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Things get even messier if you want integrated graphics that will be capable of running Windows Vista as you are limited to the Intel G965 chipset which will set you back at least £70. That’s a serious amount of cash for the sort of motherboard that you’ll find inside a basic integrated PC and it rather suggests that Intel want a larger slice of the Bill of Materials from each new ‘Intel Inside’ PC.

In other news from 2006 Sony finally launched its Playstation 3, foisting the wretched Blu-ray system upon us and any day now we’ll be swamped in a tidal wave of HD DVD movies. I’m all for high capacity recordable DVDs and it’s clear that HD will displace SD over the coming years but I have no interest in watching High Definition movies on my PC, which brings us neatly to 2007 and Windows Vista.

Every new version of Windows is important to Microsoft but it’s fair to say that it has bet the farm on Windows Vista. For one thing it has to convince its customer base to make the transition from Windows 2000 and XP to Vista, and that’s a pretty tough sell.

I don’t want to rush to pre-judge Vista for a number of reasons (oh go on…ed). In part because my experiences have been with RC2 Build 5742, rather than the RTM Build 6000 but mainly because it’s natural to stick with what you know, which in my case is Windows XP SP2. Personally, I find XP works very well indeed, even though it is riddled with annoyances, so I have to accept that I like XP because I am familiar with its ways. In time the same will doubtless be true of Vista but right now I am at a bit of a loss.

The most visible part of Vista is the Aero interface and while it looks pretty, frankly, so what? There are plenty of novelties in Vista and I’m all for clever hybrid hard drives that act as solid state devices once they’re up and running, while the idea of audio that plays your music loud and your Windows noises soft is superb but surely those features could have been rolled into XP SP3. The same is true of DirectX 10 which will only be available for Windows Vista. I find it very hard to believe that Windows XP can’t support DirectX 10, which rather suggests that it is being used as a blunt instrument to force gamers to switch from XP.

Of course there’s new and improved security at the heart of Vista but this looks like a series of major annoyances. Every time you open a file, download a file, or do anything you have to contend with a series of pop-up dialogue boxes, and it would seem that this is only the beginning of an especially rocky road. Vista device drivers are specific to individual pieces of hardware so you can kiss goodbye to unified driver models for your graphics card, and you can bet that the costs of WHQL certification will soar. In part the driver has been removed from the kernel of Vista to make the OS more stable, and in part to cut down on the number of restarts.

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