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Vista or XP Pro

Much has been written on Vista both pro and con. One thing has become clear, some people love it but the vast majority dislike it intensely - for many reasons. Despite Microsoft's assertions about great Vista sales, most of those sales have been at the retail level where Microsoft did a great job of not allowing those computer purchases to have anything other than Vista installed, from day one.

As I write this in late September of 2008 I am still hearing stories from employees of my customers about the "crappy" Vista systems they were given as presents last Christmas. In fact, I haven't been able to find one of them with anything good to say about their computer systems

I read several computer publications every month. Some are computer industry magazines oriented toward companies in the computer business. and some are news stand variety. Of the news stand magazines, the one and only magazine I have 100% respect for is Maximum PC. The reasons for lack of respect for the other news stand magazines is better saved for another discussion but suffice it to say that the historically better computer magazines are long out of print.

The headline of the October 2008 issue of Maximum PC, (MPC), was "Inside Microsoft's $6 billion failure" In that issue they had a lengthy discussion with Microsoft about what went wrong with Vista but the magazine's take closely parallels what I've been saying about Vista for the last 18 months or more, and Microsoft's much ballyhooed service pack 1 for Vista did little to change much of the basic problems.

I have Vista Business installed in my office on 2 systems. One of those is a dual boot so when I'm in Vista it's a clean stand-alone version of Vista. The other installation, on another system, is installed as a virtual machine, meaning I can run Vista Business inside my XP Pro on the same system. Neither of these systems are slouches. One is a dual core AMD system and the other is a Quad Core Intel system, but as much as I try to use Vista on both systems I can't bring myself to the point of using Vista in any serious and productive way, and using Vista as my default operating system is currently out of the question for several reasons I will mention latter in this "rant".

Back to MPC. The magazine called Vista Microsoft's worst Windows launch in the company's history. Vista had previously been compared with Windows Millennium Edition, which was a disaster by any definition. The big difference here is that Windows 98 and Windows 2000 were still viable solutions and were not taken off the shelves. When Vista was released Microsoft provided a relatively short window for people to purchase XP systems before they shut the door. This was after multiple Internet petitions and pleading even from some PC manufacturers not to kill XP. (Note that there are some companies, like PC MAX, that will be able to continue selling XP Pro through January 31, 2009)

In the MPC piece the reasons they gave for the extraordinary resistance to Vista were totally on the money. Among those were:

Instability! More people have more blue screens and crashes with Vista that I have ever seen on any other operating system, period. Microsoft blames many of those crashes on poor drivers and to some extent that's true but XP Pro had a fraction of the stability issues when it was released. Vista has a Reliability Monitor report built-in and MPC installed Vista on several of their systems and found all of them unstable.

Incompatibility! This is one that really kills me. I have several programs I would like to run on Vista that won't and some I need to run that I can't. All this time after the release of Vista and some of those programs still won't run. When people found that they bought multi function printers that could only pint using Vista but could not fax, scan, or do anything else, the manufacturers of the printers said, buy a new printer. There are still lots of perfectly good scanners that have no ability to scan in Vista, fax modems that still can't fax and the list goes on. I had a customer purchase one Vista laptop only to find out that for that one system, (out of the 14 in his office), to use one of their main programs they had to upgrade that software, to the tune of $2,300.00. Even all of this isn't even a fraction of the story.

Performance! We build some systems that will run Vista fairly well but they are more expensive than what most people purchase.. Some of the benchmarks from Vista's initial release had certain functions running at 50% of XP's performance on the same task. So Microsoft released service pack 1, (SP1), for Vista. Expectations were high that some of the performance issues would be corrected. Some were, but not enough. Vista went from 50% slower than XP to 10%-15% slower. The slower the system was the greater the effect and the slower processes ran. Very close behind SP1 was SP3 for XP which improved XP's performance a little and once again widened the gap.

Version Overload! Who out there can tell me what features each of the various "multiple" versions of Vista gain or lose. Even the manufacturers are having problems determining which version to pre-install for consumer systems but once you get to the store you buy what you see. If you find out that a feature you expected or wanted isn't there, oh well! You can upgrade to a more expensive version to get that feature but I've been a "Microsoft OEM" since 1992 and a "Microsoft System Builder" since about 1999 and I still have a hard time figuring it out.

There are other issues like the idea that User Account Control will somehow protect you from yourself, but not really. Microsoft says Vista is safer than XP, it is, but you could get the same features and functionality in XP without the extreme performance hit or other problems people have with Vista. One of the computer magazines claimed that Windows will collapse under its own weight. If this keeps up, it will happen. Vista is bloated, no question.

Microsoft is (frantically) working on the next version of Windows code named Windows 7. It's actually in the hands of some early testers as I'm writing this. Rumor has it that they are aiming for a late 2009 release but some pundits are saying they may try for an early release. The bad news, it's based on Vista. The good news, Microsoft has an inkling of what went wrong with Vista and they are trying to fix it. We can only hope.

 

 



The bitterness of poor quality and performance remains long after the sweetness of low price has worn off!

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The information contained on this site is the educated opinion of PC MAX based on more than 20 years of hands on experience and close contact with hundreds of customers, thousands of computers and many thousands of problems. They are all based on real life circumstances and conditions. Those who have experienced the problems and solutions listed on this site can attest to their validity.

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