Alan Simpson

I think Vista is built around the whole notion of hardware being ever better, faster, cheaper. As every OS should be built. The old 4 GB limit of directly addressable memory in 32-bit machines will be replaced by the near infinite limits of 64-bit. (OK, so maybe 2^64 isn't "near infinity". But it's a big honkin' number). The point is, you have to design OSs to take advantage of what's coming, not what is or what used to be. And I think Vista does that. As 64-bit becomes more mainstream, so will Vista.



I don't know that there's any set rule on this. But I rarely keep the same machine as my "main machine" for more than 3 or 4 years. By then my main machine becomes my secondary machine. My secondary becomes my tertiary. And so forth down to the wife and kids' machines. (But don't tell them that).



When Vista is a real product I'll probably build a new main machine around it.





"William R. Mosher" <woogles@charter.net> wrote in message news:9543AD0A-F90C-4977-9E06-97A93B9B329D@microsoft.com...
I bought my Gateway P4-2.0 GHZ computer in October 2002. At that time it had 256 MB of RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive and an Intel video card built into the motherboard with 64 MB of RAM and came with XP Home Edition. After all the upgrades over the years it now has a second hard drive of 80 GB, the RAM has been increased to 1.5 GB, and the video card is now an Nvidia GeForce FX5200 with 128MB of RAM and it runs Windows Vista Beta 2 very nicely. I realize that the Windows Vista code has not been optimized for performance, so if it runs this when on my computer I wonder how well will the final release of Windows Vista run? It it runs the final release comparable to Windows XP in performance, I may not be needing a new computer until 2011-2012 given the cycle of OS replacements and if my computer does not crash and burn between now and then.

What are your thoughts about the life of a PC in the coming age of Windows Vista?

William