I am sure you run a Mac and rave about the Ipod while slamming the Zune or other technology.

I have been running Vista since it was first released last November and the first machine was a P4 2.8 w/ 1.5gb ram (same machine I had for my XP workstation) and vista ran just fine. No performance issues at all, in my daily use of it, it ran as fast as XP if not a little faster. I have since been running Vista on 4 other machines and have had nothing but success with all of them. I wouldn't go back to XP unless they paid me to!

As for your comment about it taking more resources. Of course it does. Take a historic look at the majority of OS's (not just Microsoft) and all of them will take more system resources and take advantage of the increase in cheap technology.

Go 4 or 5 years back and you are prob. paying about the same or less for a laptop or computer with MUCH greater spec's. An OS maker would be foolish to not take advantage of the increases and gains in technology and the realitivly low price things are today. Some PC's of the XP days have 256mb of memory, where todays PC's have at least that much for Video memory!

I find it interesting that people always write these stories leaning on the "bad" experiance vs. getting a good sample of people actually using it.

I recently bought a new laptop for home use that came with Vista Home Premium edition and 1GB of RAM. I very quickly determined that an upgrade to 2GB was needed. It runs great now. However, I would have to agree with Mr. Kennedy on this one. If I were in charge of an IT department I would be very hard pressed to find a valid reason for recommending that the company should bite the bullet and upgrade to Vista. And, Mr. Kennedy, you missed one very important issue: software compatibility. At home for quite some time I had been running MS Office Pro 2000. When I installed it on my new laptop I discovered that Outlook 2000 would not function correctly on it. I decided then to drop office and went with OpenOffice.Org and Thunderbird for my E-mail client. So far its worked pretty good that way. Other apps don't work quite the same way. I wasn't sure if Visual Basic 6 would work. It does if you run it as an administrator. Same for Visual Studio 2005. Only thing is every time you launch them it gives you a warning message. Its a nuisance I've gotten used to at home. I just wonder how many other older software products are broken when they try to run on Vista. Fortunately, for me, its not a real big issue but again, if I had that IT director's job, I'd say no to Vista. Microsoft has alot more work to do.

There are a number of folks who can succesfully run VISTA... the problem for most IT shops is that many of the vendors software systems that they must support do NOT. My org has a critical app list 30 vendors deep ... and we have 4 of them that currently support VISTA. Explain to me how one can possibly make VISTA work in a corporate setting under these circumstances? You can't. There is no compelling reason to adopt the OS... PERIOD.

With regard to whoknowswho's ignorant comment above, I've been reading Mr. Kennedy's posts for some time, and he's not a member of Cult Mac.

As someone who has beta tested Vista from early last year, who has two copies of Vista Business installed on PCs that have swappable hard drives loaded with XP Pro SP2, and who's been using Windows since version 1, I agree that there's no compelling reason to run Vista vs. XP. All the promised next-generation goodies, with few exceptions, have been left out, the security is really not that much better than XP's, and broken hardware compatibility, to say nothing of software compatibility, means that it really is intended for all-new equipment and apps. I myself haven't seen the 2 to 1 speed penalty that is mentioned, but I do know it does strange things that never happened with XP. Finally, in a day when a new copy of OS X Leopard costs $129, how does Microsoft have the cojones to charge $400 for Vista Ultimate?

I really wanted Vista to be a success, but I have to agree--for the enterprise, it's better to wait for Windows 7 and hope that Microsoft has got their act together when it comes out.

I have been running Vista on a Acer laptop with 2 GBytes of RAM for 2 months. I have not encountered any problem. In fact I am so far very pleased. I definitely will not go back to XP as Vista is simply more fun. Besides, I found the DOS command window improved a lot.

But I only run a limited number of software titles: SAS, R, Mozilla and Office 2007. I also have a USB HDTV card which works very well.

I think This-IT-Shop-Says hit it on the head perfectly. I'm part of a pilot group for a worldwide hotel company that is testing Vista, and of the 50 or so PCs (maybe 75 users) we have on it (the majority of which are using the same Lenovo 3Ghz dual-core 2Gb system, results are all over the board. Like TISS, we also have a list of mission-critical proprietary apps that aren't all supported in Vista, and not all of them are going to be any time relatively soon.

