Why I haven't gone to Vista... yet!

I remember the good old days when I bought my first computer. I knew nothing about computers other than the little I had access to at school. It was a Gateway 486DX2-66, to some this makes me a relative nubee in the tech world. It had a VESA slot for the video and EISA slots for the other I/O. It was the fastest computer around and I had no intention of being caught with a lack of resources. I upgraded to 16MB of RAM, the most it would support. I also paid up to get the 500MB SCSI HDD, IDE was only able to do 340MB at the time. It ran the latest software Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.
... then the education began.

I loaded all the software that I had available... pirating? what's that?
Anyway, I went to run the first game I had. What? No sound card, off to the computer store. During this process I learned about jumpers, interrupts and all kinds of things. Best of all was that you could run out of memory if you couldn't keep the first 640kb free, regardless of the amount of RAM installed. So as I learned more and more, I discovered that DOS, or more precisely the 16bit OS, was the cause of my ills. I was in pain, because that's all that was available to run the applications that I had. So I did research and found that there were 32 bit OSes on the horizon. OS/2 was the first. I actually purchased it, but it didn't have drivers for all my hardware and the applications needed a lot of tweaking to work. Not a viable solution from my view.

Then Windows 95 was announced. This was to be the holy grail of OSes. So I put up with Windows 3.1 for the next year and a half until Windows 95 was released. Windows 95 was great, it ran all of my applications, I didn't need to be concerned with the 640k limit (it still existed but handled it by itself pretty well). It was more stable than Windows 3.1 and had a much better user interface. Then the weak points of 95 started to reveal itself. The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), while 4MB of RAM was the stated minimum, 16MB was the realistic minimum. The basic install was several hundred MB. So the OS vs. Resource battle ensued.

Then NT 4 was released. Directed at Business, it was more stable but could not run DOS based games, needed more resources and did not have drivers for all the hardware. Windows 98 came out and was slightly more stable than 95, but not as much as NT.

Then came Windows 2000, this IMO is the true holy grail and a fundamental shift in OSes. It is pure 32 bit based on the Windows NT model, but had drivers for most hardware. Through the growth of 95 and 98, games had gone to the DirectX model making DOS based games obsolete. This OS had been designed from the ground up with Networking and Security in mind. The NTFS made scan disk and disk defrag tasks marginal. The resources needed by now was minimum of 256MB of RAM and a 6GB HDD. This was easily achieved and the battle had slowed. The pain had stopped! I could finally do most of what I wanted without constant tweaking.

I ran Windows 2000 for a long time. Windows XP came out in 2001 and I kept on with 2000. The only difference I saw was it needed a bit more resources. Over time, Microsoft stopped supporting it and additional security was introduced in XP. Some small features were improvements, but the only reason I upgraded to Windows XP was the support. I'm happy with XP and have no need to upgrade again. It's not like the old days where you were waiting for the next release because your system was so unstable or could not do what it really needed to do. There are small incremental feature upgrades, most of which I never use. If Microsoft really wants to make an OS that is compelling, lets look at voice recognitioin and break the bonds of the desk. I'd like to be able to be working on something and without breaking my concentration be able to say "Computer, get me a list of all the restaraunts that serve healthy food and cator to children. Oh and send that list to my GPS." And when I setup my PDA or GPS, I just want to say "Computer, I'm connecting a PDA to my system. Install what is needed for it to work." That would be a benefit worthy of an upgrade. And it should run everything I have now... reliably.

Microsoft again is looking to push everyone into Vista. From a support and revenue standpoint, I understand the push. But what about the cost of the change to businesses? There is installing, finding compatible software, retraining, etc. I do not want to mess with it. I have heard nothing good about it and what little I have been on it was miserable. I was on a system that didn't appear to have an IP Address, so I went to run ipconfig /all to see if it was getting the right dhcp server. Where did the command prompt go? Where is network settings? Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, adds "features" to make it easier for the novice at the expense to all of us who have been using their systems for the last 15 years. In that time, hardware has become more powerful, apps are available on the Internet, games have basically gone to the console and are usually available on multiple platforms and other OSes that were not options now are. Linux and Mac OSX are the 2 next best options. If they are going to hide everything from me, Mac OSX is a good option. I know about as much about that as Vista. Then there is Linux, it's free but I'm not sure about running my apps. Then why not just keep running XP. I don't drive my car to the junk yard when the warranty runs out. The only reason I may switch is to go to the 64bit version, but will that gain me much either? XP 32bit is more compatible and supports 4GB of RAM and 2TB for the HDD.

So if I get to the point where I feel my hand is forced to change, I'll be looking at other OSes before I accept the change to Vista. "Computer, check spelling and publish blog."