Tuesday, January 30, 2007

It's Here!



Six or seven years after inception, Microsoft's next-generation operating system Vista, aka Longhorn, finally arrived today. It offers the most secure operating system Microsoft has ever produced, copies all the recent innovations in the Macintosh's OS-X, and adds some new innovations such as the 3-dimensional windows shown.



Here's the story of one Mac user who switched to Vista, perhaps because Vista runs faster on a Mac than does OS-X?

The eye candy is fun, but the vast majority of work which has gone into Vista is to make it secure. That security is worth the price of admission. Beware, though, that it's a memory hog and you should probably have 2 gigs of memory on any system running Vista.


Lost in the noise, but probably more important in the long run, is the new Office 2007. I've personally been using it for six months and can confidently assert that, using .NET technology, it is far safer and stabler than any previous version of Office. Although many of the features in Vista were first found in OS-X, Office 2007 includes features which are truly revolutionary. And these new tools are useful. Office 2007 is a significant step forward as a productivity tool, as internal studies have found that any feature anywhere in the system can now be located in 10 seconds or less by unsophisticated users. Gone are the days when there were all sorts of things you could do in practice but didn't know about.

7 comments:

buddy larsen said...

MHA, good post--I think I'm getting excited about it--well, not carnally excited, but, y'know.

richard mcenroe said...

And we needed 3-d windows why?

chuck said...

And we needed 3-d windows why?

Who knows? It does seem 3d rendering makes some effects possible beyond spinning cubes and window stacks, although I've run a 3d desktop on Linux and didn't see anything to get excited about. But maybe someone more creative than I with such things will think up something neat. And like big LCD monitors, it might end up being one of those things that you never again want to do without.

Syl said...

Beware, though, that it's a memory hog and you should probably have 2 gigs of memory on any system running Vista.

This is of deep concern to me.

It's always been so. What Microsoft thinks people need memory for has never been what *I* need memory for.

I don't use Office. I don't do word processing. Nor spreadsheets.

I need 2 gigs RIGHT NOW, under XP, to do what *I* do on my PC. Believe me, it's a terrible terrible struggle and slows me down considerably that I only have 512.

I am NOT looking forward to Vista.

If I had 2 gigs on my machine RIGHT NOW. under XP, I'd be happy I was using the minimum necessary to do what I do.

I'm not looking forward to Vista. I need a new machine desparately but have no means of getting one. So I guess, honestly, I don't have to worry about Vista since I'm stuck where I am 'til my machine dies and no longer use a pc at all.

And the memory requirements for Vista mean that I would need 4 gigs which ups the cost of a new machine considerably.

This is depressing.

:(

gumshoe said...

syl -

have you checked?

RAM prices aren't all that bad.

especially if it's brining in
income for you.

Syl said...

gumshoe

Unfortunatelly my machine uses RDRAM not SDRAM :( RDRAM is now sold by only one company and is prohibitively expensive.

With my ram configuration, for what it would cost to go to 2 GIGs I could almost purchase a new machine.

Syl said...

My total income for the month of January is $100 even. And that was for something I did in 2003. LOL