Performance-wise, we have different users working on the same PCs that both like it for its eye-candy and (rarely) improved performance and others that absolutely hate it because of the frequent lock ups and slower performance. I personally have an older 3Ghz P4/2Gb RAM system (not our organization's current standard) in a dual boot configuration that is running XP and Vista Enterprise. Previously, it ran XP & Vista Business. In either configuration, a large number of tasks were painfully slow in either of the two Vista flavors, when the same operations scream in XP, and I'm absolutely not alone in this - several other IT managers on this project complain of the same results.

Overall, I think it's a crap shoot. Granted, there will be several users out there that will love Vista and never have a problem with it, but the uncertainty and the lack of reliability from a performance standpoint make Vista a no-go at this point.

Oh, and I can't help but add (sorry)...

I'm sure there are a lot of users who can successfully run Vista. Heck, there's probably a few people out there who play Russian roulette and don't shoot themselves in the head.

Doesn't mean I want to try it.

Mr. Kennedy: Your commentary is right on.

My only worry is what happens 17 months from now, when we expect to see some apps vendors stop supporting XP. Windows 7 will still be years away.

I know several small businesses who had this happen with Windows 98 in 2005 and 2006. They had been hoping to hold out for Vista, but apps vendors made them bite the bullet and get XP. Of course, in that case it turned out to be a *good* thing. :-)

Aloha,
McGarrett

Vista Service Pack 1 RC0 has not been compiled/optimized for speed

I am just so sorely disappointed that Microsoft didn't do Vista and Server 2008 properly and only release a 64 bit version. Did they not learn anything from IBM and OS/2. Oh well maybe Windows 7 will do that.

Please don't make a big deal out of this!

All MS has to do is to slow XP down in the final release, and you will lose the nice boost that SP3 could have given you IF you had kept your mouths shut ...

The one thing I wish you would have commented on is the 32 vs 64 bit. I have run both 32 and 64 bit and have not found (in the 64 bit) the glitches and slow downs that you have mentioned in the article. Sure its a bulkier program. It was suppose to be as mentioned by one of the previous posters. I'm sure in 3-5 years you all will be saying different things about Vista. When XP rolled out many were critical of its performance as well. However as hardware technology became cheaper and more powerful XP was the bread and butter that many companies came to rely on. As technologies move to next gen...vista will be what many of you will be looking for. Cutting edge technologies like Wirless-N, Bluetooth compatibility, and firewire, and usb 3.0 even...will all make Vista a must own software. If you try and run xp on a machine built in 01 or even 02, you will have some serious glitches and system resource hogs. Think of all the blue screens that XP generated. When it comes down to it right now there are not a lot of companies that are upgrading, but over the next 3 - 5 years Vista will be the choice for upgrading. Just my humble opinion.

Maybe it's time to take another look at Linux...

Randall, you've put the final nail in the coffin for Vista with our company. I've been a beta tester of Vista since August of 2005, and while Aero and some other features are cool, there is no compelling reason for large enterprises to move to Vista. And with no performance gains from SP1 (I haven't seen any), XP will continue to be the OS of choice for large enterprises.

The one issue that will rear its ugly head soon is XP driver support for newer hardware. XP already doesn't like USB that well, and with Microsoft determined to set an end date for XP support, large enterprises will be caught between Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers.

If there's a long wait for Windows "7", enterprises may be forced to move to Vista, in which case they'll have to heavily tweak and tune it in an attempt to gain back some of the lost perfomance.

I think the point that the writer is getting to is that for an Enterprise environment it makes no sense to upgrade. Why go through another round on licensing costs to upgrade to something that has little value versus what you already have and paid for? If we are talking about an environment with more than 500 users then there is no reason to upgrade at this point or at any time in the near future. Why pay for something and go through all of the testing of a new OS that offers very little to no benefits. If you have your home PC running Windows Vista and it works great then that is fantastic for you, but when you have to pay for and support a new OS for that many users then that is a completely different story.

I am in a similar predicament. I have a new laptop I'm buying for a user who needs to work offsite. Because of the specific needs of the main software vendor we use, I am having to purchase a Vista notebook from a specific vendor. The regular vendor we use for all other desktop/laptop hardware (Dell) is thankfully still offering XP, but this other vendor is not. So, I'll have one Vista machine amongst a sea of WinXP PRO machines, and since I can't afford to upgrade at home (not that I'd want to) I have a whole new learning experience (& probably headache) waiting for me. I'd rather stay w/ XP until the next Server OS is out & we get the equivalent desktop OS, much like the XP/2003 team that is so venerable now.

