I would have had my new Dell today, but for whatever reason the UPS person decided that today would be the day that s/he would actually get the required signature instead of just knocking once and dumping the package at the front door.
Oh well. Hopefully tomorrow someone will answer when the UPS person knocks.
Now it’s time to figure out what to do with Vista. There are four different editions to choose from (five if you count the volume-license-only Enterprise), each of which can be had in 32-bit or 64-bit flavors. This is why there wasn’t much midnight madness happening for the Vista release — nobody had a clue what to buy! WTF are they smoking in Redmond and can I please get a hit?
My new Dell comes with Vista Home Basic. I think that must be Microsoft’s polite way of saying Loser Edition. Seriously. It doesn’t even have Aero / Glass, which is the only brand new feature of Vista that I could name without consulting the comparison chart. And now that I’ve looked at the chart again it appears that even Microsoft couldn’t think of any good reasons to choose the Basic Loser Edition (comes with IE7 and Windows Defender, woo-hoo!).
Vista Ultimate sure sounds snazzy, and it’s got the little check marks next to everything on that chart, but I can’t figure out if any of the extra features beyond Vista Home Premium are must-haves. The price difference between the two editions is $80 whether I use the online anytime upgrade or buy a non-upgrade OEM copy from Newegg, which is not an insignificant sum considering that I paid just $609 for the computer it will go on.
And once I decide on an edition there’s still the matter of how many bits. 32-bit is the obvious choice for compatibility with software and drivers. 64-bit Windows is still has a bleeding-edge feel to it despite the fact that Microsoft has been shipping 64-bit versions since Windows 2000, and since I doubt this incarnation of my home desktop will ever have more than 4GB RAM I’m hard pressed to find a really good reason to use it beyond the fact that I’m just a giant geek.
But I am what I am…
