Kachina Dunn spoke with Kurt Hutchinson, Ars Technica writer and professional systems administrator for World Wide Technology. Hutchinson has been testing Windows Vista since the beta version.

Dunn: After your testing and experience with Vista, what do you feel is the minimum hardware setup that you would recommend as compared to the Microsoft recommended minimum?

Hutchinson: Basically, to get the same experience as somebody that might be using XP would have, I would say 1 GHz or faster ... with 1 GB of RAM. RAM's the biggest problem; Vista's doing so much more in the background that it's more important to have more available memory for what the OS might need to do.

Dunn: Do you think that a lot of companies that are saying they either don't have a plan or they'll just upgrade when their PC refresh cycle forces them to do so are planning correctly because they may not be sitting on enough RAM?

Hutchinson: Right, that's totally the right approach for any business. Most of the folks I've worked with are waiting for the refresh. That's when they get the most appropriate hardware for the OS that's current.

Dunn: What have you found as far as application compatibility problems? Is there anything that really gave you pause, especially anything that might affect the enterprise user?

Hutchinson: Originally, when I first tested Vista, I tried to bring it to work with me, and what I found at first was an issue with the VPN. And this is a big issue for a lot of people who telecommute. I had a lot of problems with the Cisco VPN client. Since running my [testing] article, Cisco sent me an e-mail saying that these problems had been resolved. I haven't been in touch with them, but that was one gotcha. What happened was that it made my laptop unstable. When I first installed the Cisco VPN client, what would happen was when I wanted to be able to shut down, get up and go, when the laptop went into standby, the laptop became unstable and would eventually blue-screen. It became unworkable to the point where I actually hated my laptop. Cisco said the problem lay in a difference in the way the software handled network driver code vs. how XP did. Vista, just because it does more standby stuff, actually has the ability to tell a software driver to go to sleep, whereas XP doesn't really have that. So what happened was, when my laptop would wake up, it would tell the Cisco VPN client, "I'm waking up, now come back to work," and the VPN client didn't understand that.

On the Office side of things, there wasn't really any sort of issue. High-level network engineers who might have to be closer to the metal on the PC, they might have some issues, but other than network people or people who have to be very close to the hardware, I don't believe other users will have issues.

Dunn: What did you think of the Aero Glass interface? If you buy a version that does have it, you can run it without Aero if you choose to. Yet Aero seems like a big draw. Do you think that security enhancements and other features will provide enough of an incentive to go ahead with Vista, even if you can't or are not going to try to use Aero?

Hutchinson: I loved it. On proper hardware, it's really pretty. To me, yes, you should have the whole picture, if you can. With Aero Basic, which is what you get on lesser hardware, and also in the Home Basic version, you won't get the whiz-bang interface, in terms of being able to see through the transparent windows, but you still get the heart of Vista. I still think it's worth it. Even on my laptop, where I've been testing Vista, it's not capable of running the Aero Glass interface, but I still get the enjoyment of using everything else it brings to the table.

Dunn: On the security side, are people kind of blasé about it, do they feel like they already have pretty much everything in place through third-party vendors, or is there anything there that people are excited about having integrated into the OS?

Hutchinson: Most of the pro-level users get excited if they have lots of users using certain machines. That's where Vista, out of the box, I think, really is most exciting. Internet Explorer runs in its own separate world. In the past, if you were running IE with XP and hit a site with spyware, the machine might be just toasted, unprotected. Now, with Vista, the way it runs IE, IE has no rights, so even if the site has malware, you're pretty well protected there.