Anorak Nation: Discussion: Re: Windows Vista

Well, let me state my hand at the outset. I'm not employed as a techie and I don't have Vista installed on my systems at home. I have, however, done some work on it on my customers' PCs, but I recognise it's not the same as using it yourself full-time, so I don't really have that first hand experience.

XP is a pretty stable product having been in the market for around 7 years now and is now on its third Service Pack. My employer is a local authority with some 5000 dekstop PCs and just over 10,000 employees/computer users. We only moved over to XP in the last couple of years, previously having had a mix of mainly Windows 2000 Professional and some Windows 98 installations. I'm not aware of any ME installations - that was widely regarded as a turkey. Over the last 12 months to reduce the servicing overhead of having umpteen different versions out in the field, they went through a process of "Enterprising" most of the PCs with the result that most of the applications reside on the servers at the Civic Centre. It's all about reducing the potential support headaches. There's an expression in the IT field - "pioneers end up with arrows in their backs" - meaning untried, untested kit results in tears and support heartache. If you've got the level of kit my employer has to support then you play safe and understandably so. I'm not aware of my employer's plans and timescales to go over to Vista, but I guess they will have to make that move at some point - I get the impression they're in no rush at this stage.

I have, however, some techie friends who installed Vista on their systems and most reverted back to XP for two main reasons. Firstly, the driver support (or lack of) on Vista. I note the effort that Microsoft have put in regarding this issue but this hasn't tempted them back. Secondly, Vista is a memory hog, to do the fancy things that make it look good, it takes additonal RAM - there ain't no free lunch in this world. The additional RAM required has variously been quantified as 1 to 2 gig extra. Ok, not the issue it might have been a few years back as we've seen RAM prices falling in the last 5 years, but still an issue for older systems that may have a RAM limitation on the motherboard. It's worth also looking at the comment in the techie press regarding Service Pack 1 (which was regarded as a fairly substantial rewrite of Vista) - it was accused of introducing as many new problems as the ones it resolved! It will be interesting to see how things have settled down by the time SP2 is released. That may be the time to move, for me, maybe...

I've not liked what I've seen of Vista, it seems like change for its own sake. I know Microsoft's business model relies on them to keep selling the latest versions of all of their products but you have to look at whether the change is worth the upgrade. At some stage I will probably have to bite the bullet but I haven't seen any convincing arguments yet. Interestingly enough, after a few years of threatening to do it, I've finally looked at Linux - it's a bit of a learning curve but not as bad as I thought and I've been pleasantly surprised with the Ubuntu distro. It's highly likely that at least a couple of my PCs will be moved over to Linux. Based on the techie advice given to me, those of my students looking to buy a new PC have been encouraged to go for XP, rather than Vista, if there is a choice open to them from their dealer.

As for Firefox 3, I love it. I haven't tried the latest IE upgrade, but at this stage the only advantages of IE over FF are that Youtube works for me, whereas I've not yet sorted out why the "flash" bit won't work using FF (it didn't on FF2 either) plus FlashGet (a download manager) picks up the relevant keystrokes from IE but doesn't from FF. Apart from that, works a treat for me.

Just my 2 cents worth....

Alan
--------------
Alan Milewczyk aka The Pole with Soul
Soul pix on the net at www.soulman1949.com