When XP came out it was a piece of shit. It took SP1 to stabilize into a good working system. 2000 and even 98 both worked better than the initial release of XP. Think back carefully to the time. However, XP was a big step up from ME as long as you did a clean install.
For the Record 98 and 2000 where both great release right from the get go. Windows 95 was pretty buggy at first. It had some real major improvements over Win 3.11 however. ME was the worse new release overall.
Jim
Hear hear! I just did the same thing. I love it when friends and family call and ask me questions about their Windows machine, and my only response is “I haven’t owned a Windows machine in 2 years, so I honestly don’t know the answer to your question.” Feels great!
First, to the OP - it all goes down to hardware. If you’ve purchased hardware from a mainline vendor (HP, Dell, Gateway) then your drivers and such will most likely have been updated to work with Vista and you should be fine. If you’ve home-built your machine but used top-end parts, same thing, although I would at the very least highly recommend updating your BIOS. If you’ve gone 64bit, then your apps will likely struggle more than any other applications. You can check on microsoft.com for application compatibility testing with Vista as well; some will work, some won’t, but it’s (as already stated) largely down to the age of the application. Most big software and hardware vendors will have already released updated drivers / patches, but if it’s a 64-bit incompatibility you’re gonna be a bit stuck. If you’ve home-built your machine from low-end parts, or bought a stunning deal machine with sub-standard parts, then I wouldn’t recommend upgrading.
Second - there was a comment about Vista thrashing the HD and slowing everything down. This is probably down to Search indexing the contents of your HD. It tries to do this during idle time, but if you’re just coming back after a long idle, or if you’re shutting down your machine all the time, it might take a few minutes to come back. This should go away once the index is built; if not, you can manually rebuild the index. Just go to the Orb and type in Index; it’s pretty self-explanatory.
Third - It’s like a cult, the way all the Mac users feel about their machines. Look at the iPhone - it doesn’t even do much of anything new, but people still lined up around the block to get their shiny new nose ring from Apple. You can listen to music and organise your calendar and send emails? Wow. I did all that with my Windows Mobile device 4 years ago. And I can do it with Nokia and Sony Erricson devices for years now as well. Oh, and I can do quad-band, 3G, Edge, Bluetooth, and wi-fi with those devices as well. It’s religious, it makes no sense, and I’ve given up trying to find the logic because it’s clearly not a logical thing.
A computer is a tool to me, nothing more. I choose to use at home what I use at work, and what does the most for me. I mostly use my laptop, given to me since I’m a ‘road warrior’ for 90% of what I do on the PC. When Mac can do everything I want to do, and not treat me like an idiot for wanting to know what’s going on under the hood, I’ll switch, but what I won’t do is accept Apple’s ‘father knows best’ and proprietary bullshit without a fight. They’re a far worse wanna-be monopolist company than Microsoft has ever been, they’re just not nearly as good at actually making money. They just have better PR and a bunch of happy cultists saying how they’re not so bad. If Apple is so much more the ‘people’s machine’, then why do they cost so bleedin’ much?
Power management and security, both controlled by GPOs - savings in either one will more than pay for upgrade costs unless you’ve tons of legacy apps which are business critical. It’s not a question of ‘ready for business’ it’s a question of business cost vs. feature upgrades (i.e user benefit and upgrades, which means users spend more time making money for the company) and making a business decision about them, not an emotive one.
Bollocks. Home users are very different from enterprise users. Home users want new and cool, and if the hardware and drivers can support it they’ll have both of those. Running your neolithic software might be a problem; some game designers might need to re-issue patches. Developers might actually have to do their damn jobs and write good code on publicly available SDKs to make their software work on Vista platforms.
But the fact is - nobody is forcing anybody to upgrade to anything. You don’t want to run Vista on your home PC? Go buy a copy of XP and install it. It’s cheaper and will get more so, and will be fully supported for at least 3-4 more years. Microsoft’s not forcing anyone to do anything, and neither are the OEMs who are the ones actually shipping the machines with Vista on them. All you conspiracy theorists can sit back down - this is just a business strategy, nothing more.
GomiBoy - IT Consultant for 10 years. And I only work for the big fish (10,000 seats plus). Oh, and BTW - I’ve been running Vista since it was Beta 2. Had some driver problems, had some BIOS problems, but it’s been getting more and more stable every day that I use it. Yes, it requires more memory, but I’m OK with that.
And think back even harder, as the releases that you are praising weren’t all new operating systems but extension on all new ones. 98 was a step from 95, etc.
