up my alley. I am sure that most of use will need to purchase a new machine to fully take advantage of using this OS to its potential, but I think it will be worth it. Vista will be made available to regular consumers in 2007.

No comments:

Post a Comment