Educated OS Purchasing

[Imeriel]

I'm going to leave aside, or try to, my own biases towards Microsoft's newest OS offering.  This post/article is more of a quick n dirty collation of facts to help educate before money is spent on something that may or may not be needed.  Vista is intended to be a technology-based release, which means that it is intended to be a base of Things to Come.  While software developers will see many changes to how the system and backend coding functions,  end-users will only see what appear to be evolutionary changes in the user interface.

What's New
Completely revamped graphical interface complete with docking sidebar to put shortcuts and programs for easy access.  For MacOSX users, the look and functionality looks really familiar.

Increased and Faster Search Capability

New Fonts

Built In Hard Drive Partition Management Software

Embedded Programs
Microsoft Media Center, Media Player, Mail, Calendar, Picture Gallery, DVD Maker ... and more ... programs which previously were available as seperate addons are now embedded into the OS.  In a nutshell, Microsoft gathered info on the most popular types of programs resident on people's computers.  They then wrote a Microsoft branded version and embedded it into the OS.  Will these embedded programs work better or the same as their non-Microsoft counterparts?  Remains to be seen, but the handiness of having it all there out of the box is recognized.

DirectX 10 capability
Now, for the last part, Microsoft has declared that it is coding DX 10 so that it works on Vista ... and Vista only.  What this means is:  If a game or application only supports DX10, you ~must~ have Vista to run it.  No ifs/buts about it.  Further, DX 10 has very specific hardware requirements.  A given graphics card must be DX10 capable.  Currently, there is only one on the market now, and that is the Nvidia 8800 GTX/S series.  To complicate matters, said DX10 capable cards are fairly harsh with power consumption, requiring two seperate PCI-E power connections to the motherboard, and a minimum of 750W power supply. 

Other Tidbits

Vista will generally use around 1G of Ram to operate the OS out of the box.  Tuning, tweaking, and refining some things will lessen this, but requires some know how.

Vista requires that you keep 15G hard drive space (continuous on one drive) available and free at all times

Vista requires you have a DVD-ROM / DVD-RW on your system

Vista Capable does not equal Vista-Premium-Ready.  Only Vista Premium Ready machines will be able to use the shnazzy new graphical interface, capable-only folks using the same old one they knew previously from XP.  Many machines are being shipped now with Vista installed ... be careful which version.  Only Vista Premium has the new graphics and interface.  Vista Starter and Vista Home Basic are the stripped down and throttled versions, with no DX 10 or other such graphical benefits

Windows XP / 2000 will have continued support from Microsoft until 2014, with the replacement for Vista expected to be released around 2009.

So there ya are.  I won't go near the debates of the new embedded digital and media protections.

[Lyrima]

omg, Ime. I love you.

Thank you.

Will you give your thoughts on dual video cards vs. that 8800 nVidia of 768 memory vs single 512 video card?

Essentially, I expect to be buying another computer in 2 years...maybe longer if I stay in VG longer.  I want a computer that will do all my home stuff and let me run VG.  I don't know how to say I'd like to see VG.  Do I want it balanced with high FPS? Do I want to run it on highest? I don't know.  I'm pretty easy going about that stuff.

I can't afford much more than the specs for VG, essentially.

[Alwynn]

cool.. thanks! I'll go buy it tonight!

[DeeCaudill]

Go Ubuntu!