Every version of Windows is just slower and more processor intensive than that last. Vista requires like 500 MB of RAM before you even open anything. Tiger, before anything is opened, requires only 50 MB of RAM. There's a reason Tiger leaves Vista in the dust, it's a much lighter load. It's also important to realize that Tiger can run quite well on a 5 year old machine and still give you almost all the sweet graphical effects.
I had to upgrade my 256mb Mac Mini to 512mb in order to get Tiger running smoothly. The system requirements call for at least 256mb. 50mb of RAM for Tiger sounds low.
I do agree that Tiger runs nicely on older machines as long as you have sufficient RAM and that the Aqua UI is very nice and requires far less system resources than Vista does to run.
Vista basically requires a new machine, and not a low-end one, either. If you spend less than $500 on your machine, even today, it's likely Vista will crawl on it. Don't think it's going to improve, either, Vista will become far more demanding over time. Vista has tons of other problems right now, too.
I had the chance to play around with some laptops in that price range with 512MB of RAM running Vista Home Basic. For general stuff like internet browsing and email, it wasn't bad. Took a bit longer to load the programs than XP did, but they worked fine once open.
Still, there was a performance hit from XP and Home Basic lacks most of the new stuff that Vista offers, so I'd still recommend getting XP on a low end system.
I upgraded to Vista on Tuesday and while the upgrade process was horrendous, the OS is so far stable and faster than XP (my system has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor at 4600+; GeForce 7300 LE 256MB; 2 gigs of RAM).
The Vista upgrade is not without problems, at least for me. Here is what happened:
The installation failed 3 times the first time I installed it. Due to bad advice from a Microsoft tech, I had to reinstall a few days later because Vista would not activate because of the way the tech told me to install Vista (I told him several times I had the upgrade version, but after two failures he told me to boot from the installation DVD and worry about the product key afterwards...big mistake).
I had to reinstall XP from my restore disk and then upgrade to Vista again. The installer failed the next 4 times I attempted to upgrade, all at different stages, but finally worked on the 5th attempt.
Windows Activation went fine but on a reboot Vista forgot that I had activated it and wouldn't let me activate it again without a phone call. They've patched that now but the patch failed in Windows Update and I had to manually download it to get it working.
Also, my graphic drivers failed to initialize the first four times I tried to boot to Vista after the install resulting in a BSOD.
Again, Vista is working great now, just a really rough upgrade.
Besides, Vista can't run iTunes yet, and I hate Windows Media Player with a passion. Piece of junk if I've ever seen one.
iTunes will work on Vista right now for many standard computers. Apple is advising people to wait for an upgrade to iTunes coming in the next few weeks to ensure that they don't run into problems.
There is also a iTunes Repair Tool for Vista that can fix some problems people might encounter.
If you're interested in Vista, chances are you'll need a new machine. I can't think of a better time to get a Mac! If you ever wanted to, all the intel Macs are fully capable of running Vista. Of course, the ones with integrated graphics might be a bit less impressive.
Macs are great, I own two, but one of the more common media types on the net these days is Windows Media which Microsoft no longer supports for the Mac. Instead, you have to download the Flip4Mac program that doesn't always read streaming media properly, like at
www.ctv.ca
XP SP2 is a solid OS and is probably the one I would recommend for most people right now.
The first Mac virus already came.
http://antivirus.about.com/od/macint..._Resources.htm
If Macs were half as popular as PCs, we would see thousands more viruses for the Mac. The reason that most of the hacks and viruses are geared at Windows is because Windows has 90-some percent market share, so that's where the big payoff of hacking is most likely to be. The same goes for Linux.
So far there have only been "proof-of-concept" viruses for the Mac with nothing propagating in the wild. In short, there are not viral or malware threats that you can get from the internet for Mac OS X.
The other thing to remember is that this is not because Macs only have a 5% marketshare, but rather because the core of OS X is BSD (Unix) which was built from the ground up to be a secure, multi-user environment OS.
Trust me, with all of the bragging and bravado coming from the Mac camp about there not being any viruses for OS X, if someone could develop one that worked they would gain much more fame and noteriety than from any virus they could build for Windows.
The fact it hasn't been done yet shows just how difficult it is.
If anyone is thinking of getting it, perhaps it is better to wait for the service packs first.
That is probably sound advice. Vista is stable on my HP tower (which is labelled Vista Capable) but HP got a bunch of Vista patches out on January 30 to make sure things worked.
I'm really impressed with the job HP did with this, I am less impressed with Microsoft's installer.
