Clients are advised not to buy or install Microsoft Vista, nor buy a new PC with Vista pre-installed. Our personal experience is that Vista is buggy, difficult to work with, and incompatible with a wide assortment of existing hardware and software (including older versions of Microsoft’s own software, e.g., Outlook 2000 and Money).
The only way issues like this get fixed is when people vote with their feet and their wallets. So cast your vote by refusing to accept this train wreck of an operating system.
UPDATE:
Dell is now offering a choice between Vista and XP on customized PCs. They’ve gotten the message even if Microsoft hasn’t.
UPDATE 2:
Dell is now offering XP on a scant few machines, coexisting with Vista. Sadly, it appears that Vista is inevitable, barring a change to a completely different OS (e.g., to Linux or Mac). Clients are advised to consider upgrading their existing XP machines’ hardware to delay the necessity of purchasing a machine with Vista preinstalled. Perhaps with enough time and Service Packs, most of the kinks will be resolved.
UPDATE 3:
Microsoft is now selling Windows 7, the successor to Vista. Word is that it looks very much like Vista, but with many of the annoyances and performance issues corrected. One wonders why this isn’t a service pack instead of a whole new version. It takes a lot of brass to charge customers for fixing things that shouldn’t have been broken in the first place. Granted there are some new features, but many of them are so esoteric that the average user won’t care one whit about them. Clients are advised to wait several months after release before upgrading, to allow some of the kinks to be worked out.
UPDATE 4:
We have been using Windows 7 for about two weeks now (as of this writing on 3/5/10). There has not be a single glitch, crash, or hiccup. It’s astonishing. OK there were a few incompatibilities. For example our Brother AIO printer no longer scans across the network. JFax software no longer works; however there is a reader that can open JFax attachments. There’s some adjustment, due to lots of things being in different places. But, all in all, it’s been a good experience.
However, we are still reluctant to recommend Windows 7 to clients. If you can, it would be wise to wait until the first Service Pack is released. But if your computer dies and you need a new one, Windows 7 is a reasonable and acceptable option.
