Vista is here. After more than five years of development, over 50 million lines of software code, a $6 billion investment and a few headaches, Microsoft’s Windows Vista finally reaches consumers tonight at midnight. The new 2007 Office is also being rolled out.
In the next 3 months, Microsoft expects to sell five times as many copies of Vista compared with the sales of Windows 95 in the same period after its launch.
Happily the introduction has not been packaged as a Hollywood celebrity carnival. But the subdued introduction does not diminish real advances. Vista coverage is available from:
- C/Net
- PC Magazine
- Extreme Tech
- PC World
- Information Week
- InfoWorld
- MacWorld
- ActiveWin
- Windows SuperSite
- Windows IT Pro
- Google News
- Yahoo News
- Yahoo: Full Coverage
PC Magazine put Windows Vista Laptops to the Test:
We also got our hands on three Vista-equipped laptops, namely the HP Pavilion dv9000t, Gateway NX570X, and Dell Inspiron E1705. In addition, we asked each manufacturer to provide a second hard drive with Windows XP, so we could swap out the drives and thus examine performance under each Windows version with our own benchmarks. Overall, we found that Vista is slower on specific tasks like 3D gaming scenarios and scripts from an industry-standard photo editor. The slowdown could be a result of the combination of early code, premature graphics drivers, and, perhaps, the resource intensive, Aero-dynamic GUI.
There are, of course, other tasks where Vista does live up to the hype, such as video-encoding tasks that take advantage of higher-end, dual core CPUs. We even nixed the rumor that Vista’s interface would drain more battery life. So there are performance advantages to look forward to besides just a pretty interface.
We were lucky enough to get laptops that offered graphics solutions from three of the major graphics chipset providers: nVidia, Intel, and AMD/ATI. These are midrange-to-entry-level graphics chipsets, at best. We also downloaded the latest drivers on the PC maker’s site. In a nutshell, nVidia (which had its GeForce Go 7600 graphics card in the dv9000t) and Intel (whose integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950/945 solution can be found in the NX570X) managed to keep 3D performance close with XP, whereas the ATI chipset on the E1705 (Vista) is still in need of another driver update.
Engadget asks, Why should you be left out of those three months of free T-Mobile WiFi just because you don’t kowtow to The Man?
Luckily for you, a simple bit of googling will quickly reveal methods for swapping the user agent on most major browsers, and once you enter the string “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)” you should be all good to go. Then all you’ll need to do is train your browser to http://hotspot.t-mobile.com/vista/ and start browsing those internets. Tell ‘em Engadget sent ya’, they’ll understand.
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