WINDOWS VISTA SHIPS
EARLY
Microsoft launched Windows Vista on January 30th
a little ahead of earlier expectations. What we have to expect is still to be
determined as there are more questions than answers at the present time. We
hope to have a new Windows Vista Business Edition based computer within a week
to test and evaluate. From there we should be able to answer some of the
following questions:
Will Vista run Libra and other older programs?
This is a highly debated topic of particular interest to the
many companies that depend on Dos based programs to run various aspects of
their business.
The same questions came up when Windows XP was released and
in spite of the fact that I was told that it wouldn’t run Dos, it turned out to
be quite Dos friendly. In fact about 80 percent of our Libra clients currently
run Libra on Windows XP.
Of equal interest is the fate of older Windows Based
Programs. When Windows 2000 and XP were released, many older Windows programs
no longer worked. Microsoft has a vested interest in pushing customers into
newer versions of their products such as MS-Office. They may take this
opportunity to stop running older versions like Office 97 in the hope that
customers will run out and buy newer versions of the software. While this did
happen in the past other customers decided to standardize on older Operating
Systems to avoid the compatibility complications in the first place.
The last time around this resulted in stalled sales of new
systems for a short time until most of the technical compatibility issues were
resolved.
Will Windows Vista work with Novell Servers?
Many clients still use Novell 3.x File Servers due to their
simplicity and reliability. As Microsoft conquered the server marketplace, more
on brand name than abilities, Novell’s market share fell. Recently, Windows
Server 2003 has begun to gain respect
as a good basic file server. Hence we wonder if they will risk dropping built
in Novell support in hopes of further promoting Microsoft Products.
WINDOWS VISTA OPTIONS
Windows XP originally shipped in two versions: Home &
Professional Edition. Later they added the Media Centre Edition. They have now
increased the options to 4 versions:
Version Upgrade Full
Price
Home Basic $129.99 $259.99
Home Premium $179.99 $299.99
Business $249.99 $379.99
Ultimate $299.99 $499.99
The above prices are to
purchase the software to upgrade an existing computer. In many cases you would
be advised to just buy a new computer with Vista preloaded as upgrade costs are
a little steep.
Home Premium and Ultimate
Edition offer the features of the previous Media Centre Edition.
Home Premium, Business and
Ultimate Editions offer the new ‘Aero’ desktop interface providing you have
enough processing power to drive it.
To run the basic interface you
would still want to have at least 1gb of Ram, 100gb or larger hard drive, a
64mb video card and a DVD player/writer.
To run the Aero interface 2gb
of Ram and a 256mb video card are the recommended configuration.
Business and Ultimate Editions
have advanced hardware failure guards and enhanced connectivity features for
advanced networking.
The Ultimate edition has a
Windows Bit Blocker feature to protect your data in case of theft. It may also
almost eliminate the possibility of retrieving data from a slightly damaged
hard drive so backup carefully before
activating this feature.
We should know a lot more about
this new platform by the end of February and will keep you posted. Until then
it’s a case of Buyer Beware!