Windows Vista RTM
Windows Vista (previously codenamed Longhorn) has been released to manufacturing. It will be made available to business customers by the end of the month and to personal users by the end of January 2007.
I assume that the version available from the end of January 2007 will be patched upto date with any patches released between now and then. If that’s not the case then why not just release it to the public now?
One feature of Vista is that during installation it checks for updates meaning that if you’re connected to the Internet you should have a fully up to date system upon installation.
Don’t expect a review just yet from me, I tried the Vista betas on my Windows PC and it was too slow that I reverted to XP. I am not holding that as a criticism to Microsoft, I didn’t spec the machine with the intention of running Vista on it (as I got it a year ago), I’d need to test it fairly on a more recent machine. Currently my Mac is a PPC based (pre-Intel) iBook, when I bought it I intended it to be secondary to my PC but I use it most of the time these days.
I’m hoping my next machine will be either a Mac Pro or MacBook Pro. Currently my OS of choice is Mac OS X but I need to run Windows occaisionally, the new intel macs will allow me to run both as necessary and if Vista turns out to be my OS of choice in the future then it means I can still keep running it on my mac.
I advise if you’re going to buy a PC for running Windows that you wait until Vista is available pre-installed, this means that even if you plan to buy from someone like Dell online you can still pop down to your local computer shop and try out Vista on a similar spec machine. Although if you’re really in a hurry then make sure that the retailer is offering a free or subsidised Vista upgrade if you buy now. Many places are.
IE7 in Windows Vista fits in with the Vista look and feel that most of the other built in apps share, so IE fits in well on the Vista environment. I never played around with it too much as my machine was under spec which made things frustrating. I expect for many Vista is a release that people are either going to love or totally despise. Once I upgrade to more capable hardware then I look forward to putting it through its paces.
Of course, a new version of Windows is a good time to consider the other options, as well as OS X, Linux is getting more user friendly and most distributions have substantially lower hardware requirements than Vista (although some have higher hardware requirements than XP).
Saying ‘Linux’ in general is hard as there’s a lot of different distributions aimed at different user bases. Some, like Ubuntu, aim to be easy to use. Others aim for other areas like the server market, low spec machines, customisability, different desktop environments, etc. I do think Ubuntu is probably the best currently for a beginner, but use Google and experiment, there’s so much choice - which can be both an advantage or disadvantage, good when you know where to look but bad when you’re starting out.
I hope from Microsoft that 2007 will result in rapid improvements in IE and the gap between OS releases is reduced. We’re in a very competitive landscape at the moment and Microsoft is rising to the challenge lets hope 2007 becomes a very interesting year.