Perhaps MS is trying to get rid off some customers. How much compatibility issues can raise if i try to upgrade to leopard instead of vista?

Like someone before me said, "linex anyone?"

Microsoft is screwing us and somehow enough of us keep buying it to encourage their marketing peoplep to think they are successfull. STOP!! Resist their force feeding of us.

The only way to gain the final performance advantage that hardware suppliers bring is is to shrink, economize, and improve the efficiency of our exiting operating system. However, most users could care less, which is why people lamely buy the new stuff. But power users and IT people SEE the performance reductions. I want to be able to do what I do today FASTER. I could care less about some new fangled GUI.

Vista is Windows ME in a new skin...

just ook at all the people jumping on the apple cart , that says it all . this is millenium round 2 !

I'm a fan of Windows since the first versions long time ago. Of course, I made the follow up of Vista since it was only a project called "Palladium".

I remember reading an article about this "project" that would be Longhorn latter and thought to my self reading it "This must be a very bad taste joke or something, MS can't be so fool to create an OS like this...". Now, several years latter they were quite stupid to make it a reality.

And that was the first time I felt really betrayed by MS because it was only a project and already stinks. It was very sad to see the huge requirements, the DRM engine and the legal spyware from this OS. Now top it with the disgusting way they are forcing it to everyone.

For those who are happy with their Vista, please read the article from Peter Gutman "A Vista cost annalisys" and if you survive to this, then read the new agreement included in Vista, where it states that is gathering personal info from YOU in a regular basis and then is sent it to MS.

After that, I don't want Vista in PC, not even pirated !!

Good Luck.

If you buy a new PC/laptop with Vista Business or Ultimate you are allowed to downgrade it to XP Professional - see http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/f/4/5f4c83d3-833e-4f11-8cbd-699b0c164182/royaltyoemreferencesheet.pdf or search for "Windows Vista Downgrade Rights"

Based on personal experience (in other words, there are no real metrics here. Just my own observations) 64 bit edition of Vista is a significant performance upgrade over any edition of XP (Including VP Pro 64), whereas 32 bit Vista is noticeably less efficient than XP simply because of the additional overhead with the frippery.

So my recommendation has been to only upgrade to Vista of you are running an AMDx64 or an Intel dual core processor. Otherwise don't bother.

Of course, both OS's loose in just about every performance and ease of use category when compared to Ubuntu, but that's neither here nor there.

Vista, Yes some users will love this "OS"
Yes Most professionals will Hate it
Yes Lots of Software won't run on it
M$ Biggest Problem is when Apple Steal the Users who love it, They are perfect Apple Junkies, You sell em any crap with a logo and they will buy it not only that but with their limited experience they will shout their love for this crap from every rooftop
Vista Lovers are Users that Ain't fount Apple Yet !

There is a really good reason why Vista is a failure. It is simply Media PC with a different name. Oh, yeah and the fact that so many pc's available on the market are underpowered for this operating system, oh and the fact that there is a distinct lack of a driver base, and .... need i go further?

Microsoft needs to FINALLY slow down just a tad.
Same with there latest offerings of Office, in my humble opinion.

The problem most IT shops are finding is that from an end-user perspective other than the shiny improvements to the UI very little appears to have changed. The irony is that Vista is truly geared for the overpowered workstation world of the corporation, where the under the hood improvements to Vista would make more sense. So what are these mythical improvements? Network level authentication, allows a user to enter any environment and connect to a network with a good default configuration, unfortunately the true benefits of this won't be available until the release of Windows Server 2008 later this year. A better and more reliable driver model, also responsible for the Mossberg myth of large scale incompatibility, Microsoft moved large chunks of the driver model out of Kernel mode, this slows things down some true, on the other hand it makes the operating system and the driver model more durable. I would expect this to be more drastic in Windows 7. There's more of course, mostly geared towards the Enterprise environment.

