Windows Vista should be available as Microsoft’s new operating system by Christmas, 2006. The development name at Microsoft has been Longhorn (or Longwait, as it’s affectionately called). What does this mean for a user? Should you wait on buying a computer or buy now? If buying now, what should be in the specs?
First, let’s define an operating system. Basically, an operating system is the supervisor or manager of the computer. It has control of all the resources of the computer. If a program wants memory, it tells the operating system and the OS reserves it for the program. Every key click, every request for a monitor display, and every print request goes to the OS first and is then prioritized and permitted under the security of the OS. To do that, the OS must be in memory all the time with your program and the processor must be fast enough to handle the request along with other work it is doing. The computer should never crash, as it is always under the control of the OS.
All those Windows versions through Windows 98 (Extended and Millennium included) were not operating systems. Memory was too expensive and processors too slow to support this. The fact that Microsoft called them that did not make them that. Windows NT was Microsoft’s first attempt at a real operating system. Windows 2000 was next. Windows XP was the first Microsoft operating system that was really designed for the desktop.
Now my Windows 2000 has to be rebooted once a day. I have antivirus, software and hardware firewalls, anti-spyware, SystemWorks - you name it - they are all on there. And it isn’t just me. I have two clients with systems a few years old with the same problem. The solution is to reformat the disk and reload everything. Then everything works for about two years. It could be hardware, Windows eating itself, or undetectable malware, but the problem is there. These two clients are solving the problem by purchasing new systems.
I would never use any version of Windows at the present time as a server to host web sites. Too unreliable. Microsoft knows this. The better web site servers use something like Linux. The hosting we sell uses Linux. Microsoft sees this as very serious competition. For this reason, the major changes you will see in Vista are not that visible. They are below sea level (pardon the pun). They have to do with security. Many promised features for Vista are delayed on purpose so that Microsoft can release what they hope to be their most secure system ever. Whatever that means. If you upgrade to this, you are (at least theoretically) buying security. You will at least have much better security. There is no way to have perfect security.
One feature that will be there - the new 3D interface - is really great. If you want that and are buying a computer now, you will need a 3D graphics accelerator that supports DirectX9 with AGP 8X or PCI Express 8X and at least 64MB of RAM. Otherwise, Vista will revert back to a legacy mode that is called Classic and look like traditional Windows.
Other questions on Vista are still unanswered. Is it really secure? Will it work with all my existing programs (don’t plan it working with a lot of utilities that interface directly with the disk)? Will it work with my existing hardware if I upgrade the video? At the present time, only the first beta is out for testing.
More later….
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P.S. - As to my problem with Windows 2000, a friend gave me an interesting possibility. Maybe he was kidding, but it is a good laugh. The problem was there in the IBM mainframes of the seventies. As the disk spins, he told me, centrifugal forces will force the magnetic particles on the disk outward, eventually causing some alignment problems with the head. When you reformat the disk to rebuild the system, you are defining the tracks and sectors on the disk again relative to the head position. Whatever. My response is that the OS should be able to detect any deterioration in the disk performance and let me know if something is beginning to happen. The OS should never release control of the hardware unless there is a massive hardware failure. On my Dell system, a hidden program in the BIOS chip can test the hard disk if the diagnostic disk fails to start.