Boot The Computer, And…
October 26th, 2007What’s the definition of a good computing experience? Booting up your operating system and staring at it, with no ability to smoothly run applications or games, according to Dell. I know Vista has elicited a lukewarm experience, and my biggest gripe about Microsoft’s latest OS offering has been that a ton of resources have to be sacrificed to the machine running it if any productive experience is expected.
An operating system should, ideally, allow maximum availability of resources to the applications intended to run on it. Configurations that essentially were used for small servers until a few years ago, are required to power Vista on a ‘home computer’, forcing average users to invest in an insane amount of computing hardware and resources compared to the tasks they would want to achieve.
I found a link to Dell’s product description page via a reddit news article, and quickly grabbed this screenshot to prove my point. Check out what Dell has to say about the uses of a ‘good’ system with 512 MB of RAM that can, at best, provide basic Windows Vista experience (with no Aero, aka resource hogging eye-candy window display system on board) - “Great for… Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games.” Seriously? You’ve got to be kidding me. This screenshot has not been modified in any way! Although, the description is likely to change on Dell’s website once Microsoft’s marketing team gets across to them.
