vista-winver

Slashdot ran an interesting article today morning how a whopping 90% of IT pros do not like Vista. These stats are based off of a survey conducted by King Research and their numbers are simply jaw-dropping. According to the study forty four percent of companies surveyed are considering switching to non-Windows operating systems, and nine percent of those have already started moving to their selected alternative. Naturally this raises the question is Vista really that bad?

Since the RTM release I have been running some form of Vista on one of my computers continuously. I have not seen any significant problems. Even before that I had successfully tested alpha and beta versions of the Operating System, then called Longhorn. Apart from the occasional driver issue, which is quite an epidemic in Linux, Vista seemed quite stable. Recently I had Vista pre-loaded on a new HP laptop and I use that as my primary machine. Granted I would have felt the burden if Vista was running on an old machine. But for me it is running on Core2 Duo 7500 with 2GB memory and a 160GB hard drive.

vista-crash I believe the biggest hurdle of Vista is the hardware compatibility. Microsoft had expected most, if not all, users to have upgraded to a state of the art machine prior to or immediacy after the launch of Vista. Since that didn’t happen Vista is crawling on slow machines providing bad user experience. After all, who wants to wait 5 minutes to see Vista slowly startup or staring at the “Configuring Updates” screen for what seems like an eternity. The second most visible shortcoming is the lack of driver support. Microsoft is only partly to blame for this as most of the hardware manufacturers should have been ready to release driver updates when Vista launched.

Vista has a few drawbacks which can be a hassle for non-IT users to learn such as a revamped user interface and changed menus. I find them more intuitive than XP and leaps ahead of Win 2000. But overall Vista is an excellent choice over other operating systems and I would highly recommend it.