Vista Capable?

Windows Vista has finally made it through beta and is for sale to the public. A lot of new hardware on the market says that it is Windows Vista capable. What does that actually mean?

Windows Vista, at least the Premium versions, take some pretty serious hardware to run all the features, like the new Aero interface. Here are the hardware specifications for the Home Premium version of Windows Vista:

• 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 GB of system memory
• 40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
• Support for DirectX 9 graphics with:
  • WDDM Driver
  • 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
  • Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware
  • 32 bits per pixel
• DVD-ROM drive
• Audio Output

However, the new Windows Vista capable stickers don’t mean that you can run Windows Vista with all the features turned on… just that you can install and run Windows Vista. If the new computer you bought doesn’t have a DirectX hardware accellerated video card with at least 128MB of video RAM, then forget about running the new Aero desktop, which isn’t even included in the Vista Home basic version.
Also, the new Windows Vista capable stickers don’t mean that your machine will be fully supported by all versions of Windows Vista. For instance, the new dual processor machine you got for gaming and video processing, you have to buy either Vista Ultimate (street retail $409), or Vista Business editions ($309), since the Home editions (basic $209, premium $246.99) don’t support multiple processors.

It seems to me that the Windows Vista capable stickers are leaving out a lot of important information.

If you look at Microsoft’s side-by-side comparison page of the four versions of Windows Vista, you’ll see that Vista Basic Home edition is seriously cannibalized, and effectively a marketing gimmick to give Microsoft a near-$200 price point. It doesn’t have the mobility features that would make it useful on a notebook computer. Many features that were standard in Windows 95, 98, 2000 and XP, like faxing, are no longer included in the Home versions of the software. According to the comparison page, Microsoft doesn’t care to protect the Home version users against hardware failure—as the complete backup and recovery software isn’t included in either Home edition.

[tags]Dan Kim, Microsoft, hardware compatibility, Windows, Vista[/tags]