On application incompatibility... It's easy to say that an "enterprise company" can force a vendor to release a new version for Vista, but for an individual just trying to keep the same functionality he had under XP, it either means he is screwed if the app vendor hasn't release an upgrade, OR it means more $$$ for the upgrade just to get back to where he was. I know several people who bought new laptops with Vista then had to spend another $500-1000 "re-buying" all of their personal apps. Perhaps they should have known that a head of time, but all of them were very disappointed for having to spend as much on new software as they spent on their new PC, all because of Vista. Personally, I would be looking at $2000-3000 in software and peripheral hardware upgrades simply to support Vista. For now (and perhaps the next 3-4 years) I'll stick with XP. XP and my current applications do everything I need them to do.

I have never heard such a technocratic diatribe of snobbery in my life.

"Yeah, its more resource intensive, so go buy a new computer.... after all, we buy new cars every few years."

Come on... not all of us can afford new cars every few years. (My last car was 17 years old when I traded it in.) Same with computers. Bill Gates is heralded by the purple kool-aid drinkers as the man who brought computing to the masses, now he is being a bit more selective. Get some money and stop slumming, eh?

"Tell the software vendors that they must support Vista or you won't buy their software" ?!?

Hah... look what we got from Microsoft when they "listened" to their users... a pile of bloatware so crowded with bling that these marvelous (sic) new tools are reduced to anoyance rather than selling points. They have to find some lackey to write an article to remind people that Vista, for all its faults, might actually have an improvement or two in it if you look hard enough... or believe thier marketing department.

"Its not Microsoft's fault that no one will support their OS."

You seem to forget that Microsoft is also a SOFTWARE VENDOR. You have elevated the company to emperor status. They have as much responsibility to support software vendors as the other vendors have to support them. It is THIS assumption of fiat that drives people to alternate operating systems.

And as for that last paragraph... the one about we are not allowed to complain. Wow... I have no words.

When it comes down to it, I read this article as "This OS is bigger. It costs more and you can like it and turn out your pockets or hate it and turn out your pockets. Either way, Microsoft has spoken and we must now pay." I could really go on a rant here.

Funny thing is, there is a corollary in government. I'll lay out good odds that you are a Democrat.

I agree we are meant to advance. Take your car for instance, sure you get better technology if you pay more, but you are using more fuel, drive a heavier car, it cant drive on all roads and you still have to buy extras for the airbag to work. I am afraid MS are going to have to do better than that. When I dont need an antivirus and I can keep my privacy, use any monitor I want and they build in compatibility with all other OS's I'll look at it. In the mean time I wouldnt sniff in the direction of vista.

I don't care if Microsoft quits full support for XP, and stops selling it, as long as they will still keep activating it. If Microsoft decides they want a little more revenue for Windows 7 they can just turn off activation for XP and force you to upgrade.

I just bought a new home computer to ensure I got XP. I hate Vista. At work a few people "upgraded" to Vista, but since then everyone has switched back so there isn't a single computer here running Vista. No one who uses it can really stand it for more than a few weeks. On brand new Dell computers it just hangs or crashes once a day (versus XP which just keeps going now). It often goes off into space not responding for several minutes doing who knows what. Everything is moved around for no good reason and hard to find. Security is useless since you have to turn off UAC to do anything or be driven crazy.

I disagree with this column for a number of reasons.

I built a new computer and put Vista on it. And then promptly discovered that half my applications wouldn't run under Vista--including ones that required Windows XP. The claim that ISVs have had seven years to get on the Vista bandwagon is completely off-base. Microsoft didn't deliver bootable code to developers until a year and a half before Vista shipped, and even at that late date, they were busy jettisoning features they'd promised (remember WinFS?).

UAC is an unmitigated disaster. It simply trains users to blindly accept the UAC prompt (just as they did with the ActiveX pop-ups). And there's nothing magical about ASLR--it could have pretty easily been shoehorned into XP.

Finally, the claim that XP is "full of holes" is certainly true, but it makes an unwarranted assumption that Vista is somehow bullet-proof. Keep in mind that Vista began with the Windows 2003 codebase (itself based on XP), and then MS added a huge quantity of new internal plumbing to support secure display channels, TPM and a bunch of other stuff that consumers and business customers weren't exactly clamoring for.

The end result is an OS that--at least in my experience--is actually *less* stable than XP.

What a load of bilge. I tell you what. You write the check for the 1/4 million it is going to cost my department at a major mid-western university to upgrade our workstations so we can run Vista at something faster than a snail's slime across the surface of cyberspace.

While you are at it, get Microsoft to pry out the two dozen ways in which they have the operating system calling home and reporting everything the machine is doing.

You might also get them to reconsider their philosophy that seems to evolved to the point that I did not buy their OS, they now own my system, and can do with it whatever the hell they want to remotely, including shutting it down, if they decide they disapprove of it or think I am cheating or have violated their EULA, which essentially requires selling one's soul to them.

I retire in two years, so I will leave this mess to be sorted out by my successor in my operation, and my poor staff. As for my home network, I will stick with XP for as long as possible, my wife already prefers her G4, and I have LINUX from RedHat running on one workstation and server already. Maybe I will run a couple of XPs as long as I can for games. The heck with the rest of MicroMonopolySoft.

P.S. Have you ever actually had to manage a budget of a million dollars or so for an organization that found itself to buy new computers every three years just so they could keep up with MicroBloat? I assure you from my experience that it sucks mightily.

There is no point of continuing this debate: get Vista if you buy a new computer and keep XP if you continue an old computer.

A new computer is so affordable now. Get Duo core with 2 GB of RAm for $400 for a desktop and $550 for a notebook.

Oh please. If Ubuntu can do a release every 6 months with not much funding and manage to keep hardware requirements down for every release and not screw up compatibility in the process, surely you would expect MS could come out with a significantly better product compared to XP and do the same yet they spent over $6 billion and took 5 years to give us this?

After reading this I won't buy any of your books, I would worry about all the bad advice I would receive from them!

I totally disagree with the presentation. Progress is not measured by a more beautiful interface that requires more hardware. It is not measured by forcing companies who have invested thousands of man hours to make their product rock solid on and existing platform... NO.

Progress is taking what we have and making it work better, more efficient, more reliable. If Intel, AMD, Motorola, TI,... make hardware that required more power, more space, more supporting external hardware to run, then these companies would quick be out if business. This is logical to even a child.

Agreed Joe.

*and JAB

It's a darned shame that all the GOOD infoworld columnists have either retired or moved on to more lucrative endeavors, leaving us with r-tards like this one.

What a maroon! (actually, what a M$ lackey).

-S

I purchased a Dell computer with Vista installed. After 2 weeks I sent the computer back to Dell and requested the same computer with XP installed. I found Vista to be completely un-usible. I do not like sercuity holes, but I need an operating system that is user friendly, and Vista is not. I will wait for MicroSoft's next effort. I will not use Vista.

