Do You Really Need Windows Vista Today?
Vista comes more than five years after the release of Windows XP, making XP the Microsoft operating system with the longest life span ever. Windows Vista is intended to be the more secure Windows, as former versions constantly suffer from susceptibility to so-called malware, viruses or other forms of attack. Microsoft added several layers of security to Vista, such as an improved, built-in security center and firewall, and a utility to fend off unwanted software.
Yet we believe that the main advantages of Windows Vista are its highly improved accessibility and ease of use - we found Vista to be a very good companion for everyday work during our testing. Most of you are probably advanced Windows users, and I guess you know how to do what you want to do with Windows. But newbies, people with experience on other operating systems, and particularly older people, will have a much easier time connecting to a wireless network, installing a printer or sharing files with other people using Windows Vista.
What about performance? We will compare Windows Vista to Windows XP in another article, but there are two things you need to know right away: the Vista experience does not come for free, because all of the additions require a great deal of resources. There are some features to improve system responsiveness and to create a balanced performance experience, but we don't expect applications to execute any faster, whether you're using the 32-bit or the 64-bit version of Vista. Some applications could even run slightly slower, but considering the hardware requirements, we tend to believe that enthusiasts won't switch to Vista unless they have 2 GB of memory, a suitable graphics solutions and a modern dual core processor. In such a case, performance differences between Vista and XP will become negligible.