Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Solitaire Never Looked So Good

Vista has come out amid much fanfare after a five year, 10 billion dollar investment. Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to sell this thing, including suggesting that the patriotic thing to do is to buy a copy of Vista. Flag waving? I'm staring into my coffee.

The waste that Vista will generate has gotten a surprising amount of coverage. The main concern is the hardware requirements, which generally exclude older machines, not purchased in the last two years. The Green Party is running an anti-Vista campaign on these grounds, based on the fact that millions of perfectly good computers will be scrapped to run Vista.

Some are more concerned than others -
Peter Lewis wrote up a review of the new product. The review is funny - I don't know if he's being supportive or droll. Take quotes like this:
"[Vista has] some significant headaches but no deal breakers. One big hurdle is that you'll need serious hardware to take advantage of the best features. Only the most expensive versions of Vista - Home Premium and Ultimate - offer the new "breakthrough Vista experience" Microsoft is touting, including the glassy Aero interface and fancier graphics. Older PCs lack the horsepower to run it. If you haven't bought a new PC in the past year or so, you'll probably have to grab your wallet and a screwdriver to upgrade your hardware. That's not including the hundreds of bucks you'll spend for new Vista-enabled versions of your favorite applications."

So buying a new computer to run Vista isn't a deal breaker. And I need a screwdriver. Good to know, good to know. I'll just grab my wallet.

Clearly Microsoft is on the ropes here, with more and more folks suggesting that this will be the final push away from Windows into Linux. And with Dell now offering Vista-free computers, they are losing hardware support. Maybe the best market for this thing is the 13 percent on Americans who have never heard of global warming.


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