My personal opinion (and this is my field), there is no real
justification outside of security for the home PC.
What's she look like and which desert...(coordinates will do)
Although I do agree with you...mostly...<
) "I think" (which means
I really don't know for sure) that most applications will continue to
run quite nicely on XP Pro and DX9. I also think *most* applications
will be happy with DX 9 for some time to come. I emphasized the most
as it certainly will not be all.
There are many DX9 cards currently running on Vista (they reportedly
sold 90 million copies the first month) and few except the diehard
gamers will have the 8800 GTX and GTS cards which are the only ones at
present that are DX10 compliant. So the rest including the new
computers that are preloaded will still have DX-9 hardware.
Justification is a relative term or at least I put it about a step
above rationalization. ( usually use the rationalization to create the
justification) Where one person is going to say Vista is a "must
have" another may say "it'd be nice" to another who would say "I
should be able to get along nicely on XP Pro and DX-9".
"For me" the only real justification I can see "near term" is the
added security with Vista that most users could have had with a
properly configured installation of XP Pro behind a firewall. Longer
term I am going to want DX10 on at least one "state-of-the-art"
machine as that's what it takes to run FSX. (I hope they fix the code
in that to work with multi core and share the load with the GPU) The
other four machines will *probably* stay as XP Pro until what ever
comes out after Vista, or will end up as LINUX machines.
They also say Vista is more stable than XP but I've never had a
stability problem with XP on 4 machines (recently went to 5)
I do a lot of photo editing and one machine is pretty much a
multimedia center. it'll be a while before either of those go Vista
due to the DRM/premium content and HDCP compliant component
availability. When I can play HD DVDs (which ever mode) and use my
computer as a high definition equivalent of TvIO, or my 922 receiver
then those machines *Might* get changed over.
The only real drawback I see for the end user is DRM while I view WGA
with mixed emotions as it has both its good and bad sides. OTOH if you
are running XP you *WILL* be running WGA if auto updates are enabled.
It's on two of the five machines and has not created any problems so
far other than the one machine got confused when trying to install it
and it took three tires before it'd work correctly.
With the installed base of XP out there, it's likely that "for the
home user" there is really very little valid justification, or gain to
be had by upgrading to vista. IOW, it'd be a very rare home user that
would gain anything (or see any difference other than eye candy) by
upgrading. So except for a very small percent, the home users could
stay with XP and never even notice there was a Vista. OTOH if it had
the security most home users could still get by with 98SE. Surfing
the Internet and e-mail take very little power. Word processors have
become quite bloated. As I work with web pages I think they should ban
Front page and Word's ability to convert a doc to HTML. Those two add
new meaning to the words "bloat code".
One other question comes to mind: How many of the home users have the
hardware that would work with Vista without requiring some updating.
Some older printers and scanners may create some problems even with
the generic drivers available. I'm not so sure I can get a Vista
driver for my Nikon LS5000ED scanner which is one of the higher end
scanners. Particularly as there is less and less call for scanners
with cameras going digital.
The home user base *will* eventually migrate to Vista as they replace
their old machines with new ones that come preloaded with OS and Apps
which would certainly be the safest route. How fast this will
happen,or how many will migrate before the next OS is out is any one's
guess. There are a LOT of Win 98 and 98SE machines still out there
that don't have the horsepower to run XP and Office let alone Vista or
the latest version of office, and multimedia apps.
OTOH The rest of us might have a *LOT* to gain by the average home
user having an OS that enforces the security, that they can't seem to
be bothered with at present. I would be nice to see those millions of
zombies go away.
Still, with the statement that the *NEXT* OS is only a couple years
away (I think 09 was listed) Vista may not be much more than an
interim OS between XP and what ever comes next. It is an evolutionary
step that is pretty much like XP with the security (control of what
the user can do) wrapped around the Kernel, plus a few extra features.
