Vista Basic and Pirated Copies Will Not Have Aero

Despite Vista's delay and the suite of news related to it, Microsoft returns with more announcements regarding the new operating system, which are everything but pleasant.

One of Vista's most expected features is the Aero GUI, which promises some jaw-dropping effects. However, not everybody will benefit from the mind-boggling interface.

As part of the efforts to stop the piracy phenomenon from ruining the software producers' incomes, Microsoft will check every time if it deals with a genuine version. If the copy is pirated, Vista will not install Aero on the computer.

But that is not the extremely unpleasant news about Vista, but the fact that Microsoft has decided to do the same with stripped-down editions of Windows and low-end computers.

CNET News writes that users whose computers do not meet the hardware requirements imposed by Vista or have purchased Vista Basic won't benefit from Aero.

Vista will check if the PC has enough memory, enough graphics power and if the graphics chip supports the new driver. Should one of this checks fail, the famous GUI will not be installed.

To get a better idea of the requirements imposed by Windows Vista, Microsoft says that a single display of 1280-by-1024 pixels or less, for example, must have 64MB of graphics memory. The amount of memory increases proportionally with the monitor's diagonal and with their number.

Related to Vista, a Gartner report recently concluded that the large corporations are not ready to switch to the new OS and that they will need considerable financial resources to do this.