Washington — At least two federal government agencies are refusing to upgrade their computers with Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Vista operating system, citing concern over costs and compatibility issues.
In a Jan. 19 memo to staff, Dan Mintz, the Transportation Department’s chief information officer, imposed an “indefinite moratorium” on upgrading desktop and laptop computers with the new operating system, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7.
Mintz wrote that there is “no compelling technical or business case” to upgrade to the new products and specific reasons not to upgrade.
Washington — At least two federal government agencies are Think I’m crazy for saying there’s no reason to go to Vista right now? At least a small village’s worth of friends and family have asked me if I’m upgrading to Vista, when I’m upgrading to Vista, whether they should get Vista on their new computer, and why the hell am I not all excited about Vista. I’ve told each and every one of them that I’ll upgrade to Vista someday, but not in 2007. XP works just fine for me, thank you. I don’t have the time or the patience to spend half my working hours for the next six months installing service patches and emergency updates. I’d never buy the first year of a new model of car and I’ll not upgrade my OS the same year it’s released. My operating system is probably the only thing in my life that I choose not to have on the bleeding edge. Sometimes it’s just not worth it to be an early adopter.
Actually, Vista works great and is a wonderful upgrade. The only problem I encountered was trying to mount a Samba share, and a crappy USB speakerphone that wasn’t supported. My feeling is Vista is faster than XP, prettier, and more stable. The sidebar is surprisingly useful–and I’ve tried others. Upgrade now!
Vista supports a huge increase in DRM. Buy it only if you support your digital rights being “managed”. Video drivers that check the “integrity” of their connections several times a second can’t be that much slower, right? Having your video driver “revoked” out from under you is a small price to pay in order to add several layers of new things you’ve gotta check when things go wrong.
Maybe you just like to drop $200 on improvements that even supporters characterize as “incremental”. That sidebar will certainly not represent a distraction that will get old inside a few months, or be disabled by your network admin sooner.
Or maybe you appreciate the fact that, to reinstall the upgrade edition, you have to install XP first. Every time.
You probably are excited about the Aero Glass interface, if you haven’t seen any of the videos of Beryl on youtube.
The security enhancements will help protect you, once they release the latest round of fixes. You are running the 64-bit edition, right?
Gotta agree. For a technology guy like you, I can’t fathom not going to Ubuntu.
I have Vista only because my dad’s XP laptop died and he had to go buy a whole new one. Due to Vista being brand new and not being compatible with his work programs, he gave it to me and took my XP.
I think Vista is pretty advanced and works great if your computer is up to par with today’s technological computing standards. If you have a good processing speed, memory, and all of that other junk, Vista works really well. But installing it on another system just seems pointless to me. XP still works fine and will be supported for many more years to come by Microsoft, so why bother?
Heck, my other computer is a Windows ME and it still pleases me and gets the job done. Computers are getting more and more advanced for cheaper prices, so hold off on Vista until you can afford a whole new computer that comes with it and is properly designed to run Vista at its maximum efficiency.
Dolphinatic
Thank goodness I’ve got a Mac and dont have to worry about any of this Vista foolishness.
An observation(although WAY too late): I myself am against Vista, especially due to the fact my girlfriend’s uncle works for Microsoft and has warned her against utilizing it until all the bugs are fixed. When one desires to purchase a new computer, in order to avoid Vista, go to online retailers such as Dell.com and alienware.com and (for a roughly $100 additional charge) you can purchase a brand-new laptop or desktop with XP installed.