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Opinion

Windows Vista doesn't live up to its price 

Jim McCormick
Opinion Columnist

This week saw the release of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. If you missed the paid advertisement on Comedy Central, or Bill Gates' appearance and subsequent disappearance from The Daily Show, or the massive hooplah from the mainstream media, consider yourself lucky. The marketing blitz has been impressive.

However, this isn't to say that you even need the product. After all, the Cougar Byte store in the University Center won't distribute its discount copies until at least April. What's more, it's likely that a good number of Windows programs will not run on the new operating system thanks to some significant changes in the base system.

The compatibility issues are so bad that the South Korean government is absolutely terrified of what will happen should its citizens upgrade en masse before their banks can do the same, as the banking industry there is heavily dependent upon ActiveX controls -- an incredibly unwise move from a security standpoint. Of course, this shouldn't be a problem here, as American banks tend to use secured Web interfaces for online transactions.

What's more, Microsoft is asking too much money for this particular piece of excrement it has put out. To get the full and proper feature set, one must pay more $600.

And once they drop that kind of money, customers don't get much more than what they could with another option -- just a chance that their old programs will still work. If one is willing to play around with Wine (a free download), the odds are about even.

Vista also comes with digital restrictions management software integrated into the operating system. This software will probably disable backing up your DVDs to the hard drive, make it harder to redistribute certain types of documents and prevent you from accessing your data in various ways. Given the fact that this software is integrated into the operating system, it's not hard to conceive of someone writing a bit of malware that uses these restrictions to prevent someone from removing said malware from one's computer. 

Any "new" features available in Vista are also readily available elsewhere. While Vista touts "full content search," this technology has been on every platform for some time in the form of Spotlight on Macs, Beagle on Linux, and Google Desktop Search on Windows. Furthermore, though it sounds useful, that feature is unlikely to change your computing life. Widgets have been on all platforms as well, and even integrated into Mac systems in the form of Dashboard. Several widget engines exist for both Windows and Linux. Once again, Microsoft has reinvented the wheel and proclaimed it as the next big thing.

As for the user interface, most of the impressive parts are Microsoft playing catch-up with the rest of the world. Exposé on the Mac has done the same thing just as well, as have both Beryl and Compiz on Linux. Sure, neither has the exact look that Windows Vista does, but that's mostly because different people make them.

What is a self-respecting and broke computer user to do? Simple: don't upgrade. Keep your Windows XP box, unless you're really that sick of the viruses and spyware, in which case you can probably install Linux and be just as happy with the result. 

McCormick, a computer science post-baccalaureate student, 
can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu