The Scene
Windows XP
Windows XP is 8 years old. Thats like ancient going by the standards of computer world where things start getting old 6 months down the line and beyond 2 years, it struggles to keep pace with the new offerings. WinXP has kept on. After Vista fiasco and the painful demise of Vista , people have stuck back with almost a decade old Operating System. I being one of them too.
I was on Vista for more than a year, life was all well. Still, I couldnt really feel that at the core of my Inspiron 1420 lies a Core2Duo 2.4 Ghz Penrym with 4GB DDR2 RAM. It wasn’t just happening. Vista ran fine, smoothly enough for me to stay content but that was the case even with my 1.6Ghz Pentium 4 with 1GB RAM running WinXP. Why the hell did I upgrade in the first place then?
The Reason
Obviously, the urge and desire for better performance. Then, there was this 64Bit Vs 32Bit dilemma I faced cause of my 4GB memory. I also tried 64Bit version of Vista but couldnt notice any performance gains as most of my applications are 32Bit.
So, I switched back to WinXP 10 months back, the missing 500MB of memory that 32Bit XP shows is acceptable to me till the time I’m able to cruise while switching between multiples applications running side by side. One advantage is that I’ve disabled the page file on my hard disk as it saves unnnecessary read/write cycles and improves my battery life.
Old age beckons
Windows Vista
Although I’m very satisfied with running XP. It does have some downsides. One of the biggest one which thankfully is not one of the major issue for me at least is the non avaibility of Direct X 10 support. I am not much into gaming, infact the last game I played was NFS Underground.
At times I feel, I’m doing injustice to the 512MB Nvidia Geforce Graphic card in my laptop. XP with its non attractive cartoon style icons look a bit dated. Seriously, the admire the looks of Windows vista. Talking of looks, how can I leave out Leopard’s Aqua theme. Although, it isnt fair to compare the two, after running Hackintosh for a couple of months. I kind of despise XP’s looks.
Having said that, even Linux has improved considerably in the looks area. Linux Mint looks superb, its second to none. I tested the Beta Version of Mint Gloria and I can say that Its got the punch! Linux is now almost ready for mainstream home audience. Its simply stunning.
Windows XP on the other hand with its SP3 currently looks very old.
Ray of Hope
The reason the title of this post says 22 October is because its the official release date for Windows 7! All my hopes are with windows 7. With its legacy Windows XP mode I’m sure people would not face any problems as far as running old applications are concerned. Its supposedly cleaner, snappier and looks fantastic.
The RC(Release Candidate) versions which have been available for download since some months now have given quite more than a sneek peek into Windows 7. It looks very promising!
Hope - keeps us going, even Microsoft for that matter! 
