Wait for a year and a half before upgrading to Vista
… says MacUser, inaccurately quoting the BBC’s business editor, Tim Weber. He clearly says “Wait for half a year until the driver issues are settled and then buy a new PC.”
In my opinion this is good advice for the average user. Irrespective of the pros and cons of Windows Vista, the average user would do well to sit out the teething troubles that any major OS upgrade is liable to have.
Weber’s advice isn’t for people like me. If I had a PC I’d be trying Vista out by now and I’m not shy of taking a screwdriver to my computer if needs be. It does make me wonder though – upgradeability is considered a selling point of a computer, but is it really such a big deal? Decent PCs are cheap these days.
My iMac’s graphics, processor or motherboard can’t be upgraded. However, it is capable, small, quiet and beautifully designed – which is what a modern computer ought to be.
I wonder how may people actually do go to the expense and hassle of upgrading a machine. Don’t most people just buy a new one?
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March 2nd, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Yeah you’d think and I had much the same thoughts about diving in there….
I nuked my laptop and guess what OS it has on it….
XP.
Vista failed to get decent drivers for much of the hardware, but most frustrating of all was the LCD screen, which it would only let me set as either 800×600 or the default of 1024×768 with the bottom half of my damned screen missing.
Needless to say it didn’t last the evening before it was nuked again.
I’ve seen it running fine out of the box on other laptops and while it is nice, I’m much more a ‘it should just work’ person.
March 3rd, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Exactly. When I think about the idea of assembling some beige box that may-or-may-not work, I think about how friends did that at university.
That’s 1997, not 2007.
I’d like a new machine now that my iMac is getting on for four years old. I’m sure it’s good for at least another four on my sister’s desk, but not mine.
I’m in no rush though because the computer I want doesn’t exist yet.
I want a next-revision MacBook with a generous portion of RAM and disk space, Mac OS X Leopard and Windows Vista.
A feisty little dedicated graphics chipset would be nice, but that might be too much to hope for. Not that I’m too bothered - I want graphics punch for Photoshop and Flash, not games.
There isn’t anything for the PC (eg: Bioshock) that I wouldn’t prefer to play on an Xbox 360 anyway.
March 5th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
Exactly. When I think about the idea of assembling some beige box that may-or-may-not work, I think about how friends did that at university
but you face that no matter what you throw on… Apple are in a unique position controlling what goes in there, so no surprise OS X works. I’ve been thinking heavily about swapping from MS to Ubuntu or even BSD and I may well try a dual-boot. The only thing holding me back is finding good open source alternatives to things like Photoshop and Dreamweaver. I’m used to having a nice powerful toolkit on Windows and I’m reluctant to give it up to play around with the baby toys.
March 5th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
If there was a good open source alternative to Photoshop, we’d have heard about it.
The Linux crowd that hold GIMP up as such are kidding themselves.