I’ve been running Windows XP 64-bit since February as my main OS, and have had no major complaints. I’ve had a few minor ones, such as the latest iTunes refusing to install (curse you, Apple!), but I can deal with using a slightly older version to listen to my stuff for now.
Being a curious person, I installed the public release of Windows Vista beta2. In a nutshell: Unless you write Windows drivers for a living, don’t bother with it quite yet. Wait for RC1 come September/October timeframe.
A couple of the things that didn’t work so well with the public release of Windows Vista beta2 were:
- Very patchy driver support. My Audigy 2ZS sound card, for example, does not have a driver yet
- DHCP didn’t work, I had to set an IP address manually
- Several 32-bit programs would crash with unhelpful error messages
- Installation quirks such as using QWERTY during installation even if you specify Dvorak. It’s fine after installation.
- Slow performance across the board
There’s an updated beta2 build available to MSDN subscribers, released this July 17th, so if you can get your hands on that, it may well be worth-while exploring, from the feedback on the non-public beta2 that I can see floating around out there. It’s supposedly much faster and much more functional.
So, early-beta-woes aside, why would I even consider Vista at such an early stage? Why should you?
For me, it’s because I’m an eye-candy whore. And DirectX 10 – the next installment in Microsoft’s graphics library that drives eye-candy in games – will be exclusively a Vista feature. It won’t be backported to WinXP. Despite the obvious business reasons for such a move, there actually appear to be decent technical reasons behind it, too.
So, when Crysis comes out, and when EVE receives its next facelift, they’ll benefit from DirectX 10.
Of course, to use DirectX 10, you need a DirectX 10 capable graphics card. Those are expected later this year, hopefully – there’s nothing ready yet. Which brings me to the likely setup you’ll want for Vista, hardware-wise. It’s not for the faint of heart. 
CPU
Gaming PC / graphics editing: Something dual-core from AMD or Intel
Business: Reasonably fast “recent” CPU from AMD or Intel, anything 2 GHz (or 2000+) and up should do
Memory
This is the tough one. Not quite sure yet. I do know that Vista takes 600-700MB out of the box, as opposed to 300-400MB that XP takes.
Gaming PC / graphics editing: No less than 2GB. Likely, 2GB will be the “okay yeah it runs okay” point, and 4GB will be the “now we’re talking” point. With XP, that’s currently 1GB and 2GB, respectively.
Business: I’d say 1GB, and that’ll run, but if you work with Visio, Word, Excel, Outlook, and maybe a few more all at the same time, spring for 2GB.
Graphics
Gaming PC / graphics editing: DirectX 10 part from AMD/ATI or NVidia. Note these haven’t been released yet. If you don’t have a DirectX 10 card, there’s really little point in moving to Vista, other than for the “woo I’m on that thar cutting edge, sorta-kinda-not-really” factor
Business: DirectX 9 part if you want the Aero look, and DirectX 8 if you don’t. Aero will switch off if your card can’t do DX9. For some, that’s a good thing .
Closer towards the release of Vista – and supporting games – in Feb/March next year, I’ll look at choices then and their respective pricepoints. It may well be I can stay with my venerable NForce-4 board, and just add an extra 2GB of RAM, swap out the graphics card, and maybe swap out the CPU for a dual-core model.
Or it may be that I’ll find it’d be cheaper to replace the whole lot – board, memory, CPU, graphics card – and eBay my old stuff. I’ll see then, and I’ll share the results.
Posted by yorickdowne 