Apple is not an option for me as I need a little more access to the inner hardware of my computer and I want to be able to upgrade things better than what Apple allows for. I also use a great deal of programs that are just not available on the Mac. It’s easy to make a stable OS based off of hardware from minute choices (built to your tight specifications), but when you have to have a stable operating system that can use thousands and thousands of different manufacturing devices, of course things are going to be problematic at times. But, there isn’t a Mac out there that can outperform my PC, and that has always been the case.
Vista will be in working order shortly.
Bollocks right back at you. Vista at this time is not worth upgrading to. If you buy a new PC for Home with it on it, that is fine. But I can see no good reason to attempt an upgrade at home.
What is okay for you, does not make it worth upgrading to for the average user.
Jim (15 years in the IT trenches and I started as a home user & programmer with the TI99/4a in 1982)
And how long do you expect any company to continue supporting an old piece of software? It’s 7 years old, are you telling me your application vendors haven’t released anything new in that time that you’d like to use? Has your buiness not evolved at all in 7 years?
Do some TCO analysis. Continuing to run old hardware and old software is more expensive, in spite of the capital expenditure investment to upgrade, then running with new kit and software. if your required applications are in-house developed, then hire good developers and you’ll get better applications. If they’re not, then I’m quite surprised if the software vendor, much less Microsoft, is still supporting them and hasn’t offered an upgrade that will run faster and better.
You are correct, but of course ME was just a 98 upgrade and it still managed to be terrible. 
Jim
I think your resume is less important than what you say. I know some folks who’ve been in this game for 20 years and are utterly useless because their minds are calcified into the ‘old way’ of doing things and they refuse to change for love or money. Not sayin’ that’s a reflection on you - I don’t know you from Adam. Just sayin’.
Look - I guess this is IMHO so a factual argument is out of the question, but just once I’d like to see someone bashing Microsoft with an actual justification and not just a grudge.
It’s better than OK. Here’s why:
So let’s see - Speed, stability, security, usability - what more do I want? Oh, yeah. Application compatibility. It runs the games and applications and stuff that I actually both want and need to run.
And I haven’t even started on the whizzy-bangy-shiny-new bits that I really like, like the sidebar, Windows Media Center edition, and the add-ins to other applications I use all the time like Office 2007.
Your turn. Care to ellucidate a bit more than ‘it sucks, don’t use it?’
The two professional computer geeks in my immediate family have somewhat differing views on Vista – my brother says he got a laptop with it a few months ago, not intending to do anything more intensive than word processing, and it works fine for him. There are some software conflicts and stuff, but – and I pointed out to him at that point that he knows how to deal with those a hell of a lot better than I do.
The other one, my stepdad, says not to get Vista for at least another year until they can get some more of the bugs worked out.
My new laptop, therefore, will have XP. I don’t plan on doing anything with it that requires anything more than what I have now, on my four-year-old desktop. And, frankly, I’m behind the curve enough on computers that my fairly low-end new comp seems almost miraculous to me. To think I remember when I dreamed of a 386.
Sure:
Bitlocker is a potential maintenance nightmare. We do not plan to use it.
The Wizbang features use up more resources than are justified on an older machine. Again, I am telling people not to upgrade and that if they have older equipment, look for an XP box.
For the Home users the various “are you sures” are not adding enough protection to justify the nuisance, and no, you cannot just turn all of them off.
I have had no problems with wireless and bluetooth in XP, so how is Vista better? I have yet to see where the wireless connection on my Dell Vista Laptop works better then the dozen or so of XP laptops I have either used or maintained.
Sounds like you are enjoying the Nanny Op system, but then I do not know you from Adam. I use my intelligence to prevent the issues you want the Op system to stop with an extra click that many users will learn to ignore and just click through.
BTW: I was an early adopter of 95, 98 and XP and each new office and explorer version. This is part of my jobs over the last 12 years.
BTW: you threw your resume up there first like it meant something, I was responding in kind.
Jim
So what has been released that is so great but won’t run on Windows 2000?
Our business hasn’t changed much in that time. A Business-to-Business product that isn’t glamorous but is profitable doesn’t need to change all that much. Invoicing, purchasing, inventory. All that stuff running on an in-house developed system, basic word processing, spreadsheet and email software. What reason is there to change? Because we don’t like being profitable? I know everything runs fine on Win2000. I’d just like to be able to keep buying that.
Now we have a mix of Win2000 and XP because I can’t get Win2000 anymore. It’s harder to support a mixed environment and there were a few minor but annoying things to deal with on XP. Vista will only make that worse with zero benefits to the business. I don’t need to do a TCO analysis. It’s all paid for and running perfectly and making us money. That’s a situation I want to preserve, not change. I’d be happy to run with Win2000 for the next 20 years if Microsoft would sell it to me.
