Apr 14 2008
Vista vs XP
I’ve seen a lot of headlines about Windows Vista and XP on sites like digg lately. Vista isn’t being purchased by businesses because of drivers, slowness of machines, memory consumption, etc, and some people seem to think that Vista is doomed.
I just don’t see MS giving up on the OS anytime soon. As bloated as Vista may be, I can’t really compare it to Microsoft’s previous OS failure, Millennium Edition (ME). MS has too much money in Vista to abandon it for XP.
I’ve got two PCs at home. Both are Dells; one is running XP and the other is running Vista. There’s no doubt that the Vista machine is faster at some things, but that’s not because of Vista, but because of the good hardware that I’ve got running it. If I had the same hardware specs in the XP machine, the XP machine would be incredible.
All of this brings me to my next PC purchase. I’ve been looking really hard at buying another Dell. This would replace my oldest machine, which has frankly seen better days. For ~$900 after taxes, I can get a very nice little gaming machine. I would have to buy it before the end of June if I wanted it to come with Windows XP unless Microsoft extends its availability, and I don’t see them doing that.
Vista isn’t bad, but it’s that not good either. Not when you consider how much time it took them to make it. With all that money… did they only have one guy working on it, or what? They still had to drop features before releasing it.
The only problem with XP is that they’ll probably try to make games only run on Vista pretty soon.
You think so? That would leave a lot of gamers in the dust if they moved to Vista-exclusive. I don’t see that happening during the next 12 months or so.
Yep, it will depend on the developers, though.
It doesn’t look like Vista-exclusive games have been accepted very well so far, so we’ll see.
I think the biggest threat is the darn Xbox 360 when it comes to games–most developers are now avoiding the PC–Microsoft wants them to develop for their console 😉
True, but I guess my favorite style of game (RTS) will never make it big on a console. Those games really need a mouse and keyboard. I know Halo Wars from ES is a big gamble on the 360, but I have doubts about its control system.
I played a few free demo shooters on the 360 and I could never get used to the controls. I’m a W-A-S-D guy, so I’ll never be able to make the transition to the console for a lot of games. And a lot of those shooters look incredible.