Submitted by If you are sticking with XP – and plenty of us are – and you’re planning to miss the upgrade to Vista read
this article on the Australian PC World. It looks at big questions like: will Windows XP still be properly supported by Microsoft and, as a primary development target, by third parties? Is there something we’ve missed, some hidden gotcha that’s going to trip us up?
Death Match: Windows Vista vs. XP
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
There may not be many compelling reasons to upgrade to Vista but is that really because, as far as operating systems go, we live in an age of diminishing returns ? Can we really expect new OSs to be exciting and ground breaking (and therefore worth upgrading to) or have we already reached a sort of development plateau ?
Whilst that may be true in a marketing sense, the industry could make a few billion dollars more just by making their products easier to use. People are unaware of the functionality they already have. Most of the customers I serve use their dul-core machines as nothing more than a glorified Internet box.
Ease of use and education is the future path to profit. – not features. We already can do a decent amount with computers, and whilst that will still grow, having these features become increasingly accessible to people who don’t use them will then open extra markets and increase sales around those activites.
Here’s one example that stands out to me:
The iPhone drove 59% mobile web traffic to google by itself. By just increasing the number of people who use the Internet on the mobile, the iPhone has thus created new advertising possibilities for companies and new ways to communicate their product to users.
For businesses, that’s no small, obvious thing at all – that’s bloody brilliant! I think if everybody actually used the video editing and dvd burning capabilities of thier computers every week, then they’d be no need for the HD war and that crap, or the HD war would be totally justified as millions of users calmoured to play with the new formats creatively.
We are held back by our lack of knowing what to do with what we’ve made.
Having used Windows 2000, XP (grudingly) and Slackware as my desktop OSs for the last few 3 (or so) years, I thought it was time for a change – an upgrade of OS on my laptop.
While the bundled Vista was far from exciting (and thus lasted barely a day on the notebook) I quickly fell in love with Arch + KDE + compiz fusion.
Granted neither Arch nor compiz is groundbreaking, but for the first time in years I’ve found myself excited in the opperating system + frontend again (to the point where I’m making up any old excuse to boot it up and play)
The crux of the point was this:
I do believe Windows has reached a plateau of sorts. It’s now too familiar to people to change dramatically between one revision and the next.
Perhaps the next Windows “excitment” leap will come with the introduction of new input interfaces (multi-touch screens and the lark)?
Same here. It sounds like a cliche but the abysmal performance of Vista actually pushed me to use Linux full time. Linux is surprisingly smooth on a new computer, even compared to old OSes like XP.
Not to mention that Linux compared to Windows is actually fun, but hey, tastes differ.
Edited 2008-03-18 13:09 UTC
That pushed me over to Linux full time as well.Haven’t looked back and no regrets.
I know the feeling and I do the same thing.Using Arch on my workstation,it’s snappy,boots and shuts down like lightning on pretty modest hardware.
I’m very excited about upgrading to the next release of my prefered primary OS. Back in the day, there was some excitement moving from win2k to winXP and if I had access too a legal license for Vista uber edition I would have had some excitement in looking it over. It is very pretty on the machine’s I’ve been able to play with it on.
I can’t say “upgrading” in the last case as the days of Windows being my primary OS are falling more distantly behind me daily. This is also not meant to start another religious debate over OS so you’ll notice I only mention selections from the Windows family by name.
evolution vs revolution i say
I think the biggest problem with Vista, at least from my brief exposure to it, is that there’s been too much change-for-the-sake-of-change from XP.
I’ve had to do support for a few PCs running Vista (only 4 or 5 so far, luckily) – and each time, I spent a good portion of that time hunting for the arbitrary new location of various pieces of functionality.
E.g., while doing some work on a Vista laptop last week, I had to hit up Google just find where in the hell Vista keeps file association settings or the options to setup a new “my network place.” And I never did figure out what happened to the “Open With” right-click menu in Vista.
I started using computers with Win3.1 and with every subsequent new version, there were changes that I disliked initially but grudgingly came to see the benefit over time (the “desktop” model vs. the old “program manager,” the “explorer bar,” the XP start menu, etc). But with Vista, most of the differences between it and XP are in XP’s favour IMO, not Vista’s.