What follows is my response to an article by Paul Thurrott who derisively labeled anyone who isn't in love with Vista “Gleeful Mac and Linux users”. Frankly, I find what passes as analysis from IT industry pundits to be getting somewhat tedious. I hope that my response to Mr. Thurrott will address some of the issues IT support folks are facing with Vista. The flippant remarks about buying new PCs completely ignores the fact that the security gains are typically not outweighed by the significant loss in performance/productivity. Assuming one's hardware vendor supplied XP drivers, one could easily make the case that buying new hardware with XP would improve end user performance significantly but Vista would only bring their performance up to XP status on the old hardware. Maybe. XP SP3 is supposed to be so much faster than Vista SP1 that even that comparison may be moot.
---
If you’d permit me, I’d like to comment on Mr. Thurrott’s generalization that those who signed InfoWorld’s “Save XP” petition as “Gleeful Mac and Linux users”. I’m an IT operations professional with a specialty in deployment (and love the new Windows Imaging Format). I used Vista all through the beta process on my main production machine all the way through the release of Service Pack 1 RC (and several “refreshes”). I’ve never used a Mac or anything with Linux except a password recovery disk. I’m not a technophile (or -phobe) and am solely interested in technology as it pertains to improved productivity. I have no axe to grind with Microsoft whatsoever and was hoping that Vista would be a real improvement to XP.

That said, I have concluded that it is not an improvement for the enterprise and in fact will be very detrimental to our bottom line when we roll it out. (Due to the nature of our business, we will be deploying it regardless of the significant associated costs; perception is key). It always seems disingenuous to me when technology pundits slap a label on something as “better” without apparently considering the associated costs of the “better” product. Since third-party software vendors, lazy one or not, have been lax in ramping up to Vista, then business must consider that in their migration plan. Considering the overwhelming performance superiority of XP over Vista, businesses must eat the costs of massive hardware upgrades or significantly decreased productivity from users (read, those who use PCs as tools to generate income for the business).

Then we get into the administrative aspects of Vista and the absence of any functional tools to administer the enterprise or even enterprise computers. Vista has been out in the wild for over a year and IT administrators still do not have the tools to manage their Active Directory domains with Vista. References to how long it took XP to get up to a certain level of supportability (legitimately SP2) are irrelevant in that Microsoft should have learned from that experience and not expect IT pros to wait years for Vista to be enterprise ready. (At the WinConnections conference in Fall 2006 I informed the MS reps that I felt this lack of tools to be unacceptable and received applause from my IT peers in attendance).

There will be no argument from me regarding the, much needed, improved security of Vista. It’s the implementation that is in question. For example, every single one of my IT coworkers who use Vista has turned UAC off due to its intrusiveness. That’s certainly not a good response but people have work to do and feel hampered by almost every aspect of Vista. As a matter of fact, the only positive references I’ve heard regarding Vista have been related to its use in the home as an entertainment component. “Playing” with Vista in a test lab or on half a dozen machines is a whole lot different than dealing with 1000 boxes on which a business is dependent.

My hope for the success of the InfoWorld petition is to obtain some time for business. Yes, Vista development took five years and companies should have been preparing. But they have customers to please and accommodating Microsoft OS migration plans probably isn’t high on the list of things to do. And considering the cutbacks in IT personnel in the past few years, there most likely isn’t enough resource slack for shops to adequately prepare, assuming management provides the necessary project budgeting.

I appreciate the efforts of the IT publishing folks, journalists and pundits. More and more, however, I’m seeing similarities between these folks and Congress, i.e., a complete detachment from reality.

By the way, I switched back to XP SP2 on my production workstation and saw my productivity increase dramatically. And on a personal note, when my home machine needs replacement I will get a Mac before I pay money for Vista.

Enterprise vs Home:
I have Vista at home - Love it.
Had to update applications - Expected (Would have had to do that if I had purchased a MAC or Linux) - and I like the updated apps - MS and others
Still have an old XP box - Now I run it like a server - though not very stable - not going to upgrate this to Vista - no reason to.

I have XP at work - Love it
Will not recommend upgrading to Vista until we are ready to move the entire enterprise (8000 users)to Vista
This is a normal upgrade stance for a large company - why would we dump 3 year old boxes still under service? Why would I upgrade working machines to a new OS for which they were never certified?
Soooooo I'm not getting this controversy .... keep using XP until you are ready to turn over your inventory or until all the inventory is Vista certified. ... at least if MS still allow corporate accounts to use XP. That's what we did with the W2K -> XP switch

Get your house in order first - and don't spend where you don't have to. No rush .... No fear....

"I won't return to that cartoon-looking XP for anything"

Well then turn off that Fisher-Price theme system and you have a Windows 2000 -looking system!

Yes, some day Vista probably will be worth using like XP was. We held off for two years before installing XP in our offices. Probably will be the same for Vista.

Your idea to just go out and buy new equipment is great. I'll lay off 6 or 7 people from the workforce and wait a year, then I will use the savings from their wages to pay for all the new equipment. Isn't that the american way?

Wouldn't it be nice to have so much spare cash laying around (microsoft?) to be able to just trash your old equipment ever 2 years and buy new! I'd love it. Oh and vendor software, yes, I'll just trash them, buy new software from a Vista ready place, retrain all our workforce on the new software that I had to lay off another 10-15 people to buy and pay for training on. Oh, wait, I won't need to buy the training, after I lay off all those people to pay for the upgrades and new equipment, I'll be the only one left!

--I went out and bought new computers. So you know what? Go buy new computers. --

The speed of five year old computers is just fine.
A new operating system should not force us to fill up our landfills with working computers.

--but this industry needs cash to keep it moving forward.--

We should support the industry and have all that lead from good computers leach into the soil and water. Wrong!!!

--But Microsoft shouldn't develop a new OS. --

Microsoft should develop a new os and charge for it.

--And the new OS shouldn't require anything more than what your system needed six years ago? Give me a break.--

That is a true statement. The new os should not require new hardware to run. Absolutely. A P4 or P5 from 5 years ago is just quite enough computing power and should last for another 5 years. Why throw it away.

The precious resources our wonderful planet provides for us should be treasured and used until it is not useful anymore. A new operating system should not accelerate obsolescence.

Optimized code and graphic modes to support old graphics cards is the correct thing to do.

A major market that has not been mentioned so far is CNC's (Computerized Numerical Controller) you know - machine motion control. They are what makes automated machines do what they do.

They require real-time processing for accurate control at high speeds and that means the OS simply CANNOT interfere with it. Current XP-based system have a real-time kernel that XP runs on top of so the RT always priority. Vista does not play 2nd fiddle to anything and as such NO CNC manufacturer supports it and from all I've talked with none plan to - they are developing embedded XP systems or moving to either QNX or Linux. One major usere of them - GM/Delphi - specifically require NOT having Vista because of the suppport issues.

These are machine tools. You do not surf the web or write documents on them. Most have a service life in excess of 20 years and are expected to do that WITHOUT constant 'upgrades' or patches. Some of the systems I service were built in the '70's using a 4mHz Motorola 6800 CPU with a whopping 64k of ram and can still do everything (often faster) that new XP-based systems need a dual-core >2gHz CPU to do. This is NOT progress!

I'm just wondering how much Microsoft paid to have this aritcle written...XP is still works well enough for most, if not all, home users, and I don't want to upgrade all my software. VISTA is bloated, slow, and doesn't play well with others. I think I still have a couple of years or so before MS stops activation of XP and I need to switch over to Linux.

Huh,

Old cars can drive on new roads without a problem. Old cars can be sold in a viable used car market. Old cars can be suped up in to hot rods. Old cars can be recylced easily. Old cars are cool to look at. A 4 year old car is not old.

Old computers, perhaps as "new" as 4-5 years old or stuck on Windows 98 are worthless and have no viable market. "Old" computers end up in a landfill.

And yet, in a few years I'll buy another new or two home computers, they'll come with Vista because Windows 7 will be late by two years and the cycle will just repeat itself.

If only I could get my computer to last through three or four cell phone upgrades, or IPOD replacements...wait... I see a pattern here.

