What Is Windows Vista?

Over the past week I have had several conversations with Clients regarding some confusion over Windows Vista and Office 2007, so I thought I would try to clear up some of the confusion.

Windows Vista is a computer operating system. It replaces Windows XP. A computer operating system is the brains of the computer. It is software that makes the box of hardware into a computer. It communicates with all of the hardware components to make them do the functions they were designed to do. For instance, it is the operating system that makes characters and graphics appear on your video monitor, saves data and reads data to/from your hard drive, keeps track of the date and time, handles system security, etc, etc, etc. When a programmer writes a program to run on the computer he does not have to worry about how to do these things as they are taken care of by the operating system. For instance, the programmer can just say "save this file" and the operating system does all the dirty work of formatting and writing all those 1s and 0s to the hard drive, CD, DVD, etc.

Office 2007 is a computer application. Office 2003 is an application, Misys is an application, Internet Explorer is an application. Applications are computer programs that accomplish tasks for you. These tasks can be simple or very complex.

The relationship between the operating system and an application is crucial. When a programmer writes an application he/she takes advantage of the operating system's "brains". The application becomes dependent on the methods that the operating system uses to perform technical functions like saving files, etc. When new operating systems are created new functions are included (Vista has lots of new DVD stuff, whereas XP was not aware of DVDs as they were not mainstream when it came out), and existing functions may be changed to take advantage of new technologies or to address security issues.

What does all this mean? Basically, programs are written and are dependent on certain operating systems. Some programs are generic enough to be able to run on several operating systems and some are very dependent on a certain operating system version.

Office 2007 will run in Windows XP and Windows Vista, although it is optimized for Vista in some areas. Office 2003 will run in Windows XP and Windows Vista although, it is more comfortable in XP. Currently Misys runs in Windows XP but not Windows Vista.

You can migrate to Windows Vista and still use Office 2003. (Other office versions will be problematic). You can can install Office 2007 on Windows XP workstations.

Migrating to a new operating system is much more challenging than simply upgrading to a new version of a program. I think brain surgery is more complicated than trying a new diet!

Next, we will look at the different versions of Windows Vista that are available.