Asta La Vista
Windows Vista
When Windows Vista was made public over a year ago I decided to wait a few months for some of the kinks to be worked out between Microsoft and third party developers (software and drivers). I actually ended up waiting almost a year (after Vista was made available to business customers) and reformatted my work laptop to dual boot XP/Vista. Vista was made my default OS and I started using it full-time in August of 2007. I gave it a shot, the absolute best shot I possibly could, but last month (January 2008) I decided to make XP my default OS again. That’s right, I *UPGRADED* to Windows XP and eagerly await XP SP3 to be released. Why you ask? Here are some of the MANY reasons I have to answer that question:
- File copying took FOREVER in Vista. Things that should have taken a few seconds took minutes. Things that should have been copied in three or four minutes took over an hour at times which is obviously unacceptable.
- I got more system crashes on this particular system using Vista than I ever did with XP meaning it simply wasn’t stable. Granted that Vista did a better job at getting the OS back into a usable state after a crash, the problem was that it simply happened to frequently. For the record, I was using Vista drivers for all of my hardware and yes, my laptop had specific Vista drivers made for it even though it was purchased before Vista was made available.
- At first Vista appeared to be a bit faster than XP, but in reality once I installed all of my needed software it ran much slower than XP (my system has 2GB of RAM so that isn’t the issue).
- Even a year after Vista was released some software that I frequently use didn’t have a Vista compatible version so I was stuck with using alternatives which I didn’t like (in most circumstances).
- Vista comes in five flavors. Why does Microsoft make you choose from FIVE different version of the same OS? With XP I had one choice for business, XP Pro (or XP Home for personal). With Vista it is either Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, Vista Business, Vista Enterprise and Vista Ultimate. No thanks. I’d rather just choose Vista Home or Vista Business. Vista Ultimate has turned out to be a total crock considering it is $400 and even Vista Business is $300! Again, no thanks.
I don’t mind for a minute to just simply skip Vista altogether which is what I plan to do. I am in charge of IT at a company with a little over 100 desktops and I simply refuse to *upgrade* to Vista. What worries me though is that Microsoft doesn’t make it easy to go that route. It is fairly easy to skip one version of Windows, skipping two is quite a bit more difficult. What happens if the next version of Windows is as crappy or worse than Vista?
For the record I have run a dual Windows/OSX configuration at home for a few years but last month I made the move to all Macs. I wish I could make the same move at work but unfortunately software manufacturers haven’t figured out that Macs could play a great role in Business, especially now considering how bad Microsoft has made themselves look.
