Most busnisses are slow to change in terms of both hardware and software. My computer at work is got to be at least 8 years old, and some of the software we use is 16 bit dos based 10-15 year old stuff.
I’m not surprised. We ourselves have had problems wiht some of our networking software. It’s 8 years old, why on earth they expected to just work with a new OS is beyond me. Luckily it’s being updated and should release a vista compatible version in a few months.
That is the main problem with Vista. Compatibility.
Thing is MOST programs work. The older the program the less likely this is to be true, however.
Plenty of governement agencies are also running proprietary software that was written for one specific operating system and will not work on any other. I just ran across a piece of MRP software that only likes XP, won’t run under 2000 pro or Vista business even when run in XP compatibility mode.
So which is it? “Vista is here to stay” (get onboard or die) or “Why are you looking to install a new OS on an old machine?” (Don’t upgrade until you need to.) One moment you’re saying, yes, of course you need to upgrade your machine because Vista’s bright-n-shiny new technology (which isn’t all that new either in the guts nor the interface) requires more horsepower, and the next that Vista runs just fine on middle-of-the-road machines a few years old.
As for “you can’t have your cake and eat it too,” I can, again, run the latest versions of OS X on decade-old hardware without any major hiccups and only a very modest performance hit. This isn’t because Mac hardware is so far advanced or powerful or anysuch; it’s because Apple made the efficiency and performance of the Quartz interface in OS X a priority. As a result, it does many of the bright shiny things Vista does as well, with far fewer resources, more robustly, less intrusively, and without requiring upgrade after upgrade. The downside, such as it is, is that there is a limited set of hardware that you can run OS X on, even in the post-PPC days. This is a deliberate philosophy of Apple, however; not (just) to control profits on hardware, but to sell computers as an integrated system rather than a diverse set of components which may or may not play nicely together.
Microsoft Vista is an elephant in tennis shoes; bloated, unwieldy, requiring a lot of support, and splitting at the seams. Microsoft has the chance at every turn to start developing an OS that is truly the next generation commerical operating system; lean, robust, efficient, modular, scalable, highly configurable, et cetera. Instead, they poor their effort into designing great marketing materials and produce mediocre, lagging technology, which they’re able to do because of the inertia granted them by their enormous market share. “Where is the WOW?” their advertising banners ask, and no one seems to have a good answer for that question.
The largest Networking Company is Cisco I believe, we have a brand spanking new Cisco Firewall and Switch and the VPN client do not play well with Vista and they do not even work very well with IE 7. Our servers run 2003 with fully deployed AD. Our PCs are rarely over 3 years old. We have 98% XP Pro on Clients. Vista offers us nothing and does not work with many current versions of business software we use.
We have a Fax solution running on a 2003 server. Its client is funky on 2003.
We have a HR System that is up to date; they need another 6-12 months before they are ready for Vista.
Our Business system runs on an IBM Iseries (AS400) Midrange, this client is not Vista ready yet but I do have several work arounds.
We have engineering software that could make use of the power of the 64-bit version of Vista, but their very expensive hardware (plotters and the like) do not have drivers and therefore cannot be made to work with Vista 64. BTW: Do not buy Vista 64 bit unless you plan to replace most of your external hardware devices.
Within IE 7 on Vista, I cannot get it to let me run the little hypertag applet in the SDMB. It prompts me everytime. In XP I have no problem. I checked with a Vista expert, there is no work around yet.
Vista is not ready for the business world and offers no advantages to the home user that come close to outweighing its drawbacks.
Jim (IT professional who has taken a Microsoft 3 day troubleshooting Vista Class)
Computer guy here. Vista itself is ok, it’s more secure than XP (so far.) If you just do e-mail and surf the web it’s fine.
But I’d stay away from Vista if:
-You play a lot of high-end games (I’m not talking about web games, I mean CD or DVD-based games)
-You install a lot of older software (some will probably not be compatible)
-You have a variety of hardware (scanners, printers, etc) you want to work with it
-You need to network with older Windows machines. It’s a pain.
I’d have to strongly disagree with your first point. Games, all of the games I play, run just fine on Vista and the latest nvidia/ATI drivers. The exceptions are few, and most are not “cutting edge” games, but older games which have trouble running even on xp machines.
