Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Not upgrading to Vista just yet

About five years ago I walked into HMV Oxford Circus and bought the Windows XP upgrade pack. I believe that was the first time I ever purchased and installed a new Operating System during the launch period. I never looked back since. XP, while annoying at times, quickly matured, and for the past six years since I installed, I have yet to format my harddrive and reinstall (I did change harddrive but I didn't clean install the OS, merely cloning the original drive), even when I created new partitions for my Linux stuff.

Anyway the reason I upgraded to XP was because back then I was using Windows 2000 (which was a robust OS, but a pretty 'boring' one) and I wanted something fresher. I just completed building my PC and XP happened to be released during the period. Right now everything on my PC works fine the way it should (software wise at least) - so I see no reason to upgrade to Vista just yet (maybe once SP1 comes out and any clear advantage to PC gaming becomes apparent).

The problem I see in Vista is its requirements, which I see as being all flash and offering no genuine advantage over its 'classic' GUI. There are improvements in the kernel, no doubt about that (such as Widgets - but I can already download Yahoo!'s free Widget software, or DVD Maker - again I already have Nero 7 for that), but do we need a bloody graphic card to waste its resource on the GUI? And even if the Aero GUI is worth it, is it worth the upgrade cost of £150? Unless you go OEM, which I will once the time is right.

So I did not buy Windows Vista, but the hell am I blogging about it then? Well since every other people on this tiny planet is talking about the Vista launch I thought I would chip in my two pence and join the crowd. Keeps my blog updated too.

Note: I should have blogged about this instead: Sega's Yakuza + Takashi Miike = Ryu Ya Gotoku film! With him producing it is unlikely the film will feature Audition style torture, but one can only hope.

Technorati tags:

2 comments:

RichardAM said...

Vista seems to be a lot of processing power wasted merely on trivial display. Saying that though, my switching is pretty much inevitable, but certainly at the moment there's no real need to switch unless you're a fanboy.

Jon Choo said...

The wasted resources bug me. Even on XP with most of the graphical 'effects' turned off I would notice a significant improvement on my PC.

I would eventually get it, but only when I rebuild my PC to take advantage of the OEM license.