The enormous force that drives Microsof is that people use windows+office at home, thus companies have no need to invest in IT training and just buy what the workers already knows well.
This pact was sealed by the lovely habit of MS to not do anything about piracy ( except maybe use official Microsoft letter templates to send you the crack code) so that their platform could become de facto the standard fro home PCs.
On the same time, real money was made binding companies in using Microsoft product and selling them cicles of upgrades and patches.
I think nobody can deny those facts.
Okay, now I do work as tech for a multinational company and thus I can see the battle line first person and I notice an interesting issue coming up.
Let’s talk user’s first. I went for some Saturday morning shopping to FNAC and had a question to ask.
Clerk was busy with another customer and thus I waited till they finished and overheard the conversation.
Long story short is that customer was asking for PCs that did not have Vista installed and clerk was explainig him that no, it could not happen and that anyway Microsoft Belgium was officially cutting XP support, OEM and product selling on June.
User then started to complain about Vista being, I quote, a terrible product, unclear, confusing and that could not work in a Network if its life depended from it ( and he told about a serie of problems at work on this behalf)
So User gets Feed Vista, but for sure they do not like it.
What about Companies?
Companies are just finishing now to move to server 2003 and now ( specially for Exchange) have a whole lotta problems with Vista, which make them refuse the upgrade at all.
The official line of my company on Vista is “over my dead body” and that for the simple reason that they have already a lot less work now that XP and the microsoft server platform is acceptably stable.
So in fact, user will NOT adopt Vista unless forced ( which means a new PC) and since you buy a new PC to have someting that runs Vista no issue there (at worst they will buy the PC and install a pirate copy of XP)
Companies will not be compelled to install Vista and relative office package if the users do not do it in first place and get aquainted to it on their expenses ( sparing the company the traning costs).
At this point Vista HAS to be adopted. How? Interesting dilemma for Microsoft.
I’m ready to bet on some strange reports about a Gargantuan security hole or a new trojan that attacks ONLY XP Pcs and not Vista PCs that will pop up around October/November this year, but sure, it is just a speculation.
I mean, it is Microsoft, they care for their customers, don’t they?
Microsoft (and I shall add Apple too), care about their customers for as long as there isn’t something new and shiny to get drawn away to.
I work for a large and very successful software company and we have used Vista almost exclusively from day 1 without any major issues. I personally don’t see how people experience so many problems
I basically agree with you. I’ve never really seen any problems in Vista from my family’s use – and they’re definitely not technical.
I don’t use Vista because:
a. I don’t feel comfortable with the firewall (this is an education thing, which I don’t have time for yet)
b. I know the issues with XP and wonder about Vista
c. it does seem slow to my impatient self
d. its too expensive
To the end users I’ve seen (and this is beyond my family) they don’t even think about a, don’t really know about b (they just install updates, without thinking), they don’t notice c or d because it came with a shiny new Dell duel core CPU with 4GB memory.
Sometimes I wonder if as “techs” we over analyse things and loose sight of things just because we know too much.
.. So I guess you work at Microsoft?
Yes, you may have no problems, but you can’t justify the investment no matter how hard you try.
You’ll be surprised how many people are driving bad cars on the road thinking they are fine. If you think Vista is worth the money over XP then fine but in my view it’s just not, forced upgrade path aside.
If you haven’t had many problems, consider yourselves lucky. The vast majority of IT centers do not want to take the chance of breaking current and legacy apps in order to upgrade simply because MS tells us to do so.
Have experienced no app breakage with x64 Vista.
If you are dealing with centres that are running pre NT apps then I suppose there could be issues but also Vista does allow for compatability options with regards to running apps.
In a Graphics/Media environment I have yet to come accross application problems.
As for right click on a file and open with option, it’s there. Can’t remember if it’s hidden on a default install but it isn’t rocket science to get it configured.
Vista is different but so are all other alternatives to Windows XP and unfortunately, Vista is the only one that runs apps written for Windows XP or I would advocate alternatives to clients where they have XP only apps. Parallels on OS-X is a pain especially with running OS-X in a Windows Network (flaky network folder sharing between OS-X and Windows XP where the folders are hosted on Windows boxes) and WINE doesn’t cut it on Linux although Linux networks nicer with Windows boxes.
