Matt Loney's Blog
What it says on the box
Tuesday 25 September 2007, 6:26 PM
Monolithic OS upgrades are so over
This in itself is not unheard of - several years ago there were companies upgrading to Windows 2000, long after XP became available, usually because they were sticking to very old hardware.
The difference is that back then, companies were upgrading from the seriously unusable Windows 95 or 98, whereas now they Windows XP actually does everything you need an OS to do.
The difference is also that now we are seeing PC vendors offering downgrades - not just the option of buying the previous version of the OS but the option of taking a computer back to have the latest version removed in favour of the old version.
What we are seeing here is a real crisis of confidence.
I have a new (personal) Vista laptop arriving in the next few days and I shall be very interested to see how it performs. I am also waiting to get my hands on Ubuntu 7.10 to see how it deals with Centrino Pro and the other new bits of technology on my particular laptop that may make for some interesting driver hunts. That will go on as a boot option. And XP? Well, if Vista doesn't deliver I shall have no qualms about a downgrade.
But if I can find all the drivers I need for Ubuntu then I may well make a permanent switch asall other issues aside I do find the regular, bite-sized upgrades of Linux so much more palatable. And I suspect that increasingly businesses will warm to this taste too.
PreviousComments on this post
I did participate in the Vista Beta programme and have since purchased a laptop with Vista installed. The laptop should be an adequate specification and I also doubled the memory but it makes very heavy weather of many routine tasks, in other words it runs much too slowly.
Notwithstanding the eye candy and additional features I have decided to downgrade to XP for a more responsive performance.
My other objection is that Vista forces otherwise unecessary upgrades to both software and hardware, introduces compatibility problems and as a result is wasteful and environmentally unfriendly.
Since we must move on at some point in time, I believe Microsoft should sell XP and Vista concurrently for some considerable time to allow a natural progression, similarly for Office products.
We've upgraded most of our desktop computers at work to Vista with mixed results. Nobody really likes it better than XP but complaints about Vista have been minor. The only people who really feel the difference, in a negative way, are the power users. The power users have switched to a mix of XP, OS X, and Linux desktops.
The big difference is on the server. We have no plans to switch any of our servers over to new versions of Windows and are gradually moving to Linux and Unix servers. They're just cheaper, more efficient, more flexible, and easier to use. The only Windows servers we're keeping are for legacy systems we haven't yet had a chance to port.
