Windows Vista Capable Machines Coming

An anonymous reader writes "PC World's Techlog has a short piece talking about the upcoming emergence of 'Windows Vista Capable' PCs." From the article: "The Vista Capable designation doesn't promise that a PC will provide a great Vista experience, or even that it'll support all Vista features or features...just that it'll be able to run Windows Vista Home Basic in some not-very-well-defined-but-apparently-adequate way. At the moment, there are still new PCs on store shelves that don't meet the Vista Capable guidelines--for instance, low-end systems still sport 256MB of RAM in some cases. Wonder if that means that that A) we'll see some cheap systems that still have XP even after Vista ships; or B) the specs on even the cheapest machines will be beefed up; or C) we'll see machines that have Vista preloaded but which don't qualify as Vista capable?"

Comments

Entirely unnecessary

[petrus4]

The worst thing about all of this is that not only does it inconvenience a huge number of people, it does so for absolutely no good reason.

Microsoft have done a lot of stupid things in their time, but Aero really takes the cake as far as I'm concerned. A 3D interface (at least in terms of how they're implementing it from the screenshots) is purely cosmetic...it doesn't offer anything in the area of usability whatsoever. For what therefore is a purely visual touch-up, a lot of people are going to have to shell out large amounts of money if they want to be able to upgrade. Great for the hardware manufacturers; a distaster for the rest of us.

Thanks a bundle, Microsoft.

Re:Security ? Nix ? Consumer ? No .

[Homology]

The password being in the log is a TINY problem compared with what Windows has.

The password written in the install log is tantamount to write the root password since that user has unrestricted sudo privileges (i.e. "sudo su"). If this kind of errors are made in Ubuntu, one wonders what other security issues Ubuntu has.

You can currently install Linux on a computer with a direct internet connection without problems. You can't do that with Windows. Patching it fully takes hours after installation and the average time before you get infected with something is about 30 minutes -- do the math. I actually tried that with a friend. Gave up after 3 tries, and ended up bringing it to my home so that I could install it behind my Linux firewall.

It is always prudent to install Windows on a machine behind a firewall, and let it continue to run behind a firewall. For home users, a cheap DSL router will function as a simple firewall and will protect you during installation as well. If a real firewall is needed/wanted, then install OpenBSD on a machine and use pf