The reaction to Vista is nothing more than MS bashing that people do when ever they release something different. It happens all the time and in time when people get over themselves they will wonder what the fuss was all about just like they have with Windows XP. Sure, a service pack or 2 will help the process as well but hands up those who loved OS-X on it’s first release?
I have to agree with your upgrade statements. I have invested time and money in my tools. As with any serious user, my tools lock me to my platform.
I have to question those who says “My upgrade from XP to Vista failed so I switched to Distro xxx/ OS X/ or whatever.” #1, it is implied that this is your primary work box. Otherwise, why the heartache? Unless you’re a developer using cross-platform tools (Eclipse, Qt, text editors…) it would be almost impossible for a serious user to change primary platforms at the drop of a hat without serious retooling. I spent years switching from Mac OS to Windows. At best I could get a side box and split duties, but why complicate my workflow?
Only a casual net/ mail/ messaging/ media user can easily switch platforms. They can also ditch the PC for a phone.
One thing I wish Windows would finally do is create a 1-stop control panel similar to FireFox, Word 2007, or KDE’s System Settings. Category list on the left, settings on the right. I’ve given the new control panel an open-minded chance and hate it. I can’t believe 1 dept created Office 2007’s unified menus and another dept created this.
The fact is that Vista is/was made primarily for the home user. There isn’t anything that beneficial inside to make IT managers start frothing at the mouths, and cutting checks for (massive) hardware upgrades.
To reply to your post, I’ve been testing Vista Business on a box at work since Oct. of last year, and like you, it more or less works. Still has problems with McAfee 8.5 (mostly ePO), issues with Timbuktu, but by and large it fumbles it’s way through the plethora of common apps we use at work (Lotus 7, SAP, Office (which had better run swimmingly). There’s nothing that makes me happy I’m using it, however. Apart from those apps, I really don’t push it with much more. Solidworks will not run, and they are developing a whole separate Vista version for such, probably because of UAC. I can’t see our organization taking it on for at least the next 3 years…minimum. As long as we can deal with XP Volume licensing, and get security upgrades on the regular, we’ll be sticking with XP.
I’ll agree, there is one thing that Vista has fixed….taking the next drive letter for USB drives. XP is really a mess in that regard. MS should be publicly humiliated for the USB mess, and taking this long to actually get it right. They pushed for the standard 10+ years ago, and are just now, getting it straightened out. But I digress….
The simple fact is, as the article stated, WinXP is tried and true. It’s (relatively) stable. It brings very little new to the table in the business IT world. A properly configured Active Directory Policy structure, along with a few 3rd party apps, and you have very few reasons to begin planning a mass migration to an OS that is going to cause your helpdesk months of pain and suffering.
I think it is not a dilemma. Look at the Past.
1995: I hated W95, I did avoid it. I ended using and liking it.
1998: I hated W98, I did avoid it. I ended using and liking it.
2000: I hated W2k, I did avoid it. I ended using and liking it.
XP/Vista: I personally still can´t get friendly with it. Maybe in 6-24 months. Office: all desktops in my group are equipped with XP for 3-4 years now.
Anecdotal evidence! Yay!
On the other hand, I don’t agree with any of those things you’ve said. Does that mean I’m right?
I work in a shop that is a microsoft certified partner (so we get all our ms products dirt cheap) We are already planning on the upgrade to .net 3.5 (as soon as we get server 2k8 up and running in production), the only reason we use vs 2k5 is because BizTalk doesn’t support 2k8 yet.
We have also all been on Vista Business for almost a year now. There were some serious stuff to get passed when it comes to development processes, but now, everything is more or less worked out. I asked one of our IT guys how he likes Vista, from an admin perspective. He said he likes it alot, but that is probably only the case because we are all on pretty nice machines (2 ghz core 2 duo, SATA hds, 4 gigs of ram, etc)
Now, we not only have above average hardware, but in a general way we are definitely early adopters. That being said, when the rest of the world catches up, they wont find the nightmare they think they will.
