The Vista Phenomenon

Again this week three events made me think about the viability of Windows Vista for the long term. Don't get me wrong I've been a big supporter of Windows Vista in the past, in spite of the continuous bad press it gets and Microsoft's lamentable efforts in marketing it at all. In fact of the over 200 DELL systems that I sold last year, only two were downgraded to Windows XP on the customer's request.

However, the three events were:
a) I received Microsoft's own Vista SP1 DVD and tried to install it on a customer's brand new, high-spec DELL laptop. It took about an hour and a half to do it! The downloadable version which dribbles occasionally onto your fully loaded system typically takes 30-40 minutes to install. Why the difference? I doubt I will ever install it from that DVD again, as it is so embarrassing!

b) I had to backup 2Gb (7,000+ files) of data from another newish DELL laptop to a external USB disk drive. It took over 40 minutes! Maybe Vista SP1 would have helped this a bit, but even so it took much too long. 1Gb of large files was only a couple of minutes.

c) I had to quote for an upgrade of a local small company's IT infrastructure. This included server, desktops, laptops and the network itself. I would have preferred to quote Vista on the desktops with Windows Small Business Server 2003 on the server. However to play safe I changed the desktops to Windows XP instead. The risks were higher and they wanted to run 3rd-party client/server applications that I knew ran on Windows XP and would probably need to be upgraded at considerable cost to the customer for Windows Vista. Risk plus expense was too much.