Posted on Saturday 28th of October 2006 at 06:06 in Software

Vote: What will you do when Vista lands?

Right it's time for another vote! Vista is around the corner and we're all nervously eying it's copy protection, Media Player 11's Digital Rights Management and the notion that you're limited to X* formats until you need to purchase (* this has been reported as both 1 and 10, so I'm unsure what the true number actually is).

So, what will the release of Vista do to you?
Microsoft are being sneaky and stealthily putting their prices up by having the "Basic" package so basic that no one would buy it out of choice, forcing users onto more pricy packages "out of their own choice", which just isn't good for those of us who don't want to pay hundreds of dollars for an operating system. Don't even think about going illegally just yet either, MS are staying on top of that too - if you have an unregistered version it will apparently terminate your session after 30/60 minutes and remove useful items such as the start-menu until you register... While I'm sure the hackers/crackers will be on top of this situation, I feel MS are going to try to keep up this time around and therefore I advise people to avoid pioneering a pirated copy of Vista until it's "safe" (not that I condone such behaviour in the first place).

As far as I'm concerned there isn't any need to upgrade to Vista yet beyond being bored with XP. DirectX10 isn't out yet and nor are the corresponding games and (having played with RC1 for a while) it offers very little new that hasn't been provided for XP users by third parties. Although I'm sure that Microsoft will claim Vista's desktop search is entirely different to Google Desktop Search. Vista does have excellent indexing and searching utilities and I'm sure it's disk management is a vast improvement too, but it just feels like XP has been attacked with an alpha-transparencies rifle and between the user and the task they're trying to accomplish sits several parental features to hold your hand and question your every action. I don't like my Operating Systems to hold my hand unless I've asked for it.

Vista will no doubt have George Orwell irritated that 1984 was only 23 years wrong

So, Vista is going to cost us more and undoubtedly Microsoft will sneak some nasty Genuine-Advantage-Tool-Alike in there to phone home every few seconds and record exactly what you were doing just so someone somewhere can laugh at your attempts to write an email in outlook. Personally the entire notion of Vista seems too 1984 for my liking - if I pay for something I want it to keep my machine safe and little else, I care very little for this nanny state that is being implemented. So what am I going to do?

I am going to stay on XP for as long as I can and keep Ubuntu in the picture as usual so that I can closely monitor the decline of one and the rise of the other - if such a point approaches that I could move onto Ubuntu (or another distro) with little impact on my life, then I would. For now though, I do have a heavy dependence on my Windows partition but I have very little interest in upgrading to Vista (although I'm sure I'll be singing a very different tune in 12 months because that's the way the world works).

What are you going to do? Please vote by visiting the homepage here.

 

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