Vista (Yawn) Launches

Don’t worry, Vista will eventually take over as the operating system for the majority of personal computers, but it may take some time. The Gold Rush this isn’t, mainly because people now realize upgrading to Vista isn’t a good idea. Another service organization reinforces the point I made in my recent Small Business Technology Newsletter after talking to HiWired: the majority of computers can’t run Vista acceptably, and darn few existing PCs can run Vista Premium with the Aero Interface. Softchoice just released results from their own survey, and found that 94 percent of existing PCs can’t run Vista Premium because of the heavy graphics requirements. They believe half of existing PCs can’t run Vista at all because of the heavy processing and memory requirements of the new operating system. Since Microsoft missed the Christmas selling season because of their slow Vista release (major mistake in my book), adoption will be that much slower. Some analysts predict no more than 10 percent of US PCs will run Vista by the end of 2007. I consider that a pretty good guess. Worry not for Microsoft, because some version of Vista will be the only choice on new PCs before long. Vendors will improve their minimum hardware configuration to support middle of the road Vista, which means we’ll all get more hardware for only a little less money. I must give credit to Microsoft for “encouraging” hardware vendors to continually provide more hardware horsepower, often costing less than previous systems with less power. So when you get Vista on a new computer, you’ll be able to handle it. Just don’t rush out and try to upgrade. Jump off that bridge when you have to, not before.