I tend to agree, but remember at this point XP is still a supported product for which Microsoft will be obliged to release security updates to fix any such problem.
Ultimately if people are not given a viable alternative they *will* switch to Vista. Microsoft has *always* released crappy products and fixed them “eventually” or never, as the market demands. Look at AD… a terrible directory server, by all accounts, until Windows 2003 (now it’s merely sucky). They don’t need good products to make the sale, they just need to not allow a competitor to take business away from them.
Microsoft is Mr. We’ll-Fix-It-In-The-Next-Version-Trust-Us. Until someone can offer an alternative *upgrade path* (not just a replacement!) XP will be king, then Vista will be king.
Sad but true.
Actually, it’s the other way around. Companies started “standardising” on MS Office, and then people started pirating it to take home as that is what they were used to.
Computers were big in businesses long before they were ever popular in the home.
Then Apple had the bright idea of getting their software into the schools, so that kids would become experienced with it before they got to the business world. And then MS followed suit, and gave educational institutions huge discounts on MS Office.
So now you have MS Office in the schools and in the work force. What was a person to do, but use it at home? And since the universities were all using MS Office, that’s the format papers had to be turned in as.
Home users have very little impact on work/school users. And it’s the work/school sites that make up the largest portion of MS sales for Office.
Nailed it.
My Niece has her school laptop configured with Vista, Office 2007 and Macafee. It runs like a dog, she has to use Outlook 2007 for email and all her homework assignments are dictated to be done in Office 2007.
Total overkill and lockin from an education standpoint. I mean for god sake, Outlook 2007 for email for a 9 year old?
The laptop runs like a dog compared to their parents home system I configured which runs Vista x64 business, Windows Mail and Open Office. For AV I went with Avast Anti Virus which has a small footprint.
My neice asks if there is anything I can do to speed her system up but I have to respect the schools IT policy and wash my hands of her system.
Vista and many users poor exierence of it come down to poor choices of which version to run, hardware, and configuration. I’ve run it for over a year now, supported it and installed it for others and I find that if approached with a thoroughness of preparation and setup, it runs as well as XP. SP1 does help Vista considerably but so does running the x64 version. Most OEM’s install the x86 version of Vista which is a dog and MS’s biggest mistake on Vista’s release.
Nuff said, indeed
A year ago I’d probably try in vain to troll you off the park for that, but I can’t help but agree now.
In a business sense, I just can’t justify it. I’ve given it to two members of staff here, and also tried to use it for myself in an sysadmin role. It’s failed in both roles, offering nothing new except new issues.
I really can’t see this IT department rolling Vista out, ever.
I, for one, wish Microsoft would stop trying to make a showstopper OS and concentrate on providing a simple platform for their own and third-party applications. Forget bells and whistles, it’s the programs which matter, not the OS.
Here, here! Why keep trying to come up with something new and have to deal with all the “new” problems and incompatibilities when they could just fix the problems with their existing OS and software? If I wanted to be snide, I would say that MS OS’s are so badly designed that they can’t be fixed. But I really think it is because too many good technical decisions get over ruled for business or other non-technical reasons. I’ll leave it to the rest of you to surmise as to what those other reasons are. (hint: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish)
I got 2 PCs at home and they use W2k. I must say they do anything I want them to do and they do it in a way that has not changed over the past 8 years. My Hardware is 100% supported and W2k recieves updates via IE.
I got a testing environment in the Office with 3 Harddiscs: W2k, XP, Vista (3 GHz Intel with 2 GB RAM)
I tend to use W2k in most cases. It is quicker than the others, everything is more “cleaned up”. There are no gadgets that disturb me.
The disadvantages are not real disadvantages.
IE 7, .NET 3.5, DirectX 10, Readyboost …
These are all unnecessary things. At least for me.
Take my advice: W2k is the most comfortable system that I have used in the last 8 years and if you enter your serial number once – it won´t be checked/stored except for validity – everything is done. You will never be asked again for it and not 1 time will have any annoying pop-up.
I thought for Win2k you don’t need any serial number?
I’ve installed it a few times and never needed any.
Was I lucky?
I guess that was a special CD. All W2k CDs that I had so far asked for the serial number during the installation.