Vista is far more than ready for enterprise - it was designed for enterprise. And for home user’s it’s got all the bells and whistles. That’s not to say every user has to use all the bells and whistles, but they are there. And pretty much (with some exceptions) every XP-compatible application will run on Vista. How is it not ready again?
To your specific points:
If you’ve no road warriors in your business, then fine, but I think the security enhancements more than make up for the maintenance risk. And it’s not like it’s a ‘nightmare’. You keep the encryption key on a fob. You keep a copy in the data centre. You use it if you need to do a restore. Nightmare? A worse nightmare is having one of your troops leave an unencrypted laptop on a train or bus or taxi, and having your data (and possibly your whole network) open to the world. That’s a nightmare. Of course, I mostly work with either banks or government agencies, so YMMV.
So don’t use them, and don’t upgrade. I fail to comprehend your comment - of ‘using up more resources than justified’ however. These new features may be resource hungry - are you saying they’re badly written and could be more efficient and use up less system resources? How do you know?
I’m running Vista on my 4-year-old media centre box. Yes, it needed some more ram. I put in a digital TV card because I wanted extra channels and the non-digital channels are getting turned off in a month or so over here. Other upgrades? None. How’s that difficult?
If someone’s running really old kit, I would tend agree with you. But if my mom’s shopping for a new PC tomorrow I would absolutely suggest Vista as an option for her.
Here’s another point - if the machine is stable and has been running for years, why the upgrade at all? The old software on it ain’t gonna suddenly stop working; so it’s not like people are being forced to run Vista on old kit which can’t support it. So why all the who-rah?
No software program can override the actions of a stupid (authorized) user. At least this makes it a user problem rather than a software problem.
Better? How about more secure?
Make up your mind - 2 second ago you were complaining that it’s not enough protection, and now you’re calling it a Nanny Op? And you’re wrong. I use my brains too, but I’m (like you) an experienced IT guy who’s been at this for quite a while. The Nanny Op ain’t there for us, it’s there for my mom and my uncle, neither of which knows crap and both of whom will benefit from this.
. 95 was a bit before my time - I started in IT after it came out. But I’ve early-adopted 98 and XP and now Vista. I wouldn’t have recommended my mom or uncle do Vista 6 months ago, but I certainly would now.
Sorry, but no - you did. Re-read the last 10 or so posts; that was all you talking about how experienced you are.
Unintentionally Blank, you’re well on your way to becoming a Microsoft-Free Zone! Now all we need is MFZ stickers for our cars and front doors. Reduce the polution and proclaim it proudly! 
Where do you want me to begin? Might be easier if you explain what your business does… oh, wait, you did
Ah, a good solid business justification. That I can argue with. My argument is simple - it’s only profitable now. The cost of maintaining your in-house system will increase over time. And soon the cost vs the benefit will tip the other way and you won’t be profitable anymore because IT costs will eat up your entire profit and more.
The number of fincancial services organisations I’m working with right now that are facing this is huge. They’ve got all these fine, standard, old IT systems running line-of-business applications that have been running fine for years. Because of this, they’ve never spent a dime updating them and managing them. Here’s the problem - you can’t even buy hardware to run them anymore, much less find anyone to support them. So the software or hardware falls over, and there’s nobody who can, much less wants, to pick up the pieces. They’re now facing HUGE bills to update their software, and HUGE risks to their businesses, because they weren’t far-sighted enough to see that everything changes over time.
Yet you expect Microsoft to operate as a charity? Microsoft makes money by doing software revisions and upgrades. They do this 2 ways - 1) by release new, cool stuff, and 2) by ending support on old stuff. You don’t think they want to be profitable?
Have you even checked if it’ll run on anything else? Cause chances are: 1) it will, and 2) it’ll run faster, better, and more secure.
First, don’t blame Microsoft. Windows 2000 is fully supported until 2010, so blame your hardware vendor for that one.
Second, TCO isn’t just about ‘what’s paid for’ it’s the TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP. It means not just the licenses and the equipment and the desktop PCs, but the support costs, the support staff, the network, all the rest of it. If you actually analysed the numbers, continually trying to keep something running on kit that’s old and getting older is a zero-sum game. It’s not sustainable, and blame Microsoft all you want but the hardware’s got a lot more to do with it than they do.
Not for me, thanks. I prefer to be a realist.
