Vista : Worth the Upgrade?

Vista on Approach

If you do any form of graphics, animation or video, you know how precious your memory and graphics resources are. You've probably optimized your WinXP Pro system(s) to maximize your resources to deal with hungry applications you need to run in concert to get most any job done.

Now we have Vista coming right around the corner. It goes on sale next week on January 30 (2007). An OS that is some 5 years behind schedule. I'm not going to go into the delays or even features of Vista but more into its practical memory requirements.

As I write this I have 35 processes running and a total of 313MBs of 2 Gigabytes of memory in use. 35 processes is allot but with a Avast (virus protection),Creative X-Fi Platinum and an nVidia graphics card utilities running and two Firefox windows. These add up. I'll stop and pause right here to let it be known I am no MS basher. I have been a supporter of MS since the DOS 3.0 days. The company has definitely made operational and competitive mistakes over the years.

With Vista I feel that MS is headed to a new low point in the companies history. Vista for me as a media developer is looking like the Windows ME in the new OS age. All looks and little functionality appear to be the cornerstone of Vista. Remember the 313MBs I mentioned earlier. Well going from the varied reports of various tech and blog sites, Vista will consume around 600 MBs or more on its own sitting idle. Thats before installation of any hardware utilities or applications.

I run the Adobe Creative Suite version 2 on two Core Duos with 2 MB ram and can tell you that Photoshop CS2 is not the smoothest/fastest version of Photoshop Adobe has ever made. Running Photoshop and Image Ready can easily take my systems up to 1.6 GB of my 2 GB limit before cutting to my scratch drives for assistance. Doing simple math the 600 MB needed to run Vista would hurdle my 2 GB ram usage with the first few high resolution images I loaded.

Looking Back

Before I jumped my systems to Windows XP Pro I was suspect of the gloss that XP held over Win2K. It also looked like a glamor version of Win2K without the merit or substance. Of course when I switched over I ran into the various operating quirks that were slowly ironed out in the subsequent SP1 and SP2 updates. Now Windows XP Pro is a solid OS. I have never seen a "Blue Screen of Death" in 5 years. This is across a wide variety of systems.

I do have a free copy of Windows Vista for Business headed my way. Courtesy of buying a recent copy of XP Pro from Newegg.com. When I get the copy I plan on sitting on it. I can wait for SP1 and maybe even SP2 before installing it. For now XP Pro offers enough of what I need and the stability to handle my newest bloated applications.