Win2k is an excellent Os indeed.The best from Redmond.
I think if Microsoft wants to redeem themselves with Windows 7 they should use the philosophy of Win2k as their guiding light.Fast,minimal,rock-stable and unobtrusive to the user.
I stayed on W2K for years after XP came out. It was a very solid and reliable OS. But eventually, I started running into problems finding drivers for some newer hardware that I acquired. I finally made the leap to XP some time after SP2 was released (I waited to hear others’ experiences with XP SP2 and decided the risk was acceptable). I would say that overall XP SP2 is acceptably stable and functional, and it is my main work OS now. I don’t see moving to Vista any earlier than SP2 if then. I do have a trial copy of W2K8 server that I will try out, though. We will see…
I whole-heartedly agree.
Windows 2000 is a great OS and if it wasn’t for one driver that won’t run on it I’d use it without question! (I believe the driver is forced to require XP regardless of whether it needs it)
There’s very little that XP offers over 2000, is there? Especially in a business context!
Win2003 server is also cool if you can get the drivers right. XP drivers worked fine here in 2 hardware setups.
I now have XP at work. Having the latest iTunes is nice but other than that I miss W2K (especially the filesystem search).
if MS tells you otherwise it only shows that they don’t know what they are doing
No seriously: MS is just now awakening to the fact that there is a new category of computers on the rise, which is the EEE and his future friends.
Asus wants to sell 5 million this year alone, 70% of which with XP ! Next year every manufacturer will have an EEE style offer. So MS will HAVE to keep XP or lose the entire market to Linux because Vista is just too fat. They figured that by now because when the EEE was released, there had been an early MS reflex to offer stripped down Vista for it. Now they came to reason and it is going to be XP. XP is here to stay and it will be supported.
Deja vue (sp?) all over again ;-)! I have seen/heard the exact same discussion regarding the upgrade from NT3.51 to W2K, and again from W2K to XP. I sell and support computers to the US Government (and some others as well). These organization will in most cases hold off for quite a while (years) before upgrading, first because acceptable capability and reliability aren’t there until SP2 or so, and because any new platform must pass security audits to ensure that the new platforms are not “leaky”. Because of this, MS has no choice but to continue supporting the earlier platform for quite some time after each successor is released. Note that all Tier 1 PC manufacturers offer their systems either with the latest MS OS (Vista currently) or with the previous OS (XP) loaded. All USG RFQs that I see now specify XP as the required OS, not Vista.
If there’s stuff that’s Vista only, then good riddance.
Most people have a plenthora of software that they use on XP, and arn’t likely to move on from. I have a DVD of prized XP software (warez and what not), which does all the things I’ll ever need… Most of the software I couldn’t care if there’s a newer version (aka. extra bloat) of as well.
1/2 the software I use is open source anyway, and most of them still support Windows 95!
Vista will go down to being the next Windows Millenium edition.
From The article
“In fact, when Microsoft made these pronouncements, those of us “in the know” (software developers and programmers familiar with the intricacies of .Net coding) had a good laugh. Nobody in their right minds would produce any complex piece of traditional, fat client software using the sluggish, bug-ridden .Net Framework”
Now he’s grasping at straws, million of Developers use the .net framework every day, and it is almost as old, and mature as XP itself.
I found the article a bit of a stretch anyway, but that whole paragraph is just nonsense.
The article states that Windows & is rumored to be coming out in 18-24 months, but MS itself has stated that it will be 3 years from Vista being released, which makes it 2010. Add in the inevitable delays, and you are looking at 2011, maybe even 2012.
Seems a bit long to wait for an upgrade, especially when MS will be forcing the issue by making XP harder to get, and device manufacturers slowly cutting out XP support.
Seems like we may have to upgrade whether we like it or not, eventually.
Altho I do not agree with the articals assumptions. I have recomended our shop keep XP as out standard OS until 2009 at least.
this has to do with the many practical reasons and less with vista issues.
I think the artical glossed over many things while leaving things out. as an example, drivers in vista now run in user space, this is where some of the preformence hit comes from. but; your gaining stability and driver security. I see, Vista as apples OSX 10.0 its a good first step. but needs time for drivers and the OS to mature.