(I know this isn’t directed at me) Because it’s not necessary. 10.4 didn’t suddenly make 10.3 irrelevant. (And I’m running Leopard on the MBP.)
I guess, at a certain level, the same could be said about XP…at least until Microsoft decides to stop supporting it. Then you’re screwed as there’s a MUCH higher prevalence of beasties that those updates would protect against. Fanboi-sm aside, there’s effectively NO virus/spyware impact to ANY version of OS X…so Microsoft’s biggest selling point (The new version is More Secure!) isn’t a big deal on the Mac.
Yeah, but running 10.3 on a B&W G3 isn’t running “the latest versions of OS X on decade-old hardware”. It’s running a four year old OS on eight year old hardware.
Based on my experience on going from 10.2 to 10.3 and 10.3 to 10.4, I’d expect things to run better on the older equipment. Apple has improved the performance on old hardware with each OS X release.
Because I don’t need to upgrade. I don’t get messages about needing to upgrade. I don’t have software applications that require me to upgrade; conversely, I don’t have software apps preventing me from upgrading. And, unlike most Microsoft users (who talk of reloading the OS like it’s a regular maintenance task to clean out the gunk) I’ve never had to reload the OS on any of the Macboxes; they run like the day the OS was installed. And I’ve seen G3 machines running 10.4 that actually run faster than 10.3 on my G3.
Running the latest Tiger release on genuinely decade-old hardware would be a bit of a challenge. My WallStreet could do it (it’s got 10.3.8 on it but lots of WallStreet owners have loaded Tiger, using XPostFacto); but the WallStreet (official name: PowerBook G3 Series '98) is not quite a decade old yet…
The beige G3 desktop and laptop were '97 models, and are Tiger-capable, but they came out in November ‘97, making them 4 months’ shy of a decade.
::pokes around in XPostFacto forum::
OK, in this thread, next to last post is from someone who reports Tiger (10.4.7 as of the time of that post) running on an 11-year, 11-month old Power Macintosh 7500 and “working well”.
That would by necessity involve an upgraded processor (no processor older than a G3 can execute the necessary function calls of latter-day OSX; I believe 10.0 and 10.1 would run on a stock 604e but 10.4 certainly won’t run on the 7500’s first-generation PowerPC 601).
Even that upgrade processor is only a G4 at 800 MHz though. And the mobo and the rest of its architecture would be stock except the hard disk.
The thing of it is, any Mac that could run 10.0 can run 10.1 considerably faster, 10.2 considerably faster yet again, 10.3 a notch faster, and 10.4 at least a smidgin faster than that. Admittedly that was in part because 10.0 was simply not ready for prime time, and 10.1 just barely so; but while Apple could’ve shrugged and simply stuffed more glitz and features in subsequent versions and said “so buy a faster Mac, you cheapskates”, they did do the dev work necessary to streamline that code.
I know what 10.3.8 feels like on a 500 MHz G4 in only 512 MB RAM, so I know that guy with the 7500 isn’t stretching a point when he says that 10.4.7 is “working well” on that more-than-a-decade-old PowerMac. With 800 MHz of G4 and a full gig of RAM, that computer’s entirely adequate for several years to come.
I’m probably the only one to say this, but Vista breathed new life into my HP NX9420 laptop–easily 20% faster than XP for gaming on the same hardware, in terms of raw framerates.
It has some issues, and I’m admittedly a senior sysadmin with a decent amount of experience tweaking things, but I love it.
Can you back that up? I’ve run every version of OS-X (occasionally to my sorrow ), but my recollection is that the first version of OS-X that ran Quartz Extreme (10.2?) was considerably faster at drawing graphics because the GPU was finally utilized, but there weren’t any other notable jumps in performance solely from OS upgrades among the different versions of OS-X.
The best thing about Vista is the way it handles volume. You can set individual volume levels for different applications, and even mute them. Flash game with ridiculously loud sound and you want to listen to music? Just lower the volume for firefox, and the problem is solved. This is a quantum leap forward. Other than that, I can’t say I’ve noticed any improvement over XP. In fact, there is actually a bit more instability likely due to driver issues.
), but my recollection is that the first version of OS-X that ran Quartz Extreme (10.2?) was considerably faster at drawing graphics because the GPU was finally utilized, but there weren’t any other notable jumps in performance solely from OS upgrades among the different versions of OS-X.