I remembered the first time I heard of longhorn, it was at a friend’s place. I remembered him telling me some of the great innovation of the then forth coming MS OS that would be replacing XP, most of the information I got that day were about the visual effect, about the 3D, thumbnail preview of minimized objects; the aero glass .etc I was really crazy about the new OS no “more Window blinds” I thought .well as it turnout the new OS was not called Longhorn..it is Vista and the most hyped feature about it was not the visuals but the security.
There have been tremendous controversies about this new OS. I remembered reading somewhere that it was the OS of the future as no computer hardware company has any hardware that can cope with vista hardware hungry nature. Someone even said you 4GB of Ram would be needed to run vista. While other gave horrific testimonies about how vista almost crippled their system to breaking point. As it turn out many of these speculation ended up to be false.
To start with many hardware makers have systems that can support almost the entire present feature of vista .vista can easily fit into the hardware of the present day laptop or computer. Yes it kind of increased the standard but overall the minimum requirement to run the basic functions of vista on a machine would be 512 RAM, 20GB HARDDRIVE, and A PENTIUM 4 PROCESSOR, with a 64MB of GRAPHIC MEMO. Am sure the requirement is even lower then this but let’s just be on a save side.
They are two types of vista there is the 32Bit and the 64Bit. I would talk more about the 32Bit since that is the one that I have much knowledge about and also the one that is mostly available in the market due to its easy compatibility with exacting computer hardware. Among these two broad types of vista are 4 major Editions of vista which are; Home Basic, Home premium, Business, and, ultimate.
Vista Home Basic: Basic is a the low –end of the vista editions it will provide a way for virtually any PC user to upgrade to Vista, even those people with low-end or integrated video cards. Unlike other editions, Vista Home Basic does not include the Aero Glass user interface, which provides real time translucencies, effects, and animations, windows meeting space, media center; on the plus side however Basic has the lowest hardware requirement. A system with 20 GB hardrive, 512 ram, Celeron or P3.64MB of graphic card should be able to run vista basic.. and it also the cheapest.
Home Premium : Moving up to Home Premium, you gain additional features, such as Aero Glass, Meeting Space, WMP 11 recording and sharing features, HD support in Moviemaker, network-based projector support, PC-to-PC file synchronization, Tablet PC functionality, and Media Center functionality.
Business: On the business side of the Vista product edition lineup, there is a similar upgrade policy in place. Vista Business provides Aero Glass, Meeting Space collaboration; file encryption, PC-to-PC file synchronization, Tablet PC and Sideshow functionality, network-based projector support, remote. desktop, IIS, document scanning and faxing, and domain and Group Policy support. But you can upgrade to Ultimate Edition if you need that version’s unique features.
Ultimate: Vista Ultimate Edition adds remote desktop, the IIS Web server, document scanning and faxing capabilities, domain and Group Policy support, offline folders, TPM-based full hard drive encryption, multiple language support, and a package of additional applications and services called Windows Vista Ultimate Extras which includes up to date software available exclusively available vista ultimate users. one of such software is the dream scene and program that allows you to use any video in WMV format as your desktop background, Window bit locker Drive Encryption which provides full volume encryption and boot integrity checking to ensure that the data on your computer stays confidential, even if your PC is lost, stolen, or decommissioned, run UNIX based programs on window with the subsystem for UNIX based application .etc…
Below is a chat that displays the various features of the different versions of window vista.
System Requirement
The Minimum hardware requirement needed to run an edition of vista other than Home Basic is
Hard drive -40GB (SATA)
Ram-1GB (DDR2)
*Graphic Memory-128MB
P4-2.2Ghz (although Celeron M would just as well do the Job I personally don’t recommend the processor for anybody not even for XP).
CD Drive-DVD/ CD (combo) Writer.
*I currently use Mobile Intel(R) 945GM Express Chipset Family as my Graphic Card other graphic cards like Nvidia and ATI have been known to work with Vista.
I hope my brief Introduction to vista would give you an idea of the Operating System just in case you intend on upgrading you can know have an idea of what Edition of vista would be Appropriate for you .In my Next post I intend on Doing a review of my Vista Home premium, Which is the one I currently use.