-Nex6
Few people buy Windows. It comes with your PC. Pretty soon it will not be available with new PCs. You will buy a new PC. It will have Vista. Some of the hardware will not even have XP drivers. You can take the blue pill. Or you can take the blue pill.
That’s the point of the article isn’t it? You can skip Vista altogether until the next version.
I do have that Vista disk the came with my computer somewhere… Just not on the hard disk.
It depends on when you are buying your next computer and when the next version of Windows comes out. Shockingly, they may not actual release the next version of Windows as soon as the are predicting.
A real Enterprise OS should have long stable release cycles with support. MS trying to kill off WinXP, at the same time releasing WinXP SP3, is a weird thing. A real Enterprise aspiring company would never do something like that. For instance Sun is _guaranteeing_ backwards binary compatibility to Solaris v2.6. Now Solaris is v5.10. In my opinion that is a main difference. To force the customers to upgrade to a newer system every third year, is not Enterprise-esque.
what does this mean? Installing Solaris Sparc 6 on new Hardware? Together with old applications written for it?
Or is this a nice sentence spoken out by a Sun PR-Guy? Sounds more like that to me.
For me, it means that when I develop a new environmental application, and build it correctly for Solaris, it will run for all of my Solaris customers (some of which are still running Solaris 4). Ditto for AIX and IRIX builds. Not true for Linux (glibc is not stable across versions). Much worse situation (“DLL Hell”) with Microsoft.
Well, I would differ with that based on personal experience. Several years ago I was supporting Command and Control applications on SPARC/Solaris 8. Several of these applications would barf all over themselves unless they were running only on Solaris 8 and only on a certain specific build date of Solaris 8. Admittedly, some of these applications were EXTREMELY complex, but you get the picture…
Of all the OSes with which I have worked, the MS NT-based Windows platform has proven to present the least problems with regards to hardware and application portability across Window releases. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have problems in other areas…
My company buys PC’s OEM. (Not my choice, but there it is)
Come June, no more XP. Just Vista.
I’ve explained about doing Volume Licensing, but that doesn’t solve it all.
Not only is Microsoft cutting off support for XP OEM, but the PC OEM’s have already started cutting off Driver and Development support for their new lines (Sony for example, changed their line over to Vista only, proclaiming no drivers or support for throwing XP on your system instead)
Even if I want to backdate their systems, I’ll run into problems.
Slowly, the other OEM’s will start doing this. By June, Vista will be the only Microsoft OS offered.
We’ve already taken a look at our infrastructure, and determined that a slew of both hardware, software, and server upgrades would need to be done in order for VIsta to be fully supported in our network.
This puts my company(and possibly others) in a bind.
I’ve run Vista, and I’m under the same conclusion most of the reviewers have made, which is that Vista is not enough of an upgrade to justify, and XP will do the job.
This is why we’re looking at a Bootcamp/Parallels/Fusion environment on a Mac. We can still retain our infrastructure, while upgrading the components we need on our timeframe. Also, it gives us an opportunity to do a gradual shift from Microsoft being a the core of our environment to simply a software licensee, and it forces us to take a look at what we use in our infrastructure, and find out if we can move away from a Microsoft-centric platform towards a more cross-platform environment.
(No this is not an ad for Apple, these are just my findings after investigation of my options)
If I’m going to have to upgrade my users to a new OS, I’d rather give them something that will let them run their XP programs, but also give them an interface that’s easy and intuitive to use, and so far Mac has done that for us.
How can I say this. If you are a Mac user how often have you had to throw out your old hardware and buy new hardware.. XP has been out for over five years now.
The truth of the matter is, when OS X came out most old beige power Macs had to hit the sidewalk. The same thing is happening for newer powerPC Macs. Statistics show this year that the number of Intel Macs in use will surpass the number of PowerPCs on an order of like 2:1.. These old PowerPC based Macs are being discarded too..
So historically people have been required to make different hardware purchases on the Mac more often than Windows upgraders..
