TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

Ok, so… say your university’s online classes *cough* UMD *cough* doesn’t support OS X and you’re left wondering how exactly you should use that expensive MacBook Pro to take your online classes. Well, fear not, here’s a complete walk through on how to get Vista installed in OS X using Parallels. Of course, if you’re using Windows XP still, you can do the same thing using this site. And if you want to use the (currently free) VMware Fusion beta, as my review of Vista shows, it works well there. I really hate dual-booting, but using Apple’s Boot Camp, you can install Windows in a dual-boot configuration on your Intel-based Apple computer. Also, for the love of god, can people please stop coding to a single platform?

After the post from a couple days ago about reasons for and against upgrading to Vista, I found this article from TG Daily that does some tests to find out if the Ready Boost feature of Vista (using a USB 2.0 memory stick in place of RAM) had any impact on application startup time in Vista.

The main feature behind Ready Boost, Super Fetch, pre-loads the most used applications in RAM to reduce startup times. The idea is that since most users have 512MB RAM, and many USB 2.0 memory sticks are faster than hard disks, the memory stick can be used as Super Fetch cache. What TG Daily found is that although Ready Boost does make an impact (in their tests they experienced up to 50% decrease in load times) adding just 512MB RAM more made far more of an impact in performance. It allows Super Fetch enough storage to cache several applications and prevents excessive swap usage. So while I still don’t feel it is a reason to upgrade to Vista, Super Fetch certainly seems like a cool and useful technology that will improve application load times for many people. Maybe they could try putting the swap on a USB memory stick and seeing how that affects performance.

This is a pretty good list of reasons for and against upgrading to Vista. I agree that there are definite improvements in Vista (check out my review) but overall some of his reasons for upgrading to Vista aren’t very good, in my opinion.

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On January 30, Microsoft will release its next-generation operating system, Windows Vista. Microsoft’s previous OS, Windows XP, was released October 25, 2001, more than 5 years ago. Given this long development time and Microsoft’s massive amount of development dollars, what is the new OS like? More importantly, should you upgrade to Vista?

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