20 Things You Won't Like About Windows Vista

20 Things You Won't Like About Windows Vista

I happened upon this article whilst glancing through my daily Slashdot update. From what I was able to read so far, I agree 100% with this bloke who wrote the article.

I had the opportunity to play with a Vista beta a couple of months ago, and I was pretty impressed by certain aspects of the new OS, but in the end, I went back to my Linux. One thing, for example, was the new hardware rating system that's integrated into Vista. It's an excellent idea--Windows will rate your system to give you some rating on an arbitrary PC standards scale from 1 to 10. The higher the rating, the better your computer is. Armed with this rating, a PC user can then go to a store to purchase a new piece of software. They can compare their PC's rating with the requirements of the application and be a happy camper when the program actually runs when they get home. Absolutely wonderful concept. The problem is this: my laptop was rated at a 2.0, if I remember correctly. Here are the related specs on my laptop (HP Pavilion dv8000 series):

• Processor: AMD Turion 64 ML-40 (2.20Ghz)
• RAM: 1.1GB DDR PC2700
• Video: ATI Radeon Xpress 200M (128MB dedicated RAM, along with 128MB shared RAM)

Now, to put things into perspective, I have done a few benchmarks with my laptop up against my computer at work. Please note that these benchmarks are very limited in scope and are mostly for my personal satisfaction. My computer at work is a HyperThreaded Pentium 4 at 3.4Ghz with 1GB of RAM. As to the flavor of RAM, I'm not sure what to say, but I'd imagine that it runs at least 400Mhz compared to my 333Mhz. On several occasions, I've booted up both systems simultaneously. They both booted up Windows XP SP2, though my laptop has Home and the one at work has Professional. After logging in and letting everything settle down for a minute or two, I started up the NetBeans IDE in which I spend oh so much of my time. My laptop had the IDE up and ready to use (classpaths scanned and everything) 50 seconds before my work machine was to the same point. And this all happened before I upgraded from 512MB of RAM to 1GB in my laptop. I haven't tested since that upgrade.

So if my laptop, which beats out a HyperThreaded Pentium 4 running at 3.4Ghz with a gig of RAM in certain uncontrolled conditions, is rated as a 2 on the scale, what does that say for my 3-year-old desktop? How would that fare with Vista installed? I'm not really prepared to drop another grand or so on a new computer to meet Microsoft's anticipated hardware requirements once Vista is released, which is one reason I'm glad I love Linux.