I find myself somewhere inbetween Musicat and GomiBoy. GB’s arguements are sound and accurate. Vista is not 100% warts and scabs. By the same token, I wouldn’t recommend a Mac in my particular business environment. I Lurve my Mac, and that’s an opinion I’ve formed after test running dozens of unices, Windows of all flavors, OS/2, BeOS, and a host of others. I can like it without being a zealot, can’t I? Please allow me to use the right tool for the job without it being a religious debate.
Vista is and will be the direction for Microsoft folks. The driver support and requirements taken in current context are no worse than when everybody had pentium 120’s with 128 mb or RAM and Windows 98 SCREAMED on a Pentium II 350 with 512 Mb RAM.
When I sit down in front of a Vista box (which I have, but never been forced to live there for long) I see great improvements in the start button and search engine. That’s microsoft cutting off Google Desktop’s place on my systray. No biggie, Apple does that too.
What chaps my hide is the places where it seems like they changed things for the sake of change. While that’s just mild disorientation, it seems like they never actually USED some of the stuff. The frustration is in initially setting up a box. Example:
I want to join a domain
-double click ‘my computer’…uh, you can’t. It’s not there anymore.
-Click on ‘computer’ under the start button (network properties was then a rightclick away on the ‘network item’ under XP) there’s no context menu on ‘Computer’ anymore.
-Press Start, enter ‘domain’ in the search box…no dice
-Go to Control Panel, Click on Network and Internet, wander around for a bit, including ‘connect to a network’…that’s not the correct path. No joy.
-Find and press ‘Classic View’ on the control panel…look for Networking and sharing center. Joining a domain USED to be an item under tools on that dialog…there’s no longer a menu bar, much less a tools item.
-enter ‘domain’ in the seearch box in the control panel…no dice.
-Go back to Start, help and support, and enter ‘domain’ and it DOES show up as a task. Joining a domain is under system (a ha! I think it may have been there as well in XP) bring up system to find it looks, in no way like it used to.
So, you can do it, but the first chunk of time you spend sure takes a lot of effort to fumble around a bit.
Nicely put. I’m no zealot, even though I’ve let the cat out of the bag and admitted I’m a Microsoft employee. I feel almost exactly as you do - it’s a tool. If it does the job, great. If it doesn’t, I’ll find one that does.
The above gets less the more time goes by. This isn’t totally due to Microsoft; it’s also due to the host of ISVs and hardware vendors updating their stuff as well.
Or you could just right-click computer, and go to properties, which is just as it was before. Or add ‘computer’ to your start menu.
So begin. I’ve explained my business. You tell me an application that I need that isn’t available for Win 2000 but is available on Vista.
No, you are wrong. Maintenance costs have decreased to practically nil because the environment is stable and reliable. This is a good thing. My time is spent on adding new functionality. Day-to-day maintenance is trivial. This is a sweet spot to be in and I’m not keen to move from it for no good reason.
Can’t buy hardware to run them anymore? I’m talking standard off-the-shelf PCs that you can buy anywhere. Hardware like that will be available for decades.
No, it makes perfect sense for Microsoft to operate this way. We all know that sales of Vista would be a lot less if everyone had the choice of staying with previous versions of Windows when they buy a new PC. So they are removing the choice to force adoption of Vista. It doesn’t mean I have to like it.
My hardware vendor tells me they can’t get Win2000 from Microsoft anymore. I blame Microsoft for that. That’s their decision, not the vendor’s.
Of course it’s sustainable. When the hardware wears out I’ll just buy new. It’s just your standard desk-top PC. The only problem will be my inability to duplicate the operating system environment because it’s not sold anymore.
Tell you what, I will stop being snarky and condescending if you do. If you read your first reply to me, you might see where I found it condescending.
We are both IT pros with pretty good credentials.
You make some good points, but you seem to be glossing over the warts in Vista.
By older hardware, I should have specifically said older peripherals. There have been quite a few issues with people being unable to get an older scanner or multi-function to work without headaches or jumping through hoops.
In my case, I have a Network Color Laser from a fairly off brand, Konica-Minolta. Getting my Vista Laptop to print to it was a struggle I never had with 98 and XP.
It is issues like this that means for most or at least many people, that it can be more of a hassle than it is really worth to buy a Vista machine as long as they still have an option.
At work, we need to accommodate everything from AutoCad and Wildfire, to Production monitoring software and camera software to AS400/Iseries Client software. Going to Vista is not a reasonable option yet and will not be for an extended time, at least a year. Mid Size companies like mine are part of the reason why Dell & HP are still offering (or again offering) XP loaded boxes.
As for home use, Vista just does not offer me or the collection of family and friends I support any advantages yet. I am not saying switch to Mac, but for the first time, it does not sound crazy to me.
Jim