It's HOW MUCH?!?!?
 

MS Vista prices leaked
:shocking:

Time to stock up on the Vaseline...

Seems a mite pricey for something you won't actually own.

I can't wait to see how much of my resources this thing hogs, trying to chew my food and wipe my ass for me.

Happy ending?

Damn it Pie! I was saving that chocolate squirrel!

Calm down! Those are Canadian dollars, not real money.

Oh, well I have plenty of leaves and twigs in my backyard. Do you have change for a chunk of tree bark?

I've heard the minimum specs are something like 1GB of RAM and a 128MB vid card...MINIMUM.
Hooray for OS's driving hardware development!

The link doesn't work. 404'ing.

Anyone know/remember what the price range was?

I believe it was "WTF?!" at the low end, to "You filthy, greedy, scumsucking evil sons of a motherless goat from Hell" on the high end...

$239 for home
$259 for upgrade
and $399 for "ultimate"

all prices CDN.

What's the "improvement" anyway? Is it designed to require a patch every five minutes ???

Well, let's see. There's Palladium (next generation security). No, that's been yanked. Then there's WinFS (the new generation file system). No, that's out too. The Monad shell. No, it's gone. EFI? Hmm. That's been pulled.

Ummm. I'm really not sure what's left.

Pretty 3Dish effects on the desktop.

...and a whole bunch of stuff to ensure that you aren't violating anyone's digital media rights, or that, if you do, someone is getting paid for it.

How many people actually go out and buy Windows as opposed to buying a machine with it installed?
I'm thinking they say $349, then sell it to Dell for $49, and Dell touts their PC as being $300 cheaper than it actually is. ;)

I don't know anyone (besides businesses) that have paid for an MS OS in quite a while.

Those specs are if you want to run the pretty Aero interface blah blah blah. You can get by with 512mb of RAM and a somewhat decent processor. (According to our Microsoft Rep at work). My computer is ready because I have quad hampsters, the external handcrank, and my 14 inch monochrome TV hooked up. Oh, and the modem box thingy. :p
But yeah, as far as prices, I haven't heard exactly how much each version is. Good question to ask the rep the next time he comes in.

You have a Microsoft rep? How do you keep from locking him in the supply closet and torturing him?

I got a free copy of XP Professional from AIT a few weeks ago...

Are you on MSDNAA with your school?

Edit: Microsoft Developer's Network Academic Alliance. (It's how I get my free stuff)

One more day, and I can give LJ back the squirrel. Although I've gotten kinda used to it.

No... AIT is the American Institute in Taiwan, which is our embassy that we cant call an embassy.

That thought never crossed my mind! hmmm......maybe score some free copies of Windows or something! haha Nah, he's pretty cool. He's about the only real rep that comes into the store with any information for us.

My 1st reaction: How would you know that?

My 2nd reaction- So the hell what! It's just frikkin' graphics, what I care about is how well it works. If I want cool graphics I'll go buy an Xbox 360.

My 3rd reatcion- How much do you want to bet the graphics are there just to slow it down so much that you'll be needing an (expensive) upgrade within three days?

1: It's in the press.
2: Agreed.
3: See above article.

I wonder if the OEM loophole will still exist, buy a $12 mouse from an online vendor and get Windows for cheap. I'm running Vista RC1 "activated", first legal Windows I've had.

In regards to question 3, I'm using a Nvidia 6800 (base model) AGP and I score a 5.9, asumming out of a 10. I don't feel as if this card will be worth much by the time Vista is released. Vista needs a horrific amount of RAM to run smoothly, 1GB is a joke.

Vista RC1
 

I was running it on my 2.0Ghz Centrino laptop on another hard drive (I swapped out my hard drive for a 40GB spare).

The OS, with the most basic theme set up, took up 512MB RAM.

Everything worked except my Cingular Communication Manager software, which caused my Blackberry to crash. I use it as a tethered modem. It's a no-go for me because of that (Cingular will have to update their software).

After a reboot, it had drivers for everything on my Thinkpad, including the fingerprint reader (!). Again, Lenovo didn't have the Biometric software, so this was another no-go for me.

It also didn't have drivers for my second NIC, the CardBus IBM Etherjet (based off of a Intel 82557 chipset, no problems with any other OS, and well-supported in Linux). This is to be expected, however, as they're not going to have all the drivers done.

Aero Glass looks nice, and Flip3D looks good as well, but I missed the ability to see all windows open at once via Expose on OS X. Twisting the windows around in 3D is a little annoying. Expose is better for me because it allows you to see only the open Window, a clear desktop, or all windows tiled at once.

Java 1.5 runs well in IE7+, and AEP Networks' Netilla (a platform built upon Sun's Tarantella technology) works well. It can't print, but that's a Tarantella issue. Java 1.5 also causes Vista to switch from Aero Glass to Aero Basic mode due to some issues between the two. Java 1.6 may fix that.

