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!