What’s wrong with the Vista marketing push…?

Posted by stuart as Search Engine Optimisation

So Microsoft has launched a new operating system, whilst nothig like the media blitz we were hit with on the launch of Windows 95 (man, was that 12 years ago?) we’ve been hit pretty hard here in Australia.

Two things about the launch have really pissed me off:

1. A lot of computer shops are advertising in big bold fonts that you can pick up your copy of Vista for $129*. upon looking on the back page of the catalogue, we find that to get the $129 deal, you need to be upgrading from XP, and it’s an academic version. If I actually wanted to walk in off the street and buy a boxed copy of Vista, I’m looking at closer to $500! The version I’m getting at this price is also only the “Home Basic” version, which doesn’t have a lot of the “cooler” functions of Vista such as the Aero interface (which looks suspiciously like the Mac OSX 10.2.8 I have running on my eight year old G3 laptop 333MHz with 256Mb RAM - try running Vista on those specs!)
2. A lot of people are going to be sorely disappointed when they get their shiny new copy of Vista home, and discover it barely runs, or won’t run at all on their hardware. Microsoft says that you can run Vista on an 800MHz processor with 512 Mb of RAM. Gimme a break. My newish lappy has a 1.7GHz processor and 512Mb of RAM, and runs XP Home like a dog. It has a shiny sticker on it informing me that it is “Windows Vista Capable” - I call Bullshit.

This all reminds me of the saying:

A PC without Microsoft products is like a dog without a brick tied to its head

Has anybody out there actually tried Vista? Are those of us refusing to upgrade missing out on anything?