In my previous post, I mentioned that I was going to attend the Windows Vista Preview. However, when I arrived there, surprisingly there are not much people attended the Technical Preview as I expected. As I attended one of the sessions entitled, “Vista and AMD”, there are fewer than 100 people at that seminar room.

During the Technical Preview, few issues did surprised me:

1) One of the speaker stated that the Vista version will require at least 1G of RAM in order to support the Aero interface, a lot of people knew that. However, he elaborated this particular 1G of RAM must be in 1 piece, there are not in any case like this, 4 pieces of 256MB (4 X 256 RAM). In my case, my PC came with 2 pieces of Kingston 256 RAM, it would not work well if I buy another two (2) 256 RAM and stick these addition RAMs into my PC to make it 1G of RAM in total.

2) BitLocker’s recovery mode is really look cool. But this feature will only available in Vista Ultimate version.

3) There are far too many different versions of Vista when it officially launch to the market, i.e. Vista Basic, Vista Business, Vista Ultimate, Vista Enterprise. For Office 2007, they are available in eight (8) versions when I looked at its leaflet. For a lot of people out there, I wonder they all know how to differentiate the Office 2007 suite, i.e. Office Standard 2007, Basic 2007, Professional 2007, Professional Plus 2007, Home and Student 2007, Ultimate 2007, Small Business 2007, and lastly Enterprise 2007 when they purchase it from the retail store?

4) Vista looked too many security advancements. On personal, i just want to have a reliable operating system, and enabled me to run some applications. But with Vista, I need to switch from “Standard User” to “Administrator” each time when I want to install a new program. I could imagine it would really annoying in this kind of situation.

5) I believed Microsoft have already made this Vista “looked” very powerful. When I looked at the Demo on the screen, there is a myth that Vista was so secure it might be possible to run this operating system without any anti-virus program installed.

6) The tagging feature is really cool when I first saw it from the Demo, but frankly is there a need to have the tagging (categorization) feature in Vista? If one want to tag a picture, he/she can install a third-party software and run it. Is this strongly implied that Microsoft want to develop an operating system that could cater to all the users’ needs and wants?

7) Windows Vista cannot be considered as a upgrade version of Windows XP, both of them look differently in terms of performance and features. Thus, it’s no longer an operating system that we familiar with.

Bottom Line: No doubt Windows Vista is powerful, but I urge all the potential buyers to have a second-look preview before they upgrade their Windows XP to Vista.