How software companies plan to take over the world

At the beginning of the year, I bought a laptop to allow me to carry my work between school and home, and to aid me in presentations (especially for my lab director). The laptop came with Windows XP, but included a free upgrade to Windows Vista when it was released. Being the techno-geek that I am, I decided that I was going to make the jump from XP to Vista once the upgrade media arrived in the mail.

The upgrade process went very smoothly - I'm now running Microsoft Vista Home Premium on my laptop. There are lots of people with opinions about Vista: some love it, while others really hate it. I like the slick new interface, but then that shouldn't surprise anyone - Kimberly will tell you that I'm the person that likes to make pretty pictures (if I have an engineering project or assignment that requires plots or graphs, I like to make them look good). I like the new, resizeable icons in Vista, I like the translucent windows, I like the animations that accompany minimizing and restoring windows, and I like the Windows sidebar, which allows me to keep tabs on my processor, memory and battery states, as well as put other gadgets on it.

However, all of these cool-looking additions come at a price: Vista is a huge memory hog. I don't know what it is that requires so much memory, but the hit is so big that I had to go out and upgrade my RAM so that I'd have enough. Windows XP on average required 200-400 MB of RAM (many new computers today come with 1 GB, or about 1000 MB of RAM, so XP would use 20-40% of the available memory). Vista uses anywhere from 800-900 MB of RAM - that's a huge increase from XP. That means that all of the memory that I had before to run programs with, I no longer have, which is why I had to go out and upgrade it.

Many people have noted that Windows Vista now looks a lot like Mac OS X, which may very well currently be the best operating system out there. Get this, though: OS X doesn't require anywhere the amount of memory that Vista does. In fact, the requirements for OS X are much lighter than for Vista: 256 MB RAM & 3 GB of hard disk space vs 512 MB RAM & 15 GB hard disk space. However, despite the stated Vista requirements, nobody I've seen who has a well-informed opinion about it's memory requirements thinks that 512 GB is enough - they all suggest that 1 GB is the very minimum, with 2 GB being a safe amount. OS X, however, runs very well on only 512 MB of memory (I know because my Mom has done it). What gives? Where does Vista use all of the memory? I don't know the answer.

Anyhow, I should finally get to the subject of this post. After realizing that Vista requires so many system resources, I started looking to see what alternatives I had. I can't run OS X because it will only legally run on Mac hardware, and to downgrade to XP again would require that I purchase a new license, which would set me back at least $150. I didn't want to do that, so I started exploring Linux, a good, free, light operating system that could potentially compete with Windows as my OS. As I explored its possibilities, guess what I found? I found that all of the software that I've learned and grown used to either only works, or works best with, guess what? Windows. Linux users say that there isn't a Microsoft application that you can't find some Linux-based application to do the same thing, but usually the Linux application doesn't do it as well, it requires a user to learn new software, or, in the case of commercial software, which I have Window's copies of, I'd have to purchase a Linux version. Another issue is cross-compatibility. What if I do move to Linux? I'd better be able to find some software that will open all of my Office documents, especially my Powerpoint presentations. The free Open Office Suite will do that, but it doesn't read the files perfectly, so some objects on the slides get changed.

So guess how these software companies plan to take over the world? Do you know that Microsoft gives student discounts for software like Microsoft Office, and Visual Studio (their development tools)? Do you know that other software companies do the same? The USC bookstore sells lots of really good software (Matlab, Photoshop Elements, CAD tools, other multi-media editing software, etc.) with student discounts. So what happens? Students, when they're getting their education, go out and buy all of this software at discounted prices, learn that software, and get hooked on it. Then they graduate, get jobs, and don't ever want to use any other software, as it would require them to learn something new. By then, though, software companies can charge them full price for new versions of the same software, and make lots and lots of money. Ok, so these companies may not be wanting to take over the world, but they are very good at making money off of us.

What am I going to do about my laptop? I'll probably stick with Windows, just like the other 90% of the world. If I do switch to Linux, though, you'll hear about it.