Sorry to do this to you again, but:
I’m going to back off on response #1, above. That’s my recollection, but I’m not finding any backup for it (one way or the other). FWIW.
Fair enough. I’ll accept that, although I disagree. If you took my comments to be snarky, condescending, or glib that was not my intention and I apologize.
Yup
Respectfully disagree. I’m not glossing over anything, and specifically said if there were app compat or hw supportability issues, not to upgrade.
As I said before, if there is a driving reason not to upgrade, and if you know that the application or HW simply won’t run on Vista and there’s not an upgrade for that HW / SW, then don’t upgrade. Nobody is forcing you to. Where I object is a knee-jerk 'don’t upgrade ‘cause it sucks’ attitude without doing the actual research in why and how and what the impact will be.
Only if people are married to old kit and old software. In this day and age where it’s nearly as cheap to replace a printer completely as replace a toner cartridge, does it really make that big of an impact if your old printer needs to get replaced when you buy a new PC? Face it - most people will only upgrade their OS when they buy a new PC. Most PC users won’t upgrade their OS until then, unless they’re hobbyists who just want to play around. So what’s the big deal?
And like I said, fair enough. There’s sound business decisions behind this stance, which I can’t argue with. I would argue than any main-line software or hardware will be fully upgraded to be Vista compatible in less than a year, but if you’ve made a decision of when to entertain an upgrade I can’t fault you for that.
Your decision. I think you’re wrong, but if that’s your choice then c’est la vie. I won’t loose any sleep over it.
Your recollection was right. A base XP install didn’t put anything on the desktop except for recycle bin. You could right-click on computer, documents, etc… in the start menu and put it on the desktop, but it wasn’t there by default.
I need more info. How many seats in your business? what sector is your business in? What does your in-house application do? How is it hosted - client hosted, n-tier, web service, mainframe, what? How do your clients access the data they require - locally stored? Database connections? Who manages your network, your own IT guys or a 3rd party hoster?
Then as I’ve said repeatedly, don’t upgrade. You don’t have to.
Who’s your hardware vendor, Chuck’s PC down the road? Any mainline vendor will be able to create a bespoke build for your organisation which will have a base OS build of whatever you want.
I’m guessing you have a small-to-medium size business, say under 1000 seats. In which case the model you describe is perfectly sustainable and I understand your frustration - Microsoft works best for home users and big enterprises, but we’ve a bit of a blind spot in the small-to-mid-size business area. That said, I would still bet that whatever software you’re running you could buy shrink-wrapped off-the-shelf and spend less and be able to run it on whatever hardware platform or OS you’d like.
Our main software is highly customized and not available shrink-wrapped.
Yes, a small business. And you are right Microsoft does have a blind spot there. Probably because most operate under the same philosophy I do. You don’t screw with a working system without a good reason. It’s hard for Microsoft to make money off of that.
I’d still bet you’re able to replace what you’ve built with an off-the-shelf with limited customisation, but c’est la vie. Your model is a tough one for us to crack, but we’re doing some work in Shared Services and the like which may make it easier.
Best of luck.
I wouldn’t be so quick to make that statement. Our personal albatross is an application created by an external contractor (long since gone), who wrote it for a business unit, who didn’t bother to ask the IT department’s assistance in writing the functional spec.
The end result is: 1/3 of our workstations cannot be migrated past IE6 pre SP1 as the application breaks. (Interactions between ActiveX, Seibel, and their custom coded crap)
That means the single dirtiest application, that hits the nasties sites, and is the biggest source of infection CANNOT BE PROTECTED. As the Security dude, I’ve gotta protect everything else AROUND them as I can’t protect them directly.
Numbskulls with money, sent it to someone who wanted to get-in-get-out-stop-support, and IT gets to pick up the pieces. A series of events for which, I’m afraid I’m much too familiar.
Not just your personal albatross, it’s a very common one. Someone writes something, doesn’t write it well, and then leaves without ensuring supportability, security, etc… Microsoft catches the blame for this sort of stuff all the time, even though it’s rarely ‘our’ fault. We’ve all sorts of publicly-available and Gold-partner-available stuff out there to help with this sort of thing - writing secure code, writing supportable code, etc and for our enterprise customers we’ve supportability reviews and the like which also lessen the pain, but it still happens a lot.
I’d look at stuff like Softgrid for desktop application virtualisation - it might work wonders, and removes some application dependencies on the OS. Try here for more information.
I’m gonna have to ask for a cite on that one from you or squeegee. I suspect there are situations where XP did or did not install the my computer icon on the desktop. (home or pro, upgrade or fresh install, OEM, or Sysprepped) IIRC, XP started with My computer on the desktop, but a fresh SP2 install might not.
But the point I was making was that there were 5 ways to do something in XP, there’s 2 ways to do it in Vista, and they didn’t happen to overlap with the way I was used to doing stuff.
It was a default setting in XP, as well as XPSP2, to have a ‘clean’ desktop. Some OEMs gave out build images for their PCs which had the desktop icons installed by default, but if you bought off-the-shelf XP or SP2, you’d have no icons on the desktop except Recycle Bin by default. You could add them from the start menu.
And every way to do something in XP is still there in Vista. It might be a little bit different, but it’s still there. You can also change the UI in Vista to ‘classic’ view, which is more like XP, so all the functionality is pretty much the same.
Replying to my own message is a bit cheeky, but here’s how you do it: (From the Vista help file) -> Under Theme, select the Windows Classic theme in the drop-down list, and then click OK.
You can also customize the hell out of the themes to reflect whatever you like, something that wasn’t widely available in XP.
Noted, I’ll check it out on Monday.
I have checked it out, and it’s Death by Marketing Speak. Sounds a bit like warmed over SMS (shudder) or Windows Live. If it is something more than that, don’t blame me, Microsoft guy - that web page sucks, it dithers around before not telling you what this Softgrid thing actually is. You can click on the tiny, illegible diagram to learn, well, nothing more than the little you already knew.
I didn’t get that impression at all. It looked closer to a VMware/Terminal Server/Citrix product.
Sort of both. It’s a tool that allows you to abstract application requirements from the OS with a cross between virtualisation and emulation. It can be a deployment tool, it can be a virtualisation tool.
After playing around in it a few times it refused to boot on my new laptop. Something about a corrupted hive. I have been too disgusted to fix it as of now. Meanwhile, XP gust keeps chugging along on my I-mac production machine.
Incorrect
From the linked doc file
So, is Microsoft still insisting that hardware manufacturers cripple their output in the name of Premium Content Protection such that things like S/PDIF and high res video playback to the monitor won’t work if ‘premium content’ is detected?
I mean, I really can’t wait to get an OS that deliberately downgrades the quality of audio and video that my computer can display - that’s why I spent the cash to get hardware that could do all the high-end stuff. So my OS will disable it and I can’t use it.
I don’t understand. Doesn’t that document refer to the rights to USE prior versions?
I want to BUY a prior version. My vendor (admittedly a small shop) can’t do that for me. I don’t know of any vendor who can.