Windows Vista is golden!

After over five years of development, Windows Vista has been declared complete and released to manufacturing. I never thought I’d see this day come. Haha.

It’s nice to see Vista Gold finally happen, but we all should remember to never buy into the first release of anything. If I’m a high level IT decision maker at a business, I would be planning a Vista transition to hit sometime into 2008, as Service Pack 1 — complete with an upgraded kernel — will be on the scene and have the bugs shaken out of it. My experience with the last three or so public test builds was mostly positive but I still think there are very strange behaviors that need fixing. None of the release candidates felt like finished products, at all, and I just don’t see how that bodes well for the final release. I’ll see what the reviews say, though, and anticipate those very soon.

Will I be upgrading in the next year? I’m not sure yet. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve already upgraded at work, and have been using Vista exclusively there for about two months or so. It’s been a positive experience. At home, it’s a trickier story: I’ll probably want to drop a newer Athlon XP onto this machine at the very least, and possibly build a new machine for Vista sometime late next year, as I’m not sure my machine will deliver the performance I want from it. But, that’s just me.

Paul Thurrott has screenshots of each of the Windows Vista versions, for your viewing pleasure.

  • http://www.lifelessempathy.net/ NotMyBest2Day

    I have the fastest Athlon XP produced (3200+) in the rig I just retired. I’ll probably pick up another board for it (Abit NF7-S v.2) since my current one is just…worn out. They aren’t server boards, so it got tired after two solid years of 24/7 running (there was about a week of total downtime in that 2-year span).

    My new rig that I built could handle Vista without flinching, but I won’t run it. Socket F Opteron. Right now just a single processor (dual-core, of course), but I’ll get a second processor (multi-socket board), and in Q3’07, quad-core Socket F Opty’s will be released, so I’ll have the potential of an 8-core 32gb of RAM beast.

    That is a very wise move to wait for SP1 to come out. I’ve had nothing positive to say about Vista nor XP all along, but that’s one thing I know for absolutely sure is to wait for SP1.

  • http://www.lifelessempathy.net/ NotMyBest2Day

    I have the fastest Athlon XP produced (3200+) in the rig I just retired. I’ll probably pick up another board for it (Abit NF7-S v.2) since my current one is just…worn out. They aren’t server boards, so it got tired after two solid years of 24/7 running (there was about a week of total downtime in that 2-year span).

    My new rig that I built could handle Vista without flinching, but I won’t run it. Socket F Opteron. Right now just a single processor (dual-core, of course), but I’ll get a second processor (multi-socket board), and in Q3’07, quad-core Socket F Opty’s will be released, so I’ll have the potential of an 8-core 32gb of RAM beast.

    That is a very wise move to wait for SP1 to come out. I’ve had nothing positive to say about Vista nor XP all along, but that’s one thing I know for absolutely sure is to wait for SP1.

  • http://www.jaredwsmith.com Jared Smith

    I had an NF7-S v2 before it got taken out by a power supply a year ago. A great motherboard, I like it a lot, though I must say this AN7 that I got to replace it is kickass and I think it performs better. Plus, the AN7 has the nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset, which includes a gigabit ethernet adapter onboard, while the NF7-S only has 10/100. Something to think about…

    And a Socket F Opteron? Shit dude, get some more processors and you could run VMWare on that thing. You could run Vista, XP, several flavors of Linux, Win2K, all at the same time ;)

  • http://www.jaredwsmith.com Jared Smith

    I had an NF7-S v2 before it got taken out by a power supply a year ago. A great motherboard, I like it a lot, though I must say this AN7 that I got to replace it is kickass and I think it performs better. Plus, the AN7 has the nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset, which includes a gigabit ethernet adapter onboard, while the NF7-S only has 10/100. Something to think about…

    And a Socket F Opteron? Shit dude, get some more processors and you could run VMWare on that thing. You could run Vista, XP, several flavors of Linux, Win2K, all at the same time ;)

  • http://www.lifelessempathy.net/ NotMyBest2Day

    I’m working on it! Ran out of money and I’m waiting for RMAs for DOA parts to come back. First the mobo was DOA, so I got that replaced and installed and the system won’t POST, so that tells me the CPU is fried/DOA, so that’s in the midst of an RMA as well. Dropped a cool $1100 on this setup. I shall have tons of pictures and benchmarks once I do get it running.

    When I get some more money, I’ll get a matching Opty and more RAM and I won’t have to reinstall anything for that upgrade. Windows just needs to know during the initial installation that you have more than one processor (core), otherwise it’ll never utilize additional ones without a full reinstall. Installing with a single dual-core processor installs the multi-threading components, so you can add more cores on-the-fly.

  • http://www.lifelessempathy.net/ NotMyBest2Day

    I’m working on it! Ran out of money and I’m waiting for RMAs for DOA parts to come back. First the mobo was DOA, so I got that replaced and installed and the system won’t POST, so that tells me the CPU is fried/DOA, so that’s in the midst of an RMA as well. Dropped a cool $1100 on this setup. I shall have tons of pictures and benchmarks once I do get it running.

    When I get some more money, I’ll get a matching Opty and more RAM and I won’t have to reinstall anything for that upgrade. Windows just needs to know during the initial installation that you have more than one processor (core), otherwise it’ll never utilize additional ones without a full reinstall. Installing with a single dual-core processor installs the multi-threading components, so you can add more cores on-the-fly.