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calendar   Tuesday - January 30, 2007

Geek Stuff

Microsoft is officially launching Windows Vista upon an unsuspecting world today. The official launch site is up and running. There is even a demo page that lets you see the brand new, bright and shiny O/S in operation. Here is the bad news ... the official price list ....

imageimage
Full versions

• Windows Vista Home Basic: $199
• Windows Vista Home Premium: $239
• Windows Vista Business: $299
• Windows Vista Ultimate: $399

Upgrade versions

• Windows Vista Home Basic Upgrade: $99
• Windows Vista Home Premium Upgrade: $159
• Windows Vista Business Upgrade: $199
• Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade: $259

As I told you yesterday, I’ve been running Vista for some months now and I’m here today to offer you a few tips if you want to jump on the latest and greatest from The Borg Empire at Redmond.

Hardware: pitch your old PC in the trash. It won’t run Vista worth a damn. In spite of Microsoft’s recommendations, here is what I think you need: (1) a 2GHz or higher processor, (2) 2GB of RAM, (3) 500GB hard drive, (4) DVD-RW drive, (5) high-end 5.1 channel audio card (Audigy or better) and speakers, (6) SLI-capable PCI Express video card. That last is the most important. And this is what I consider the bare minimum.

I built a machine from scratch to take advantage of all of Vista’s features. Here are the specs: (1) AMD Athlon dual-core 64-bit 4600+ CPU, (2) 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 128-bit RAM (3) 2 Terabytes of SATA-2 hard drives, (4) Sony DRU830A DVD-RW drive, (5) RealTek high definition 7.1 channel audio card with Altec Lansing surround speakers, (6) EVGA GeForce 7950 GX2 PCI Express, video card with 1GB video RAM. The video card is the most expensive component, ringing up a $450 price tag. It works well with the Planar 21” LCD monitor.

Total cost of the above “monster” system: $1390.00. That includes Mini-ATX Shuttle case and 600 watt power supply.

64-bit or 32-bit If you’re going to go, go whole hog. I remember the mid-1990’s when we were all switching over from 16-bit O/S (Windows 3.0) to hybrid 16/32-bit O/S (Windows 95) to full 32-bit O/S (Windows XP). Now the time has come again to raise the bar. I’ve had a 64-bit O/S on my Linux server here for some time. Red Hat Enterprise Server 4.0 64-bit version. Slick and smooth. Works like a champ.

I wish I could say the same for 64-bit Vista. You guessed it - no 64-bit drivers yet. A trickle of drivers from the larger manufacturers has slowly allowed me to get almost everything working in 64-bit Vista that I had working in 32-bit Windows XP. Almost. I’m still waiting on Canon for my scanner and HP for my printers. It will be the end of this year or early next year before all vendors catch up but I wouldn’t waste money on a 32-bit system at this point. It will be obsolete in two years. Trust me.

Anti-Virus: By now you all know Microsoft is pushing their Windows Defender as the AV tool for Vista and they have tried to shut out McAfee, Symantec and others. Lawsuits stopped that but the other vendors are way behind. I found a really good anti-virus tool called Avast! from Alwil software. They have a free “Home Edition” and a relatively inexpensive professional edition ($39.95 annual subscription). It works with both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista and works quite well.

Vista Aero Interface: The coolest thing about Vista is the new Aero display interface. Transparent window frames and 3-D windows is only the start. It just is very pleasing to the eye. The problem is that a lot of older programs use their own color scheme and this blows Aero out. When you start one of these older programs, the screen flashes, goes dark and a warning message pops up to tell you that Aero has been disabled because your old program sucks.

Most vendors are already rushing to fix this incompatibility. The programs work fine but you lose the cool display while they are running. One major Aero killer is java. Any app that uses java will kill Aero - unless you go grab Sun’s just-released Java 6 SE JVM. Remove all older versions, install it and all your programs (including Firefox) work with Aero.

That’s all for now. I’ll have more tips in the weeks and months ahead. If you have any questions about Vista, drop me an e-mail and I’ll post the answer here. Before I leave you with this though, I better tell you that on the day of the official launch Windows Update dropped no less than TWELVE (12) KB (Knowledge Base) patches on my system. I heard the machine churning all last night. I finally had to turn audio off to get some sleep. That bodes ill. You might be best advised to wait until this Fall before even thinking of upgrading. By then SP1 (Service Pack 1) will be out and most of the major bugs will be fixed.

Or you can go buy a Linux or Macintosh box and laugh at your friends fighting Vista ... LOL


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Posted by The Skipper   United States  on 01/30/2007 at 12:02 PM   
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:
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Oh, and here's some kind of visitor flag counter thingy. Hey, all the cool blogs have one, so I should too. The Visitors Online thingy up at the top doesn't count anything, but it looks neat. It had better, since I paid actual money for it.
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