A curious thing, this Microsoft Vista. I’ve installed RC1 and, previously, Beta 2 and Pre-RC1… They’re not bad but have their flaws. For example, the fact that, on certain network cards, you can only surf certain websites (as well as issues with other forms of network and Internet access). This occurs with Yukon Gigabit controllers and Broadcom netXtreme 57xx controllers too.
Me, I’m just lucky.
My home machine has a Marvell Yukon controller and my office machine has a Broadcom netXtreme controller. I’ve been informed by Microsoft’s feedback system within Vista that this will be fixed in time for RTM, but it kind of blows my use of the computer during the beta away.
On my home machine, I’m okay. I have an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard which, thankfully, comes with two network controllers. One nice gigabit Maxell port and a rather pleasant nVidia nForce 4 port. The nForce port works perfectly. It doesn’t help me evaluate Vista on my office machine though.
My home machine performs very smoothly with the RC, and it has a rating of 4.2, whatever that means! The graphics are nicely smoothed, compared to other beta releases and the Flip-3D switcher is fast and funky. It’s nice to see the windows continue to operate when they are slapped diagonally by the window management system. I still prefer XGL etc. on Linux over Windows, in terms of graphical coolness but hey, we are talking about Microsoft here. They’re not really well known for innovating anything.
Kind of like Symantec.
Did you know that Symantec has only ever created one product? The rest have been bought or taken over. And I think they create most of the bugs we see out in the wild just to ensure their software continues to be purchased.
Anyway, back to Vista. Microsoft want me to pay $399 if I buy a copy of Vista Ultimate without a previous version. What? I could buy nearly three quarters of a Mac Mini for that price, which includes an OS and a lot of tools. I have three computers at home. To upgrade all three would cost me a fortune. I suppose XP will be nice for another 7 years.
Microsoft have obviously got a screw loose, so I hope that Vista kills their business. They took 5 years to write a new version of an operating system.
Apple has released 5 major version updates in those 5 years. Not only that, in the same time it took Microsoft to write Vista, Apple moved from one olde operating system (Mac OS 9) to a completely new platform (OS X) and took all their customers with them. They even created an Intel version of their OS at the same time as producing one for the Power PC chips from IBM… That’s a true achievement. Linux has had 50 or so major updates and about 8 really advanced improvements in this time.
Oh well. My next desktop will most likely be a Mac as a result. At least then I can run Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux all at the same time using virtualization so all run natively on my 8 processor (16 core) monster!!
G
