Reader Feedback Friday: Vista
It's all you this Friday, literally. We're clearing out a backlog of our finest
reader e-mails and then heading off into an 85-degree afternoon. In October.
In New England. Hooray for global warming!
Anyway, regarding our post about XP
hanging on a little longer, we actually got a little Vista love in return...sort
of. Diane says:
"With minimal experience, I love Vista, but the market isn't ready
for a system that only works with all the bells and whistles on the latest
hardware. We do love nurturing every last bit of performance from our dinosaurs.
And it's not that the public or corporatations are not willing to adopt it
-- they just don't have enough time or incentive to upgrade all the hardware
or be 'bothered.'
"Am I bothered? Only one of my five PCs meets the standards for running
Vista Ultimate, and frankly I see no reason to upgrade them at this time.
As for Office 2007, until somebody actually knows how to design a SharePoint
Server, the big plus of Groove will become just as muddied. A few years ago,
I used SharePoint very effectively as an application information repository.
Since then, I have not seen or heard of an implementation that was time-saving
rather than another quagmire of useless searches.
"As for IE7, well, most of us are afraid -- very afraid! How many
e-mails from major companies have you had telling you their site would not
work with IE7? Beyond that, the interface is relatively unfamiliar. I do like
it, but still find it frustrating and don't understand all of the new 'features.'
And I am supposed to convince people of its technical benefits?"
Diane, we're with you on IE7. Well, actually, we're not -- we use Firefox at
home and IE6 at work. But we hear you.
For his part, Alistair, who writes from the U.K., joins the chorus of folks
saying that Vista's struggles have been more about third parties than about
the operating system itself.
"We've been running Vista in the IT deptartment from December '06,
and it has been fine after some initial tweaks (mainly badly written drivers).
We're running all our legacy apps on it, and it has been way more stable than
XP Pro. Uptime was 60 days with no problems -- updates forced reboots.
"I can't help feeling that one whole lot of the issue is caused by manufacturers
shipping shoddy drivers and IT not taking the time to really get to know the
OS. It is actually good -- it just needs a bit more work than XP.
"Incidentally, I also think that a lot of the supposed shortfalls that
are getting whinged [that's "whined" here in the States -- LP]
about by business are the result of security measures that the industry has
been asking Microsoft to address for years."
Very possibly true, Alistair, especially the bit about shoddy drivers. It's
amazing that this still seems to be a problem with Vista going on being a year
old.
Have any more thoughts about Vista? Send them my way at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on October 05, 2007