Well, at least old cars don't need to go to the "start" position to be turned off.

One word for happiness - LEOPARD

Exactly the kind of response that I would expect from a person enamoured by the latest and greatest instead of seeing it for what it is.

An OS that opens your PC up to a Vista of programs that do not run.

I have a new PC with Vista Business and I cannot think of any period of time that I have ever had more problems with software lock-ups and crashes ... Even Office 2007 seems to be allergic to Vista !!!

> So you know what? Go buy new computers. I'm sorry if you want to keep those dusty, five-year-old
> systems going a bit longer, but this industry needs cash to keep it moving forward.

What a load of crap! It doesn't matter if the computers are old or new, they are a LOT slower with Vista. We've got nearly-new computers here and by putting Vista on them they've effectively become 3-year old machines in terms of application performance.

Since the Gates security initiative several years ago, it seems that the Microsoft approach to security has been to keep the user from actually using the computer for anything that might be insecure. Their security efforts, culminating in Vista, have focused on controling the user rather than securing the underlying OS. The UAC, defender, firewall, locking down folders, disabling administrator priviledges are designed to protect the OS from users. I think this is obvious by the sheer volume of user frustration.

Intel giveth, and Microsoft taketh away!

However, I don't blame Microsoft for many---if not most---of the problems with Vista. It isn't Microsoft's fault because the real problem is with the hardware and software vendors that could barely make their products work with XP.

Now, the operating system has changed, and these vendors just can't keep up. Sure, in 2011, I expect Vista to be close to the support level as XP experiences now.

Unfortunately, I fully expect it will take until 2011 until the vendors catch up.

I am just dumbfounded by this article. Many have already posted the litany of reasons why the author of the article is misguided, so I won't repeat them.

I certainly find it amazing what a "journalist" will write.

And for the record, my company is doing a complete refresh of all PCs this year, and we will be purchasing XP, not Vista.

WOW- Such misinformed folks. Yes there are some industry applications that will not run on Vista, but most (98%) will run in compatibility mode. Of the few hundred, yes few hundred, that I have tested I have only found about 7 that I couldn't run.

Didn't we hear the same snarling when XP was released? You don't need an entire machine, get some more memory, it's not that expensive and is a worthwhile upgrade to any system that is not older than 4 years. I am running Vista on a P4 with no problems right now, one with 1 gig and 1 with 512m of RAM. I don't recommend anything less than 1gig and you should try for at least 2 gigs if you can.

Most businesses are smart enough to roll out OS with equipment replacement cycle, so I don't see why anyone would plan on upgrading all 2000 systems today, or for that matter even 12 if that’s all you had. It doesn't make sense just from the economics of down time and lost productivity.

Yes it's the vendors fault, they have know this code change was coming for years...I started showing Vista in my classes about 2 years ago while it was still in early beta and pre-beta.

This isn't really a hard choice...
1) Test the OS against your apps, if everything works then plan your migration. So many ways to do this it isn't even funny.
2) Test the OS against your apps, if something isn't working contact your vendor(s) and plan your migration for to start after the problems are corrected. We all pay for software support and maintenance on our critical apps don’t we? That’s what you are paying for!
3) Do nothing and wait 3 years until XP is at the end of all support and then upgrade.

Its technology, everyone wants to be on the cutting edge, but no one wants to bleed, and when they do they will cry like babies. If you want to be on the bleeding edge, have fun, but please don't cry when you bleed! If you don't, shut up and don't cry for those you know who are bleeding, it was their choice.

Years ago, in Dos 3.11 days, I had a 10-MHZ 80286 based cpu. A friend had an Amiga, with a supposedly slower processor. The graphics on my machine were a joke.

However, I could do fancy word processing and save my documents on my 20-megabyte harddrive.

My friend with the Amiga had stunning graphics, glorius (polyphonic, 4-channel) sound, by comparison.

Today's games are far better, and getting better still. The key to all this, is the software coding efficiency.

I don't want the random popup stealing keyboard focus from the program or script I'm writing, but that is precisely what you get in Vista. Vista Efficient? Please.

Every year that Microsoft has released something, it has gotten bigger, fatter, heavier, required more hardware. One theory I heard was that the M$ folks were in cahoots with the hardware vendors, to drive folks to purchase the latest and greatest.

I used to love M$ Windows, until I discovered the clean, quiet stunning efficiency and reliability of unix, and later Linux. We had servers that we'd had up and running, still performing, after over 1600 days (thats almost 5 years).

Its difficult to get M$ products to run a week, much less 100 days, never mind even considering 1600 days without a reboot because of some stupid memory leak in an application that the "os" doesn't know how to handle.

I'm no longer even remotely interested in Microsoft. My next machine that I buy (should I choose for once to not build it) - will be a Mac. Its underlying operating system is... a version of BSD Unix! Yay!

Microsoft? This is Microsoft's claim to fame:

"You've successfully clicked your mouse button. Please click 'ok' to reboot"

No thanks.

I've tried Vista and found it to be similiar to Windows ME-in other words don't bother with it. ME was a crap product put out by MS just to make some money while they were working on XP. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any desktop O/S in the works that will allow us to dump Vista for something better. ME users went back to 98SE in droves and now the same thing is happening with Vista/XP. Yes it "maybe" more secure then XP, but what good is a more secure system if it won't run the software you need it to run. I believe "more secure" is only becuase the virus/trojan, etc writers haven't gotten around the new built-in security features of Vista, yet. It will happen. Yes, Vista is pretty but pretty doesn't get the job done and it is more important to get the job done then it is to have a pretty screen. Even with all the "pretty" turned off Vista still wasn't stable enough to depend on it on a daily basis. As a privte consultant, I tell all my customers to stay away from Vista at all costs. A couple that took the plunge anyway is sorry they did. I installed Vista on one a couple of my machines and gave it a through workout (when it would run) and ended up dumping it an upgrading back to XP. SO I'm telling my clients to replace their machines (that are near the end of their useful) before June while they can still get XP.

There *is* a company out there with bags and bags of cash laying around, ready to be splurged on a new round of hardware for everybody, and VISTA Ultimate licenses all around. Oops, that's Microsoft... they're so inwardly focussed these days they've obviously confused their bank balance with yours... their upgrade costs with yours... their OS needs with yours... their success with yours.

I'm glad to see the author of this steaming pile of dung is equally confused. I wonder who stocks up his bank account?

I have Vista at home but not the 32bit version but the 64bit version. Why should I pay for another 32bit version when I already have one. Anyway I was able to get drivers installed so that I should not have a h/w issue. By the way Microsoft requires all drivers for Vista64 to be certified before Vista will allow them to be installed. The system is slower but then so am I trying to used the new gui. The gui is pretty but hard to use. Getting the games installed & working that I play has been a real hassle to date. Out of 6 only one partially works & keeps imploding on itself. No problems with XP running software.

Where I work (university - large) has had troubles getting vista running with the apps we use let alone trying to train faculty & staff. With the way budgets are this will more in likely be a 10 year project to fully get xp converted to vista.

The funny thing is that linux runs most of our applications if not all (haven't checked lately) and it will run on 10 year old computers. So where is the incentative to switch to vista. None at all. An with all the different versions, what a joke. There should be 2 versions, home & pro. The cost of vista alone is a breaker in my department let alone getting new computers that can support vista.

Several faculty members have bought new computers but were not able to get xp, only vista. So I was tasked with getting them downgraded to xp. Guess what all of vendors I contacted acutally had a seperate section on their sites that had xp drivers. So at the moment it looks like the people getting vista is mostly home users since they do not know how to order/buy a pc with xp.