It looks nice, but:

1. It's a memory hog. 512MB at idle is unacceptable, especially when Windows Server 2003, which is what Vista is based on, takes up 120MB or so at idle with nothing else loaded.
2. UAC (User Account Control) is incredibly annoying.
3. Unlike 2000 or XP, vendors will really have to work to get their software operational on Windows Vista. Remember how a lot of devices didn't work with Windows 2000 at first?
4. There's no Start -> Run option anymore. I had to add a shortcut to the Command Prompt to my desktop to get it to work.
5. The boot time is a bit slower. This is unlike my transition to XP from 2000, which made my boot time FASTER.
6. Aero Glass does slow down the machine, especially those with slower video cards (I have a Radeon x300). The same card runs XP beautifully.
7. The user navigation with back buttons always in the same place is a User Interface nightmare! It got me a few times.
8. IE7 is nice, however the navigation and menu system is a user interface nightmare as well.
9. The lack of backward compatibility with older apps is going to cause a lot of users who expect their apps to work with whatever version of Windows they run to not be happy.
10. Their approach of trying to put the genie back in the bottle with application security and supporting the older apps that they can with "shims" is going to inflame developers more than anything else.

In short, it's a nice try by MS, but I'll at the least wait for SP1 before moving to it.

Mitch

You know, with every version of Windows since Win 3.11 for WorkGroups (except Windows ME, but that hardly counts) I've been ready to vomit when reading the prerelease reports, but eventually came to admit that there were some useful improvements. Hell, at the time Win95 came out, I was supporting Windows networking in college dorms, and say what you want about 95, but the networking was big improvement over that in Win3.1x.

But it's sounding like it's going to be awfully hard for me to come around on Vista.

Previous Windows Versions...
 

Steve,

Windows 95, NT4, 98 (yes, 98), 2000, XP, and Server 2003 all had many things to look forward to. There were major improvements.

Windows Server 2007 (Longhorn Server) does have many improvements. It doesn't have a lot of the cruft and overhead that the desktop version has, kind of like how Server 2003 doesn't have the cruft of XP.

Vista is going to be a new experience for Windows users, I've never used OSX longer then a couple minutes in a store but I'm guessing Vista is grabbing stuff from there. For me, it feels like an entire new computer. I wont say good or bad. I'm still using it, basically just web browsing, mp3ing, and pictures of the baby so its doing all that stuff for me.

I'm using the x64 version so my memory footprint is a bit higher, and when you first install it does its indexing stuff in those first idle times so it appears to use more memory/cpu over the course of a bootup.

The UAC got turned off after first 30 min, and mainly because I think it crashed the Nvidia driver installtion because it just keeps doing that "permission" crap.

The hold back for me will be upgrades, I need more RAM for 90% of the games I have. They say it will run much better on PCI-E motherboards because of the increased video bandwidth it sucks up... I have that first Athlon 64 generation of mobo with AGP only.

Well, looks like you'll want to hang on to your XP OS, or switch to Linux. In fact, I think this is the best thing to ever happen to Linux, or so it will prove.

SuSE love you, baby!

If it's more expensive than it's worth, don't buy it.

What's the big deal?

Whats with the vista bashing when it's not even released yet? Yes the security protections were annoying in RC1, but don't you think they will realize that and tone it down for the public final retail release? The interface with Aero glass on a high end graphics card is simply jaw dropping and worth the new upgrade alone. This probably appeals most to me because I am a visual person, I like things to be pretty I don't care how well they work as long as they look fabulous doing it, which is exactly what Vista is going to be, from my impressions of RC1.

I've been using Internet Explorer 7, beta 3, for a little while. I'm pretty happy with it except when I first fire it up it can take as long as 15 seconds for the homepage to come up and I'm using the blank homepage. That said I'm not sure it's an IE-7 problem as I've been having cable (comcast) issues since that big storm outage awhile back. :confused:

Bruce, if you want to see how your connection is performing, you can run one of the many speed tests on the net such as this one: Speakeasy's speedtest.

However, to be really meaningful, you need a baseline.

I always do well on them, hooked to Seattle, 4685 down and 352 up right now.
My problem is getting into the stream. One of the techs that came out when I first got Comcast, a few years ago, explained there is an acceptable bandwidth or range that my signal must fall somewhere in.
Previous techs had put the meter on and said it's ok because it was in that range, but this guy told me if it's not near the center, when it hits the merging/switching points along the cable, it'll hit the abutments on the side and stop.
He might have been bullshitting me, but when he was done fooling with it, I'd click on a website and shazzam, I'm there.
After that big outage, I can't shazzam any more. I get the, can't display the site message, frequently and when I hit refresh I usually shazzam.
I've got to call them and get a tech out here but I think I better see my doctor for some blood pressure medication, first. Even though I don't take any normally. ;) Yes, dealing with Comcast will do that.