Vista will be with us in January. Hurrah. Regardless of what’s in it and what’s been left out, the sooner you get used to working with it, the sooner you can make effective use of it for the next five years before Microsoft bring out the first post-Gates\Allchin version of their OS. And I’m going to go whole hog here and start straight out with the x64 version of Vista.
The latest issue of PC Pro already went through the advantages of this decision. Two of them - signed drivers being required and the windows kernel being protected by the PatchGuard system - are also regarded as problems. Application compatibility with Vista’s Glass\Aero scheme is also a sticking issue. Just ask those of us unfortunate to run early builds of Vista in a VPC and then open an app which didn’t support Aero.
But I think this is exactly the reason why x64 should the way to go. I mean I didn’t hear many Mac users cry out because most of their apps didn’t play well with Mac OS X when it was first released. They just had Mac OS 9 somewhere at hand and waited for the apps to make the way across. Even Quark made it into OS X land eventually. So will apps into Vista x64.
And while we’re waiting, what’s to stop us from actually getting to grips with exactly what Vista comes with out of the box? I know that I don’t know how half of XP works and I want to redress that. The ‘Introducing Vista’ I reviewed in my last post confirms there’s a lot to try out and see if it can make my life easier. And that’s more straightforward to do without me installing all the other bits and bobs that will eventually stake their claim on a piece of my hard drive.
As a developer, I’m waiting for SQL 2005 Service Pack 2 and VS2005 SP1 anyway before they get officially supported on Vista so what’s the rush? As a home user, Office 2007 is already OK on Vista but I wonder if I’ll actually need to install it this time as all I ever actually used was Word, Outlook and OneNote. Potentially redundant anyway as I only ever used about 10% of their functionality anyway?
64 bit virii - also far and few between - which is kinda handy when you realise how much trouble some antivirus firms are in following the realisation that MS really meant it this time when x64 switched PatchGuard on with no exceptions. They’re crying foul play to the moon when an MS clampdown on kernel patching should have happened years ago and in fact did happen 18 months ago when Microsoft finally had the opportunity with Windows x64. (Incidentally, while we can’t have failed to notice how happy Sophos are that their AV software does in fact work fine on x64, surely they aren’t the only ones who haven’t been caught out like Symantec and McAfee?) You can’t see Microsoft ever going back to a non-Patchguard world so now’s the time to make the bold step and see what it’s like. To be honest, if I have to buy Sophos products I will but I full expect the others to catch up.
Games - OK I’m not a gamer, but let’s look at the facts. Vista Aero likes DirectX 10. NVidia\ATI have just started releasing the first DX10 boards. MS is hedging its bets and releasing some games as exclusive to Vista (Halo 3 anyone?) before release to other platforms later on. If the games of today don’t work on x64 it’s not because of the hardware - it’s because they aren’t signed - but the games of 2007 will be signed and will be better anyway with their geometry shading and their even newer bells and whistles.
Oh yes, adopting Vista x64 early is the way to go. A tiny bit of pain up front, six years of pleasure to follow.