By the way did anyone notice that the costs of pc's acutally increased with vista.

I will convert to vista when it can do the same think as xp without the speed penalty.

Thank You

Wow. After quickly looking at a few comments, I dont think anyone's OS is causing a lack of production I think its some of these maniacs long winded replies to an article obviously looking to touch a nerve. Good points were made concerning the improvements of Vista, but I think what most people are glossing over is the slow or nonexistent response of other vendors to be compatible. Did MS have to be so drastic in their changes to force this? maybe not...but otherwise all we get is slight improvement on a old OS, eventually you have to make the jump. I bet "Paul Podbielski","Sunnyboy", and "HeartlandLiberal" were kicking and screaming because they couldnt bare moving to Windows from their DOS machines! But I will say, I sympathize with admins/CTOs trying to figure out the next step for their companies...no easy answer...Im sure too thats not who the writer was speaking about when he said "Go buy new computers." That could be wisely directed to home users thinking once a new OS is out they should be able to install it on the same old system they've been using from two version ago. Give me a break. If MS was developing for Pentium 133mhz you'd be going nuts about something else. And a lot of the blame falls on guys like DELL and HP. How can you sell a computer thats barely qualified to run XP (256,512RAM) and offer Vista with it?! Better yet recommend vista or have it preconfigured! In my opinion a lot of bad blood in the market has been caused by that.

I run an IT department at a small government agency and I would like to say that I agree with the author, for the most part. I won't go into arguing with all of the negative commenters, but we have been implementing Vista and Office 2007 since they became available and, while we have experienced a few problems, on the whole we have not experienced *any* of the nightmare scenarios that most are describing. Because we are the government, we do not have large budgets for hardware, so we make up for it by planning ahead - we began to buy machines that would be Vista capable as much as three years ago, adding memory or DVD drives to them when they became cost-effective and just recently adding graphics cards to the last bunch. Vista runs great on all of them - would XP run faster? Perhaps, but most of the small problems were obliterated with Vista SP1. And we like all of the security features *a lot* and we use almost all of them to keep confidnetial information private and to keep our systems from being hacked. Sure, Vista has its glitches, but we just checked our logs and none of our IT support people have had a crash with Vista in more than 6 months.....

I don't have time to say more, but the author deserves a break - most of his comments are dead on....

Hey PC Wizard,

If you work for the government, then I (and others, on whose behalf I'll boldly speak) pay your salary, and pay for all those toys you're playing with. My wishes, which your superiors are *supposed* to respect, are that you stop wasting MY money on Vista & Office 2007. There are other, cheaper, better choices - use them. If you don't understand why my wishes take pressidence over yours, your superiors should be fired.

To the guy driving a 17 year old car... we dont care about your opinion for that reason! you obviously have failed. and the guy retiring... congratulations, maybe now that university will be able to get these decisions made wisely. the comments are a dozen times more revolting than the article which im still on the fence re: vista/XP we'll have to see after SP1... sound like a bunch of snot nosed babies.

Explain to me again why consumers should have to pay for security improvements by spending money on an expensive OS upgrade (that they probably don't want?) Especially when MS always claims that their OS's are secure. If my car has an inherent safety defect, do I have to buy a new car to be safer (every 3-5 years?) If yes, I might instead choose to pick Linux because OS upgrades aren't forced on me.

Bottom line: Vista doesn't provide anything significant to justify an upgrade from XP.

It's nice to see that Apple fanatics don't have a lock on delusional fanboys.

I work for local government myself. Funds are not available to get new and improved every 3 years. XP has been MS most stable system in years after they patched security holes for years. Vendors should not be forced to migrate with MS because MS believes they can get the big corps. to bow to them now that they are on the hook. If MS has so many flaws and is making us pay to correct them with a new OS, lets make them back themselves up like the toy manufacturers. The OS is full of lead paint...MASSIVE RECALL at MS expense. Return for a FULL REFUND!

My big question is did they have to release a "new" product in order to improve it or could they have just fixed the old product? There is no rule that says that Microsoft can't charge for service packs if there are enough changes. I think what most people are saying is that they would be perfectly happy paying for an upgrade to XP that didn't break all the existing applications they already have. I'm not all that familiar with Apple products, but how much of the older software still runs on the latest OS?

Another question is what does Vista offer that XP doesn't have that many users really need? If XP is "good enough" for most people, why force them to move to the next level?

I just bought a new laptop from DELL... after fighting with them for 3 months, I got another new laptop from DELL! Seems the problem was NOT the laptop, but the OS - VISTA. This IS/WAS the last computer that I will buy from DELL and the last OS I will buy from Microsoft. I am going to switch to MAC... then I can buy all new apps, just like with VISTA... but maybe the OS won't change every couple of years... just improve!

I remember when WinXP first came out. Everyone was quite pleased with Win2k or with Win98 SE, for that matter. Yes, eventually all those people complaining will move to Vista just as they did from Win2k or Win98 SE.

We are starting to actually see the reverse of the driver issue mentioned. If you look at new laptops from Asus (I don't think this is true with Lenovo, Acer, or Dell), the vendor does not even have WinXP drivers. If you use Windows, Vista is it.

I have an older Adaptec 1205 SATA card that works fine under WinXP but Adaptec has decided not to produce a Vista driver for it. Very likely seeing that the age and cost of the card make it financially unsound to write and certify a Vista driver for it.

Virtually every OS issue we see are caused by bad drivers. I don't care whether it's Linux or Windows (Apple controls the hardware and the OS but even with that idealic environment, they have their share of Leopard issues).

Turning to updates, we seem to have a double-standard with MS security updates than with Linux. People complain when there are too many MS updates yet think nothing of it with Linux (I use and am quite happy with SuSE 10.2 but I probably should get upgraded to 10.3). When you should start complaining is when the updates stop or are not delivered on a timely basis. On both Microsoft's and Linux' side, I see timely updates.

People also complain about viruses and that not enough is being done about them. Those are the same people that complain when Vista warns them that something is attempting to write to a system location. Any company that has to write an OS for all user-levels is caught in a choice to not "challenge" the user (and allow viruses) or make the user understand more about what happens when software is installed (don't allow viruses but get angry people complaining about the extra click).

Getting back to drivers, I don't know if it is the OS that forces new driver models, new hardware that forces new driver models, or (very likely) both. On the Linux side, we go through great pains to get our OS to work properly with the hardware at hand. I just replaced my CRT with an LCD and hand-edited my X11 conf file to match the horizontal and vertical refresh rates of the monitor. It works like a dream but most of the world expects to plug in a device, hear a pleasant sound that the device was recognized and is being installed, and see the message indicating the device is ready for use.

We can complain now (as we did when XP arrived) about the great hardships we must undergo by adding memory or with replacing an aging PC. However, as we have seen with XP, you aren't being asked to do this every two, or even three years. To Microsoft's benefit (and perhaps to their detriment), people have become attached to well-working WinXP systems running the software they enjoy using, with quite modest hardware.

Still not convinced? I guess another way of looking at it is, once XP is no longer supported and your company is forced to migrate to Vista, you'll finally have a PC on your corporate desktop that is reasonably modern and contains hardware that, for many serious users, is what they should be running today, anyhow.

The bad thing about extolling the virtues of microsoft's newest world domination gambit is that a few years from now, you'll look as funny as the guy who said windows was the greatest thing since sliced bread back in the 80's.

