I had wanted to post something geeky that I was thinking about earlier in the week, and a post at Lifehacker gave me a good reason to jot those ideas down a little more cohesively.

Here’s basically a copy of my comment to the above-linked post:
I don’t really give a crap if Microsoft is evil or not, but by making almost nothing work well with old hardware, Vista seems like little more than a way for MS to cater to hardware vendors…

I’ve been running XP (and/or occasionally some Linux distro) on my desktop machine (a 1.3 Ghz athlon) since I upgraded it from Win 98 over 5 years ago. It still runs everything I need like a top.

It seems to me that new-software development curve has really dropped behind the new-hardware curve since XP has been on the market. Outside of cutting-edge gaming, what is everybody out there doing that you need to replace a computer every 2 years? Surfing the web? Listening to music? Burning a DVD? Writing a paper? Even on my 5-yr-old desktop: Done, done, done, and done.

So, I imagine there are other people in the same sort of boat, and I look around at PC sales plateauing, the only really good reason I can come up with for MS to show us this “new OS” (whose key features it seems could have just been in an XP SP3): force everyone who wants it to upgrade, whether they really need to or not.

?

After all, all the PC makers (Dell, HP, Lenovo, Toshiba, etc., etc.) scratch MS’s back by packaging Windows with every unit they move. Eventually, it just makes sense for the software folk to reciprocate. It’s all about the benjamins, one way or another, and that’s true for every party involved.

Personally, this sort of crap makes me a lot more excited about the next version of Ubuntu, tentatively due in April. If the hardware support for my laptop (which is already pretty damn good) gets even better, it’ll be ‘bye-bye XP’ for the Bocko.