My introduction to the Windows operating system came in the form of Windows 3.0. It arrived on four 3.5″ diskettes and weighed in at a whopping five megs before install, not to mention it needed around 6 to 8 megs of hard drive space post-install (depending on what you opted for installation). It even ran on 1MB of RAM (but loved you if you had 2MB of RAM (or more) so that it could run in “Enhanced” mode). It was released to the marketplace in 1990.

Seventeen years later, Windows Vista hit the marketplace (January 2007). Instead of four 3.5″ diskettes, it now comes on a 4GB DVD. It now requires 512MB of RAM and 15GB of available hard drive space–and that’s not even to mention the CPU and hardware requirements, which are astronomically beyond those needed by Windows 3.0.

So, for that 511% increase in RAM demand and approximately 2600% increase in required available hard drive space, what are we getting?

Logically, considering that we’ve seen nearly two decades in technological advances, and along with it the availability of faster programming languages, the continued growth of open source applications, the growth of the internet’s userbase, and much more–not to mention the progressive development of Windows as an operating system for PCs during those 17 years, shouldn’t we be seeing the most advanced operating system imaginable.

But is that really the case?

In reality, the Windows operating system continues to be struggling with incompatibility issues at the hardware level, incompatibility issues at the driver level, and inconsistencies at the user interface level. In reality, the Windows operating, while continuing to add eye-candy features on top of all of these ongoing issues, continues to be haunted by its own instability–the worst of which manifests itself as the “BSOD” (Blue Screen of Death).

And it’s here that I am left utterly disappointed. After 17 years, if there is anything we should no longer see, it should be the BSOD. How is it possible to put together an operating system that takes eye candy to all-new levels, includes a built-in firewall, video software, spyware software, networking features and the ability to protect users from causing (too much) damage by incorporating a feature called UAC, yet fail so miserably to protect the operating from itself? How am I to believe that Microsoft programmers can write 64-bit operating system software, server software, office suite software, PC games and XBox games (not to mention the operating system of the XBox systems), internet applications, and more–and yet, in spite of all of that, not come up with a way to prevent the operating from crashing to an enigmatic blue screen?

I can’t help but ask of Windows: How far has it come, really?

–Timothy Kline