I've been running Vista for some time now and can honestly say that;
1. If I never see another "video driver has recovered" balloon it want too soon.
2. More secure? If you don't mind all that fluff. I turn all that off because it drives me nuts! So who is that for?
3. unpredictable crashes when viewing utube?(it's not the driver?)
I do like the looks of it, I like DX10. It is the worst when you have the flag and are about to score the tie breaker in a 30 minute standoff and you get the dreaded video driver recoverd from death balloon.
Search is better? I did not have a problem with XP search?
I'm running Vista home Premium X64 quad core@3.2 gigs, Patriot memory and four raptors in raid, so the bloat was not a problem and vista seems to run fast enough for me.
But I must say I would rather have my money back on this OS and wait for Windows 7. Due to the failure of Vista it won't be long.
Regardless whose fault it is that Vista does not work well, one thing is for certain it damn sure is not the consumer!

The best operating system is PinOS, made by PinActive. If you have problems with it then buy my book "Mastering the PinOS user experience".

That would've been a much more honest and concise "blog" by Peter Bruzzese.

He won't be able to peddle his vista books if people stop using vista. How honest can his opinion be?

I thought this article was satirical -- surely it's not serious!! I haven't met anyone who likes Vista yet, only people who have installed it then removed it!

I would like to point out a very minor nit.

Encrypting File System, which has been around since at least Win2000 as part of the OS, can
provide much of the same security as Bitlocker.

EFS isn't hard to set up but is almost never used.

EFS and Bitlocker are somewhat complementary and I am happy to see the addition of Bitlocker in Vista along with EFS.

Nonetheless; I wonder how much it matters.

I wonder if BitLocker will suffer the same fate as EFS (and FileVault in MacoS): a powerful but underused tool.

If a stolen disk could have been encrypted, but wasn't, does Bitlocker matter?

-David

Wow. It's hard to argue with his logic. When someone is stomping up and down saying "green is blue" and "2+2=5", there's really no point in debate.

It may be old news, but does anyone remember the Mac OS6 to OS7 migration? Had to upgrade/replace much of the hardware and software apps. Things that worked fine with OS6 would not work with OS7 and Apple's approach was we are moving forward, too bad if you old hardware and software won't make the trip.

Either the software companies or the user community has not learned from past experience.

1) As a computer consultant I am gratefull for the extra income stream that MS has provided me scince Feb 1, 2007: "upgrading" Vista systems back to XP

2) I once made a call to Microsoft Support regarding an issue I was having with XP and during the procedure the Microsoft technician encouraged me to make the switch to Vista, telling me how superior Vista is over XP and how my issue would go away by switching to Vista. Then about 5 minutes later he had to pass me over to another technician because his Vista workstation had stopped responding! (By the way, the XP problem was not with XP itself but with so called "security update" that Microsoft likes to call Windows Genuine Advantage and its reporting of valid software as being copied. It turns out that there are more stringent requirements in the WGA algorythm for OEM versions of XP than there is in the MS retail verions of XP. Which would indicate to me that Microsoft believes that a major source of pirating of XP is in the OEM channels! The explanation MS gave me for this difference between the OEM and retail versions of XP is that owners of computers that come with XP pre-installed are less likely to make any hardware changes to their computers other than RAM.)

3) I may be wrong, but I believe I remember in a 2006 online interview with Bill Gates or Steve Balmer saying something like "we spent over $260 million in 800 fees for our support department last year, so don't try to tell me we are not serious about support..." Does any one have the budget numbers on Microsoft's support division for the last 5 years?

P. Poirier
SK, Canada

This is a moot issue anyway. Here are a couple of hints:
1. Hardly anyone with common sense upgraded.
2. Microsoft's allowing downgrades from Vista to XP.
3. Microsoft working furiously to get "Windows 7" out the door.
4. All other operating system sales increased drastically.
5. Most DX10 eye-candy can be made with DX9. (I applaud the use data management in 10 but the OS removes the advantages.)
6. This is Microsofts second attempt at (Windows/ME) snake oil sales and no one bought into it.

If Microsoft wants to help customers out how about trying these suggestions.
1. Make IE a removable component. (No, not just hide it.)
2. Remove WGA. (I do not need to register and activate my software more than once.)
3. Allow independent developers to build drivers again without certification from MS. (Hey, let the customer decide if he wants to risk his system, it his problem.)

I think Microsoft might do well to listen to the end user this time but I doubt they will. After all they know best.

Well, the drivel in this diatribe convinced me there's a book on the market I DON'T need to buy. Microsoft is a business and as such, they will (or should) respond to their intended consumers. The decision to keep supporting or abandon XP should be one framed by business logic.

The column here sounds arrogant and elitist -- which presents a rather humorous picture given that he's defending Vista. I never liked the security holes in XP but the WGA and DRM implementations in Vista strike me as even bigger security holes.

DX10 is pretty, don't need it. Gadgets are interesting, cool little items -- until you realize just how much CPU, RAM and user attention they grab; don't need them. I don't like the garbage I see in Vista so far, we'll see if Microsoft adapts to consumers or continues with their historic arrogance and expects consumer demand to adapt to them. If the former, I may stick with a Windows-based platform at home since I haven't used a Mac or Linux seriously for years. If the latter, I'll definitely be changing entire architectures at home when I make the jump.

Pete

Great article! Checks in the mail.

Bill G.

Let's see, this same discussion, with minor variations, took place when Windows XP was introduced, but also when Windows 2000, NT 4.0, NT 3.5, NT 3.1, ME, 98, 95, 3.1, 3.0, 2.0, and 1.0 were introduced. I'm skipping what I deem to be minor releases, including XP SP2, NT 3.51, and so forth.

Some things just never change.

xp volume license keys on ebay in 6 months

The ONLY reason that Microsoft dominates the desktop market is the enormous base of legacy applications that are Windows-based. So, sure, technically it is not Microsoft's problem; but from a business point of view it most certainly IS *their* problem.

As for the comment about the Microsoft community complaining about "one day" having to give up XP, that is not the case at all. It is all about having to give up XP before its successor is mature and stable enough to be a suitable replacement. Yes, stable. Forget the marketing bilge about "self healing" and "robust", my personal experience is that it is easier to crash Vista than it is XP with the latest service pack. That, combined with the lack of backwards compatibility for drivers and applications, means it isn't a suitable successor to XP *yet*.

I don't expect it to be supported forever, but I also don't expect to be stampeded into an immature next release.

If you don't want XP to look like a cartoon I can suggest a couple of good books to help you configure it properly!

I think in all my years, I've never seen a more obvious distinction between someone who writes for the industry as opposed to someone who actually works in the industry.

Mr. Bruzzese, I would suggest that maybe you're a bit disconnected from your readership and need to take a refresher course in reality before you write any more articles for Infoworld.

I've had very little experience with Vista- and not all that positive, but to be fair, not enough time to explore - still, the security nag boxes were , to say the least, a pain. Things moved around for no reason, as well, come on!

I've been at these things since punch card days and the bloatware arguement is well-founded. The smaller the operating system the better. I do numerical analysis and am amazed at the systems we have compared to the days of clattering line printers - but we loose a large portion of these advances (at least in my field) to the OS hogging up precious RAM. Nobody knows which processes we can unload, etc. The registry is a nightmare, I said (and I was correct) when I saw it in '95 that it's the end of PC's as we know them.

