Subject: CCEX Windows Vista Brief:
Upgrading or purchasing new computer running Windows Vista
Capitol Computer Engineers have been testing the final release of Windows Vista since early November when Microsoft release this pre-product to all of their Gold Partners. Now that new PC’s are starting to come pre-installed with this new Operating System and customers are starting to ask about upgrades, we feel we need to share some important information regarding Vista. Vista was released to the retail market on January 30th, 2007. This is the first major Operating System release from Microsoft since Windows XP was released 2002.
Vista has a redesigned desktop that utilizes 3D graphics, new search features, better security, and a number of other features that you can read about in other articles or on Microsoft’s web site. We are more concerned with letting our customer know about hardware requirements and application compatibility. First, for customers that are interested in upgrading to Vista, your computer will need 1 Gigabyte of Memory, 128 MB 3D Video Card, 40 Gigabyte Hard Drive, DVD-ROM and a Pentium 4, according to Microsoft. This setup will allow Vista to run on your computer but not much else. In reality, we have found from our testing that you will need 2 Gigabytes of Memory, a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 or faster, and a 256 MB Video Card. Also note, that many scanners, printers, cameras, handheld devices and other peripherals do not currently work as there are no drivers available.
Application compatibility has been our biggest hurdle so far. A significant number of applications are not Vista compatible. For instance, no Adobe product is currently on the compatibility list. This includes Acrobat, Flash, Photoshop, etc. QuickBooks 2007 is the only version of Quickbooks that will work on Vista. There are no current versions of PeachTree Accounting that run on Vista. Multimedia applications such as DivX and iTunes are not currently Vista compatible. The list of incompatible applications goes on and on.
Customers interested in running Vista that only use Microsoft Office Products and browse the web will probably be happy with Vista, but the vast majority of our customers that run a number of 3rd party and custom applications should not upgrade to Vista until they are sure the applications they rely on have the “Works with Vista” stamp of approval.
All in all, we here at Capitol Computer are excited about a number of the new feature in Windows Vista, but feel it is in everyone’s best interest to make our clients aware of these issues before upgrading to Vista as we are sure this will prevent a lot of head ache in the future.
Alert by:
Jeffrey Pena (Senior Network Engineer)