| NEWS: Microsoft Windows Vista
The new OS (operating system) from Microsoft, Vista, is available. There are several new features built into Vista which may entice you to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista and many pitfalls that you will encounter if you decide to do this so here is a brief explanation of the Vista versions available and the system requirements for running Windows Vista. There are actually 8 versions of Windows Vista, STARTER, HOME N, HOME, HOME PREMIUM (or Media Center Edition), TABLET, BUSINESS (or Professional Edition), BUSINESS N and ULTIMATE. Enterprise and Starter are not available for home users. Enterprise is for large volume installations and Starter is for third world availability (not sold in US). The N versions are for European Union and also not available in the US. The Tablet version is for Tablet PC's, So that trims your choices down to these 4;
The system requirements for Vista are quite a bit beyond that of XP. If you are thinking of upgrading your XP system to Vista you should probably think hard about that. Doing an OS upgrade will almost always cause problems of one sort or another, especially if your XP system doesn't run right. Make sure your system is clean of viruses, spyware and adware and does not give you any problems during normal use. Many old programs will not be compatible with Vista. Research the critical software you use to insure compatibility. Many old hardware drivers will not work with Vista. Research your hardware drivers. Many old Printers will not be compatible. Most older systems will not meet the system requirements of Vista, RAM, Video subsystem and Audio subsystems may need to be upgraded. Jump over to Microsoft.com and run their Upgrade Advisor. It will show you some of the problems you may encounter if you do an upgrade. Microsoft lists the basic system requirements to run Vista as: 800MHz processor, 512 MB RAM, 15GB of free hard disk space. While we suspect that will run Vista it may take 15-20 minutes for your sysem to boot up. Our advice is:
Our basic advice is this; if you want Vista and your system is clean, works well, meets our system requirements and is less than a year old ... Go For It. If it isn't, don't bother, you'll just be buying yourself a bag of worms, consider a new system. Our Jupiter and Apollo systems run Vista quite well in their basic configuration, gamers will want to consider at least a video card upgrade. VISTA HOME BASIC
VISTA HOME PREMIUM
VISTA BUSINESS
VISTA ULTIMATE
Jump over to Microsoft.com to see an easy to view comparison chart and get the full details about Windows Vista. Windows Vista is new and slick, it takes a powerful system to make full use of many of the new features. The Aero 3D interface for instance requires a nice video card with plenty of video RAM, Bit Locker requires TPM 1.2 hardware and a USB Disk. Windows XP will be the dominate OS for at least the next year or two. It won't be going away or become obsolete for a few years. Business' will probably not upgrade to Vista until it has seen some user runtime and experience, and most will wait until at least Service Pack 1 is released, this may be a while since Microsoft is claiming they won't release a service pack like they did with XP, and simply do incremental updates and patches. If your current system works fine, don't mess with it. If you are considering a new system get a good one with Vista Home Premium or Vista Business. If you are a power user or Gamer get a new system with Vista Ultimate and a nice video card. Stop by and have a look at this CS&T Custom Made, Home Entertainment and Gaming System. It's not your typical system. This system was built in December, 2006 anticipating the release of Vista. We didn't want to wait for Vista so we put XP Pro on it and planned to re-format and do a clean Vista install upon release. By the time Vista arrived we had so much music and games installed that we decided to try the upgrade. All data was backed up in anticipation of failure. Prior to Vista upgrade installation we ran the free upgrade advisor which indicated several problem items including Norton Internet Security and the video drivers. A free update to 2007 Norton Internet Security was available from Symantec, downloaded and installed. NIS was then disabled and the Vista upgrade from CD started. The Vista upgrade took slightly less than 2 hours (expect 3-6 hours on a typical system). Following the upgrade, there was no sound at all and the video system crashed the computer (BSOD) during normal shutdown. Sound, video, remote control drivers and software were updated, 4 programs were incompatible (but worked) and were updated, 1 was incompatible and was uninstalled (though there was an update available), another was incompatible and could not be uninstalled, we also did a system BIOS update. Total time to complete, about 10 hours. The end result was a very fast, very stable system running Vista Ultimate, Most games we've tried so far work great (Quake 4, Sims, Supreme Commander, Splinter Cell, Oblivion), some older games did not. Media Center, controlled by the IMon Remote, has become the choice of Entertainment System control as it runs the TV Tuner (yes, the TV Cable plugs into the PC), can pause, rewind and record live TV, maintains the music and video collection in a slick and efficient manner. Overall, the upgrade went very well. This system has a performace score of 5.5 using the builtin Vista experience score. As of the initial release of Vista the highest score obtainable was 5.0, this shows you how fast things move in the computer industry. This is what you really, really want. Aproximate price $5000.
|
© 2005 CS&T Inc.
www.hamsfork.net
cst@hamsfork.net
(307) 877-6612