Windows is a "dirty" system. One thought that immediately comes to mind: A program should install with all of its files in one folder (With subs of course as needed) not writing files into the OS directories and adding registry keys ad infinitum. You can still enforce anti-piracy and do this with one lousy key, and give the user some kind of control back.

Of course, vendors are as much to blame with sloppy install/uninstall, lack of documentation, etc.

In my view, Windows has become what is set out to destroy. It is intractable to the average user unless you stay in Bill's carefully defined guidelines. As someone alluded to above, it's now his PC, not yours.

I'm at work and busy, this could be better phrased and I'm sorry, I hope someone better ferrets out what I mean and makes the points better. But I'm holding off on Vista for now as well.

Basically, Vista security involves asking the user to confirm every system and program operation every time. UAC has no understanding of trusted programs; everything is suspect always.

It's hard to imagine the security experts at Microsoft actually believe UAC in its present form is a good security solution. Having watched many users in action on Vista, it's only a matter of minutes before most users disable UAC or simply click away every warning dialog without reading them.

http://www.devtopics.com/software-behaving-badly/

"Incredible" is an excellent choice of words in describing Vista. As in, "lacking in credibility."

This article is the harbinger of a new era, however. The age of, "Lies, damned lies and tech blogs."

Wow. What a completely unintelligent piece. Nice to see that the majority (if not all) of the responders to this post do not share the same geeky adolescent philosophy as Mr. Bruzzese.

Since I like to kick dead horses...

The idea that we all need to go out a buy new computers every other year is crazy-talk. Especially now, since processing power is far beyond what the average user really needs. I'm pretty sure that my mother, at age 60, doesn't need the latest dual-core, 64-bit, 5000.8GHz RXGj89whatever processor out there just to check her email and play solitaire. And, I think it has been made abundantly clear that businesses who are currently running all Microsoft shops will pay a huge premium to upgrading to Vista; here in lies the problem.

People tend to make decisions at the margin, if the benefit of buying Vista was worth the extra money, then they will buy it. If it is not, then they won't. But now, because Microsoft needs to recoup it's billions of dollars that it invested in a failed operating system, then are discontinuing the only real competitor out there, Windows XP so, there goes the consumers choice. What Microsoft is betting on is that the cost of switching to another operating system is still higher the the cost of switching to Vista. We will see how that plays out.

The great irony is that with more and more business applications becoming client-server based, and the processing power needs are at the server not the client, fewer and fewer businesses will be willing to spend money on processing power that they don't need to do business. I'm sure this occured to Microsoft when they designed Vista to be a giant bloated piece of suck.

It will be interesting to see what happens once the executives realize that all they need is something capable of running a thin-client (at their employees' desks (i.e. web-browser) to do 99% of their business.

Since it is clear that Microsoft has completely lost touch with it's customer base, I can only hope that this is the beginning of the end of Windows dominance, but that may be a bit of a pipe dream.

So, go on ahead with your geekery Mr.Bruzzese. Write some more crappy articles, and then return to your make believe world in Second Life where you are a brilliant writer famous for pointing out just how silly the rest of the world is.

You and Balmer should get together, you'd make a great team!

Funny, unlike some of the posters above, I don't seem to remember the same level of vitriol when XP, 2000, or NT came out.

Sure, there were comments about holding off until the first service pack and discussions of the continued bloat and resource accumulation of the new OS, but not to the level that we are seeing with Vista.

Now, when ME came out, that OS did glean a large amount of [justified] derision and many large IT shops did not migrate until the next OS.

Vista seems to be Msoft's next ME. The DRM alone is enough of a deal breaker that I migrated to Linux.

You should have seen how many scanners starting showing up at garage sales when XP took over. It seems that the scanner companies didn't want to put out new drivers for their 1-3 year old products. My $1400 laser printer had an awesome driver set for Windows 98. For XP I'm stuck with nothing more than the vanilla, change nothing set of postscript. And I don't think Vista is an option for it at all.
That's progress.
Vista has problems.
XP has problems.
I have problems.
Now, can we get back to work?

The pond is quiet, the air still; a meadowlark can be heard singing in the distance as the sun just starts to peek over the horizon. The angler slowly draws his arm back and casts. The lure hits the water with a satisfying splash as the angler
waits for his prey ...

Probably a more appropriate analogy of the editorial that has elicited these responses.

When I do the same thing over and over, it's rare that I need a new tool to accomplish the task more efficiently. Sure, once in a while, someone invents a better mousetrap-- but on the whole, mousetrap technology has gone as far as it's likely to.

I don't work in a tech-savvy insdustry. I rarely play computer games. I browse, and I write, and I do accounting ad spreadsheets for small businesses. I want my computer to do one thing: run boring old business programs fast and reliably. I abhor new program versions that offer hundreds of new features I would never use at the cost of slower, much much slower, response. (Think: Quickbooks, MS Office)

Buy a new computer to run Vista? Sure, I've worked on them. But they're STILL slower than my old computer running XP. And if I have to upgrade to slower applications too, all to do the same thing I did before, how on earth is that an improvement? Using the auto analogy, I think MS has decided we ALL need SUVs, when many of us would prefer a smaller vehicle.

I just replaced my old laptop with a Dual Core running XP and it's everything I could possibly want. With XP going away, I would have gone to Mac if they only had an accountant-friendly (keyboardable) version of Quickbooks. As far as I'm concerned, after the XP sunset, MS will need something a lot better than Vista to get my business again.

I recently purchased a used Dell Latitude laptop with Vista Ultimate from Ebay, for home use. I was a little scared due to all the published anti-Vista sentiment, but the price was right.

My personal experience has been positive: Vista has a nice interface, doesn't crash, boots quickly, runs plenty fast, has useful Help and Search, encrypts data easily, and executes all my applications successfully.

Re UAC, I like it because I don't have to keep admin authority turned on all the time. Entering an occasional password unquestionably beats having to sign off and back on as admin.

Re resources, my impression is that Vista's resource requirements are met by pretty much all new Windows PC hardware offerings. It is big vs. XP but maybe that really doesn't matter. I have 1.5G of memory and an 80G drive, which seems average-to-small for new machines. It is plenty for my purposes.

I still use old XP machines at home, and also use XP for work. Those machines are fine as is. I think Vista is an improvement, but not enough to justify the work and expense of changing existing machines. They will die a natural death running XP.

Conversely, I won't be putting XP on any new machines under my control unless I see more problems with Vista than I have encountered thus far. I like XP, but like Vista more.

Regarding the "save XP" campaign, it seems to me that the crux of the matter is application compatibility. I was surprised at the number and intensity of comments around that, particularly in light of my own positive (but limited) experience. Microsoft needs to invest in progress, not maintenance, in order to compete with Google, etc., but it does sound like more energy should be expended understanding and addressing the compatibility issues.

DJ,

A better analogy would be that Msoft has decided we all need SUV's powered by lawnmower engines when all we want is an appropriately sized vehicle/engine combination for our needs.

GOOD POST MR. BRUZZESE!

Unfortunately, I doubt many of the people responding to your post have any real knowledge of the technical industry and how technology evolved, especially over the last 20 years. They seem to have no clue about the development of hardware and software. They just appear to have blinding hate.

Please, people. It's all just the same griping and complaining whenever Microsoft releases a new OS.

Guess what people, if it's a modern OS running on older hardware, it'll ...wait....wait...waiting for you to engage your brain... ...you guessed it, it'll run slower! Amazing, eh?

I enjoy using Vista. There are, of course, a few issues that have to be addressed and third-party drivers and support that needs to be improved (yes, there are many lazy vendors out there), but all-in-all, I really enjoy using it and see the value of, and like, most of the changes and new features.

