14 DAY TRIAL // In an article posted yesterday we reported on the humongous memory needs of Microsoft's new operating system and on the recommended amount Vista needs for a decent experience.
Yesterday's news affected mostly PC users, today's news hits Mac users harder.
According to a Neowin.net post, which cites the apcmag.com site, Microsoft revealed today that Vista will not have support for EFI booting on its launching.
What does it mean? It means that the EFI technology, designed by Intel to replace the BIOS system, which is 20 years old, will remain unused until Longhorn server is launched.
For those of you who have a hard time remembering cryptic words, EFI is the acronym for Extensible Firmware Interface and represents the next step in computer evolution.
With the help of EFI, the operating system no longer loads the drivers in the RAM memory. Instead, they are stored in the EFI flash memory on the hardware device.
You might ask yourselves why this is bad news for the Mac users. The answer is extremely simple. Many owners of the Intel-based Macs hoped they would be able to install Vista and choose what OS to load, OS X or Windows. Although some of you might say that no respectable Mac user would do such a horrible thing, the impressive number of Windows games is enough to drive mad even the most fanatic Mac user.
Moreover, Microsoft also announced that Windows will never boot on systems with 32 bit processors, which will probably force some PC users to switch to 64 bits.