Comments on: How to avoid Windows Vista in business.

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 17:52:16 +0000

@Tony: you appear to be speaking of some happy fluffy lalala land where corporate idiocy doesn’t equate the terms “Microsoft” and “standard.”

By: Tony Springston

Tony Springston — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 07:51:12 +0000

Alas if you’re moving to web apps for most things why would you even need XP – locked down thin clients are a lot cheaper than lots of XP workstations everywhere – not to mention the power savings and lower admin costs.

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:27:48 +0000

Of course, the answer to “which operating system should I use?” is always “what’s it for?” XP with Office is a known quantity that can in fact be managed relatively cheaply. Vista is a resource hog with severe practical usability issues. Linux offers the possibility of much cheaper management, but there aren’t ridiculous quantities of cheap support drones who are familiar with it as yet.

XP is not great, if I had my way I’d have a laptop with Ubuntu. But I don’t have my way. We run XP for (a) Outlook 2003 (b) Office 2003 (c) a number of in-house Windows apps that I’m pretty sure run properly on Wine anyway (and we have other actually business-critical stuff that we run on Wine). XPsp2 is a usably-stable version of Windows that runs OK in 512MB-1GB of memory and I can get most of the open-source software I actually use for it.

Vista is a resource hog with severe usability issues, for all its shiny exterior (and it really is very pretty). I was particularly put off by Calle Dybedahl‘s experiences with being given a Vista laptop for proper work. He gave it a serious go, and concluded after two months that it just wasn’t up to serious work as yet. I remember when trying it on a friend’s laptop (she was quite prepared to hate it but turns out to love it), I had to resort to the command line to access a CD of camera software that Vista decided it was in my best interest not to let me see. It’s quite possible that it wouldn’t hamper business use in practice, but you’d need proper testing and so forth, not to mention every machine having 3 gig of memory.

We were enormously pleased with the success of writing our in-house web apps for Firefox ;-)

By: Felipe Ceotto

Felipe Ceotto — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:40:07 +0000

Dear David,

First, thanks for posting a comment on my blog. I ended up following your link from there to here and I was reading some interesting stuff. This last post strikes me as quite interesting.

I have a background of Unix but I’m the IT Manager of an all-Windows company and although we are still using Windows XP on all workstations, people are giving up to marketing and looks and they’re constantly asking my about Vista. Avoiding it is interesting but what would be your main reasons for avoiding it in favour of XP? I mean, I don’t think XP is that better…