Thanks again for the good, to-the-point post.
James

Wonderful Rants! I have few a words in response: UBUNTU LINUX
Ease
Security
Compatability
Cost
Plays Games, Business Apps, Web Surfs, & Email
Cost
Cost
Cost
also runs on really old hardware very well!

Dear Mr. Bruzzese,

Glad to see you read my comment. Given the number of responses, I'm impressed you did (thank you); I didn't mean to be flip, but with the vast amount of feedback you've received, I didn't see a reason to go into detail as I didn't think you'd see it. Since you have, I will:

I was a gamer before I got into IT (still am), and one of the things I was told after getting hired into my first IT job was that "bigger, better, faster" wasn't always conducive to the bottom line, and that the whole point of IT wasn't to deploy the latest cutting-edge systems, but rather to bring value to the business. To improve and streamline processes, to reduce operating expenses, to increase profit potential, etc. In a hotel environment, that means deploying an enterprise-grade wireless system to provide a better HSIA experience for our guests, updating our POS systems to be PCI compliant, or upgrading our property management software to provide a faster check-in and check-out process, to name a few projects we've done in the last couple years, each of which has produced a concrete & measurable impact on the guest experience and the bottom line.

If you want to tell us to upgrade our PCs in order to provide a hardware platform that will handle Vista, I'd like to ask what the business justification is to do so? The systems we have in place now (using Windows XP) are working perfectly well for my user group and aside from a handful of older P4's, our hotel is pretty well updated, with about 90% of my PC inventory less than two years old. Applications work, users are able to do their jobs with no complaints, and IT systems hotel-wide are running pretty smoothly.

By contrast, the few Vista PCs I've been asked to pilot (as part of a larger, nationwide effort) here since the initial business release have been a crapshoot. With time and with additional patches and driver updates, some of our users have grown accustomed to the new OS and have grown to accept the daily freezes and slowdowns (lessened somewhat since the initial rollout, but still disturbingly frequent), while others still can't stand it. We still have a couple mission-critical apps that don't run on Vista (okay, not Microsoft's fault, but definitely a counter to the idea that we should even consider upgrading) and not a week goes by when I don't hear about a system locking up while a front desk agent is trying to check in a guest or issue a room key, and would you like to be that guest that has to wait an extra five minutes while that agent has to go log onto another system to cut you a key? What makes things worse is that I've dual-booted XP & Vista and seen the exact same hardware run XP at least twice as fast as Vista with virtually no glitches whatsoever.

Of all the Windows ugprades we've seen since DOS, I'd have to say that 3.1, 95, 98, NT, and 2000 were all no brainers. I won't bother justifying or arguing those. 2000 to XP was less so, and I would dare say we started to see diminishing benefits after 2000 to the point where Vista is providing no benefit (yet). Do I prefer XP to 2000? Of course, but if I walk into someone else's hotel and see Win 2k, I won't necessarily cringe (if I know they're patching it and keeping it updated). If MS had never released another OS after 2k, it'd still be perfectly viable for most users.

Every OS that MS has released so far (excluding Me and XP) has had a pretty obvious "here's why you need to upgrade" path associated with it immediately upon release. Maybe you didn't want it because the first service pack hadn't been released it, but you knew you would see a definite advantage when you finally did. Not so much with XP, but there was still a business justification to it. With Vista, we've got nothing more than empty promises. About the only thing that really blew my skirt up was Superfetch and wow, does that absolutely NOT work...

Vista provides no practical improvements over XP that actually impact productivity or efficiency. Windows Search? Great concept; slows the system to a crawl. UAC? Again, great concept; steals focus and not only annoys users, but trains them to just click on everything (ergo, useless). Sidebar? Useless fluff that steals system resources. Superfetch? Great concept, if it ever worked; I'd seriously have to ask why our systems just seem to get slower and slower, with more lockups, even though we're not installing anything new beyond Windows patches & hotfixes? Hmm... Should I go on?

So in summation... spend more money to purchase newer PCs in order to get less performance and lower user efficiency.

If this becomes a viable OS in the next year or two, maybe. Otherwise, we're waiting for Windows 7 and hoping MS doesn't jack things up a third time.

Oh, and another couple thoughts:

1. For anyone suggesting Linux, I'd point out that yes, theoretically it would be a significantly better OS to run a business on and if we didn't have 14,000 users in North America alone to try and educate, along with a couple dozen mission critical apps that are firmly tied into Windows and/or IE, we might head in that direction. Heck, even with all of the hurdles we have, I've suggested to our VP of IT for North America that we might want to start beta testing Linux as much as possible, but a ship this big doesn't turn on a dime, and a lot of it hinges on what the operational people are willing to deal with. Since when has IT EVER been able to make a decision without having to listen to Operations?

2. For everyone suggesting that "wow; upgrading to a new OS requires better hardware..." Guess what? We're not all babes in the woods who've never considered that. However, there's a world of difference between buying $1,000+ systems that are state of the art and buying systems that are "good enough." Also, remember the scale here; we're not talking about one or two PCs, we're talking several hundreds, along with sometimes dealing with different ownership groups that all have to be convinced of the need to part with money that could be going towards other projects with more visible benefits (at least to non-IT eyes).

And by the way, I'd love to see that $400 desktop that alsoRun suggested that would actually run Vista without crashing once an hour or more. 2Gb RAM and a 3.2Ghz Core 2 Duo PC is the magic bullet.

Sorry - I wouldn't have written War and Peace in the two posts, but actually got a response via email.

Dang - wrote War & Peace and still got a typo.

Meant to say that ''2Gb RAM and a 3.2Ghz Core 2 Duo PC is NOT the magic bullet.''

One has to wonder what Tom as been smoking or if someone passed him a whole lot of green paper under the table.

The reality is that Vista is much harder to use than the previous systems. That is even without the almost every minute security violation messages. One has to wonder how setting up a security system that requires users to know more about the computer and networking than a Computer Science PHD to actually remain even slightly secure is actually a secure system. One also has to wonder how a system where the users are conditioned to simply ignore all security messages is in any way an improvement.

Certainly on the compatibility issue the idea that it is outside vendors who are the problem is proven pretty much false by the fact that not even Microsoft's products are compatible. I just returned from a client site where one of the sales guys brought in his Vista lap top he bought a month ago and went to training on costing more than the lap top. It immediately shut down the XP based network. It took me over 100 hours of billable time in cleaning up the mess VISTA made of the network in about 5 minutes. I have another site to go to with a similar problem. If VISTA is not even compatible with Microsoft, how can you claim that it is anything but a Microsoft problem that there is compatibility problems.

This is not a security improvement, it is not a usability improvement. It is simply a way to get maximum dollars from the market.

What Microsoft needs to do is to go to their designers, give them linux desktops for six months, and tell them to use them and to look at how well they work. They need to look at real security and usability in action. Then they need to be given the XP system and told "now make this work as securely and as easily as this does". Better yet, just come up with a good migration path for getting to Linux and call the entire Microsoft product line what it is, a piece of junk.

Oh boy, you sure brought out the cry-babies now. These people need to get a grip on reality and learn something about computers. I will go through a few of the things they complain about and explain. Obviously, these people will simply not understand because they are just ignorant and greedy, but I will do it anyway.