For those waiting for Windows 7 I wouldn't hold my breath on 2009. If Vista is any indicator I would look to see Windows 7 in late 2010 or 2011. Furthermore, on the surface it likely will be little different from Vista, again because most of what was changed, and what truly matters is under the hood. We were let down by Vista because we were expecting another improvement like 95 was from 3.1, that will never happen in the foreseeable future. I would expect improvements in durability, and security. Which to no surprise is precisely what I got when I bought Vista.

To the IT managers out there, wait for Server 2008 to upgrade to Vista. To the home user, upgrade when you get new hardware not before.

I am not an IT professional, but I can certainly understand why many are so hesitant to adopt this new OS. Where is the benefit? I used to work in the corporate world, but these days my computer usage is strictly as a home user. About a year ago I made the switch to Ubuntu Linux. My PC runs so much better, and you just can't beat the open source concept of software. I don't think I'll ever buy another copy of Windows. Especially with the "digital rights management" that's built in to Vista. I really don't need my OS to decide when to allow my hardware to function. It's my computer. Isn't my OS supposed work for me, not against me?

I gave Vista a good solid one month evaluation on my new hardware. As a home user who games in the online world of first person shooters, and with various games, I've personally found no reason to keep the operating system. With gaming alone, the system requirements are generally much steeper than with XP. You need more CPU power, need more RAM, and DX10 is buggy to say the least.

Before anyone jumps down my throat about my hardware. Intel Q6600 core-2 quad, 2GB 667Mhz RAM, Nvidia 8800GT OC2 all running on an ASUS P5N-E SLI motherboard. The only older piece of hardware I have left is my Creative Labs Audigy MP3 sound card, and it functions just fine with both Vista and XP. In fact, all the hardware does, I just don't appreciate the fact that Vista makes the games perform so much slower, along with everything else.

Is there anyone who see the similarity here?
Windows 98 SE upgrade to Windows Millenium?

Windows 98 was also slim, neat and with a little work you got it to run fine.. and Windows ME was bloated, slow and filled with bugs who never got a solution.

I see Windows Vista as a until-somthing-that-works-comes-along OS.. Let it come then let them realize their mistake and then make a new OS that works.

I do not want to work as a techie on a bigger company and have a boss that comes to and tells me "we have decided to upgrade our network to Vista" and that poor guy that works on the company support...

A Newly installed Windows XP uses around 180-220 MB RAM while a newly installed Windows Vista uses around 400 MB RAM and sometimes even up to 6-800 MB RAM. This tells me that all the applications started to keep the machine alive is far more "fat" then earlier.. what more information does they contain? Not 200.000.000 additional bytes for some lousy graphics?

Its almost that i could write an OS based on JAVA and get a better result..

Microsoft should not force us to "upgrade" to Vista. MS dont have to admit that Vista is a big mistake, they just should let us continue using and bying XP. Is it to much to ask for?

Regarding Enterprise OS, I am sceptic. Every Windows version breaks compatibility. MS forces us to upgrade every 3 year. Enterprise should allow long support and never ever abandon old customers. For instance, Sun _guarantees_ binary backward compatibility back to Solaris v2.6. Now Solaris is v5.10. That is Enterprise. Unless MS changes mindset, windows will never be Enterprise.

MS is selling Microsoft Home Server, and it is corrupting files. A server that corrupts files. That is great. The patch will arrive in june. There are lots of info on the web. Someone blogged at MSDN about he lost 180GB of data. photos and stuff.

Different systems will, for obvious reasons, allways have down and upsides to them. The fact that vista works perfectly fine for some people does not say anything at all about its efficiency versus annother system, such as XP. XP works fine for a lot of people, and a lot of enterprises and organisations.

From what i can see here those that claim to run vista without problems are generally amateurs like myself, probably in many cases incapable of even identifying the flaws and lacks of their system!

On the contrary most of those who recent vista seem to be people who have actually used it professionally, and in most cases this is proven by their ability to point out specific problems.

The fact is that vista is nothing but a bunch of extremely "cool" functions for home users, most of them are directly copied from OSX. The windows tradidion is carried on....

Ofcourse there are those that appreciate this. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, it's just a good thing. But with enterprises and organizations this is NOT THE CASE! They speak ONE language, and that is currency. If there were any economic winnings in migrating to vista most of them surely would do so. But there isn't. If you use your computer for work or if you run a system with many users, vista is probably the most inefficient OS today.