I don’t mind that Vista is designed for faster processors and new 64-bit envioronments and newer graphics cards. I don’t complain if I have to buy a new PC to get better performance or give up some legacy hardware to run the latest version. It’s the product of a throw-away society. We aren’t all tweakers and the latest geration works for me.
Most Windows upgrades have been painful for users from Windows 2000 and on since.. The complaints are due to the fact that Microsoft services everyone including people who haven’t been through an upgrade cycle.
The new hardware is a compelling reason to upgrade especially with things like Server 08 coming. If you don’t think you’ll be stuck in obsolete hardware situations and a more costly upgrade with Apple think again history will prove you wrong too..
I appreciate the comments.
However to mention a couple of things…
We haven’t recycled hardware with Apple because we got into using Macs after the Intel changeover. Unless Jobs decides to go to another processor, most of Apple’s systems will continue to run OS X and XP long enough for our needs.
Also, this is a business environment, where both hardware, applications software, network based software and servers would be affected. You may be right that just a hardware upgrade might not be such a bad thing, but there are other systems to deal with in regards to Vista in my environment, and it would be a serious undertaking. Management’s decision, along with mine, is that we are unwilling to support a Vista environment until all infrastructure changes are made.
This gives us time to evaluate and determine each business process. If it works better in a Microsoft environment, so be it. But if the process can be moved to a platform that isn’t dependent on a Microsoft OS (web based, Java based, etc.) then it doesn’t matter what we use.
What I’m annoyed about is that in our view, Microsoft and it’s OEM lock-in are determining the technology we use in our company. Senior management doesn’t like that. They would rather dictate the type of technology used in our business for our business.
This solution gives them that opportunity.
I just don’t hear any buzz about vista,
infact xp still has nearly 80% of the market.
Vista works better with a computer(new)made for it.
most computers that did not start with it has a
painful experience. I like xp it gets everything
i want done and i still have win98se on two computers
If xp becomes dirt, linux,bsd, or reactos will
hopefully, be ready by then.
“…Vista works better with a computer(new)made for it…”
Erm…I beg to differ My HP DV 9535nr laptop works *quite* a bit better with XP on it. In fact, I lived with Vista for a month (I should get an award =]), and when I could not believe that my dual processor system was booting SLOWER than my 3.5 year old single processor XP laptop, I decided to jettison it. About the only indulgence I allowed myself was some aspects of the Vista “look” (Ex. transparent window borders/start menu, ala windowsblinds).
I’m not switching to Vista, unless Microshaft puts a gun to my head, and hopefully by then ReactOS will be my lead shield 😉
Edit: quoted too much
Edited 2008-03-18 20:59 UTC
A major problem of MS Windows has traditionally been relatively poor OS security. Normally you just cannot imagine connecting an MS Windows PC to the Internet without also using powerful third party antivirus and firewall programs (preferably also other third party anti-malware software).
I don’t know for sure (I’m a Linux user and have never used Vista; the only MS Windows version I have used on my home PC in almost a decade is Windows 2000) but at least they advertise that Vista should have much better security than previous Windows versions? The writer of the article doesn’t seem to be convinced even in that sense, however…
But – at least Vista tries to do things in a more secure way. That is a big plus in my opinion, although Vista might have plenty of other problems.
Any comments on that from people who have used both Vista and XP (or W2k), and are able to compare the security in Vista and XP?
Edited 2008-03-18 19:48 UTC
I’ll agree with anyone when they believe “my current system supports my needs so I don’t need to upgrade.” As Byte magazine said a long time ago: “a stable system doesn’t change. Duh.” It’s sensible.
I ask a lot from my boxes: development, research, college, photography, graphics, and music. No existing OS’s organizational tools were sufficient so I planned for Vista. Vista works flawlessly (for me) on a home-brew box built for Vista. Just like any OS experiment, I approached it with an open mind and a lot of preparation. I waited over a year before installing it.
System Search, Explorer’s new organizational capabilities (columns, sorting views, etc), the breadcrumb bar, all improve usability. Except for search, no 3rd party tool can duplicate this functionality on XP.
New admin reporting tools are far better – software explorer, process explorer, problem reporting, update history, etc help in understanding system status. The system tools are reason enough to upgrade.
Many other small improvements add up to a great improvement over XP.