Vista is Slow – Yes, Vista is slow on a Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM. With loads of crap-ware running at bootup. Vista was designed to run on new and future hardware. Listen up! If you want to play with computers people, keep with the times. Common sense should tell you not to try and run a 2007 operating system on 1999 hardware. The computer industry moves forward, not backwards. So either trash your old hardware and get new stuff or keep running Windows XP and keep your mouths shut about the software that runs fine on my quad core machine.

Vista not Compatible – Again you are right! The computer industry is not only about new technologies, it is about making money. Just like I said above, the industry is moving forward. Do you think that all these companies that produced your printers, scanners, TV cards, game adapters and so on, are trying there best to keep your 5 year old equipment and software up to date. Keep wishing. I can just see the guys that make QuickBooks racking their brains to try and figure out how to get QuickBooks 2001 to run on Vista. They would really hate it if you had to spend another $200 to buy another upgrade. Grow up people. Now after all that, Shut the hell up about Vista and go tell HP, Dell, Kodak, Philips Logitech and so on that they all suck for not writing new drivers for Vista. I personally have no clue to what you are talking about as I can run Office 2000, Quicken 2001, OpenOffice and an encyclopedia Program on CD from 1999 all perfectly fine. Maybe you guys just need computer lessons.

Vista has bugs – Well what did you expect when you try to please everybody? You want your OS to run all your old programs and all your new programs and all future programs and to work with every piece of hardware ever made. Did you ever stop to think that trying to combine all these different technologies might cause some problems? Like all other operating systems before it, Vista tries to be compatible with most of this stuff, but in the end there are going to be problems.

Nothing New in Vista – Maybe Microsoft is tired of getting sued by third party developers for including stuff into their operating system. Just what exactly is this new stuff you want? I have been using computers for 27 years and all the operating systems did pretty much the same stuff.

No, Vista is not perfect, but it is just another step in the operating system world. I have used DOS, Geos, Win 3.1, Win 95, Win 98, Win ME, Win XP, Linux and Vista over the years and they all have the exact same problems as Vista when they came out. So what’s all the complaining about? This is how it works people, like it or not. If you think Vista sucks, then write your own operating system.

Do people really want technological progress to just stop because they really like what they got now? What about the future. If I had felt this way when I was running windows 3.1 with a 486 computer at 33 MHz, 1 MB RAM and 128 MB hard drive, could you imagine me still using that system today? Well that's exactly what these people are asking for who want to save XP and have Microsoft support it indefinitely. These are the people who need a wake up call.

My first response is directed to individual home users. This is my response to Businesses and IT professionals. What I am going to say should already be obvious. If It was me who had to deal with this situation, such as George's post above about the hotel chain. I would advise waiting and not upgrading to Vista. Vista does require new hardware and software. But if everything is running fine with XP, there is no need to upgrade yet. I would wait about 2 years after Vista's release date. By doing that, you leave time for all the bugs and patches to be worked out in the OS. The new hardware of today that can run vista good will be more affordable in a year from now when you want/need to upgrade. More time for custom applications and hardware compatibility. Bottom line is when Vista is more mainstream is when businesses should upgrade.

Let's see, if I'm driving a fifteen year old car on fifty year old roads with some minor patch work, and getting to the same place at the same time as someone with a new car and using less fuel, wait a minute, I forgot, this combo may not attract girls. But hey I've already got one.

This is kind of what it looks like to me. If you're kind of insecure and need to boost your image..........well you get the picture

Vista is the worst Microsoft OS, bar none.

The only good thing is the eye candy. Everything is slow as hell (copying, searching, etc.), even on a fast computer with plenty memory. The hard disk just keeps spinning indexing all day long and slow everything down.

I just can't stand a bit of it.

This is truly awesome. Does anyone know anyone at Microsoft so that they can send them this page's link?

Several of the comments above making reference to MS not listening are true. In advertising and marketing it is called "public". We are NOT Microsoft's public. Their public is the machine builders, the tech heads they hit with the OEM fees. We aren't even on MS's radar. That's why a mac opens the disk drive when an install is complete and a PC doesn't, along with hundreds of other intuitive user oriented differences.

Apple, on the other hand, is it's own machine maker and therefore knows how to find and focus on it's public. Consequently, their apples fall closer to our trees.

There you have it. MS focuses on the wrong public and our choice is switch O/S's or suck wind.

Three glorious decades and dozen dirty windows later, ready... everyone breathe deep...

I don't remember the same kind of uproar with previous new OSes. I recall Win2K being welcomed. I remember XP being praised when it came out, despite its steeper hardware requirements, even though it didn't really come into its own until SP2 was released. I don't remember anything like the near-universal opposition to Vista. You know, I don't think it's all bad: popping up a confirmation box every time I try to do something? Good idea, should have done that sooner. Moved things around? I'm sure that with time, we'll wonder how we ever did it any differently. Broken compatibility? To move forward, at some point you need to break compatibility, and that's something that's held Windows back in the past. But it's unrealistic to defiantly say, "we'll drop any vendor who doesn't support Vista". Aside from the upgrade costs, now you're threatening to change a potentially large base of installed software. What happens to your productivity when your fleet of employees, who barely know how to turn the computer on and whose favorite application is the aquarium screen saver, have to leave the comfort zone of the software they're familiar with? To recommend something so disruptive is to show oneself as being divorced from reality, which is the problem with this article. The writer further demonstrates his lack of solid points by resorting to emotional language like "incredible" and "cartoon-looking". Speaking of which- I thought XPs eye-candy interface was exactly what I didn't need, but Vista's is so over-the-top that it makes me think that there must be some great mushrooms grown in Redmond. No doubt that's a big chunk of the performance hit: I've got XP and Vista on separate hard drives on the same new machine, and Vista is a real dog compared to XP. So, what do I get in return for that performance hit? Aero? Useless, especially once the novelty value's worn off. The real problem with Vista is that Microsoft is alienating the average computer user. The average computer user does not read InfoWorld. The average user is the guy who doesn't get the whole "files-folders-desktop" metaphor, and thinks it's some kind of impenetrable technical jargon. The average user is the lady who points at the case and calls it the "hard drive". Windows has always supposedly been easy for the average person to use, but for every two things Microsoft's made easy, there's one thing that sends the average user to the Control Panel. These people are afraid that clicking on a Control Panel icon will immediately post all their personal data online, alert the Secret Service, and set off the computer's internal shrapnel bomb. These are the people that need their hands held, and as it was, MS only held their hands half the way. With Vista, instead of making the difficulties even easier than before, they've turned around and taken them to the next level. It's a big mistake, but Microsoft's huge enough to be able to recover from it. Then again, if you kill a big tree, it can take years before the top branches find out that the tree's dead. They'd better get it right next time.

Oh my God!!!

I have never seen such whining and crying from supposedly adult people. What is your problem anyway? Let me explain it to you again. Who told you MS is forcing you to upgrade. Are you a retard? Unless they come to your house and install Vista by force, you can keep XP for the next 20 years if you like. What are you all afraid of? Because MS is not going to sell XP or Support it? Big deal, you can get third party updates and service packs from the internet. How many copies of XP do you need? you have had 6 years to buy it and you got 5 more months to go out and buy as many copies as you want. If you buy a new machine with Vista on it, downgrade to one of your XP copies. Better yet, Head over to the antique computer store and pick up some computers as to make sure XP will have all the correct drivers. These computers will even run Linux! Imagine that! No one is stopping you from living in your little XP world for as long as you like. Me, I'll stick with reality and a great computer.

J. Peter Bruzzese is a Knight in Shining Armor, come to defend Microsoft from its critics. Hail Bruzzese, our savior!