To Vista, or not to Vista

ANYONE SHOPPING for a new computer in the next six to twelve months is going to have one big headache facing them. (Except for the Mac people, who are happy to buy Macs regardless what is going on in the world).

For the "rest of us" - the 90 percent of us that buy PC-based hardware (Well, I could say that's all of us, since the Mac people are buying simplified PCs with better looking cases and a different operating system, but the Mac people would argue not), there are tough choices ahead.

If you want to stay on the leading/bleeding edge, Windows Vista will allegedly/supposedly be available in January 2007 and might show up installed on "Windows Vista" optimized configurations around that time or shortly thereafter. If you go this path, you'll likely end up paying for a pretty hot box that may be able to do something patently useful with dual-core and/or quad-core processors that will be shipping on the latest and greatest high-end boxes that manufacturers can put together if you also shell out extra for the Business, Enterprise or Ultimate versions of Vista - Vista Home Basic or Home Premium will only recognize one core, according to what I've seen.

According to a number of blogophiles, you don't need hot hardware to run the lower-end versions of Vista, but if you're saying that, why do you need Vista at all? Why can't you just stick with Windows XP? A lot of people will likely be tempted to get in on the inevitable shelf-clearing deals with loaded Windows XP Media Center 2005 deals in the holiday and post-holiday season. Exactly how long it's going to take for manufacturers and vendors to clear out stocks of XP Media boxes and switch everything over to the five flavors Vista remains to be seen, but carrying around a lot of versions of Vista in parallel with legacy Windows XP versions (regular, Media Center) strikes me as a major inventory headache.

Should you happen to buy a PC during this holiday shopping season with sufficient horsepower to run Vista, word is Microsoft and its "vendor partners" will be slipping in coupons into the box for a free or reduced-cost upgrade to Vista when it ships in 2007. So, you'll get Vista for free, and get stuck with the couple of hours of installation time necessary to load it and work out any problems that may crop up during the install. What a bargain!

For the security paranoid, there's the rather interesting guessing game of sticking with XP with its known weekly shower of patches schedule or moving to Vista and betting that it's more secure than a patched XP from the get-go. There's a lot of promise about Vista being more tightly locked up, but the only way you're really going to know that is if it's been on the street for a while and creative times have had a chance to take some hard shots at it.

I can't help but think that the Apple people should be dancing around happy right about now. Even after Windows XP boxes are cleared out of the supply chain, ordinary blokes are going to have to choose between two or three versions of Windows Vista Or just look at the one-size-fits all Mac OS choice. Sure, people who buy Macs will also be able to run XP and some flavors of Vista on a dual-boot, but most of the people who end up on a Mac aren't likely to spend a lot of time in dual boot.

Me? I'm going to be sitting on the sidelines as long as possible. My desktop machine is getting a little long in the tooth but a quick & dirty RAM upgrade to tied me over for the next year might be less painful than the multi-threaded choices that are going to be put on the table throughout the end of this year and rolling into the first half of 2007. µ