Information Technology Pros Debate Windows Vista

An anonymous reader writes "As a follow-on to John Welch's widely read review arguing that Mac OS X is superior to Vista, Information Week is running the first in a weeklong series of roundtables where a programmer, networking consultant, and 3 IT managers have a serious technical debate on the pros and cons of Vista. What's been your experience with Vista? More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?"

Comments

Re:As an IT guy also

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference between 98 and XP was huge in comparison though. The whole architecture was different - and thus XP (and indeed its predecessors 2000 and NT4) is a lot more secure than 98.

Real features like NTFS filesystem, properly done process separation, a more robust TCP/IP stack, better support for windows domain features etc made it worth upgrading 98 to XP.

I can't think of any such compelling features for business IT in moving to Vista from XP.

My Vista pros/cons

[daybot]

Pros:

• Scheduled defrags without third party software
• Aero interface looks less dated

Cons:

• Regardless of memory usage, it's slower than XP. Games are slower (see Tom's Hardware), CAD/CAM apps are slower (same again)...
• A great deal of Windows software doesn't work on it yet. PGP has just reached beta, iTunes is having trouble, I can't get Cygwin to work properly, VMWare server doesn't have a released version that allows it to work as a host OS. That's most of the programs I run!
• UAC is broken. It slows down your system, bothers you far too often. If you've seen the Mac advert slagging off Vista security - well, it really is that bad.
• Games are slower
• It's DRM crippled to the extreme
• Aero doesn't run smoothly on mid-range Quadro cards...
• That stupid Windows-Tab animation keeps getting shown in the media when they talk about Vista's innovative new features - sorry, it's a very slow tool to use; press F9 on OSX to see how it should work (someone's done a hack to make this work in Vista, but it's bloody slow on Quadro).

Not quite

[einhverfr]

I maintain one Vista machine for testing purposes. I do as little work as possible on it because quite frankly I prefer Linux. In particular, I make sure that LedgerSMB runs on Vista. LedgerSMB in turn depends on PostgreSQL, Vanilla Perl, and Apache.

Compared to XP, Vista is a mixed bag. There are some user experience improvements, and way the menus work on the start menu is an improvement. Aside from the initial disorientation, the UI is closer to what XP's should have been.

However, there are many complaints I have about Vista. UAC is the biggest one, and this can result in corrupted installs of some software (including Apache), and it is simply way too tempting to turn off every security improvement that Vista offers. Whatever Vista does, it will *not* make Windows that much more secure-- it just allows Microsoft to blame the users.

I also find Vista to be surprisingly slow (granted I only have 512MB RAM in this system) and some settings like UAC are hard to find. I think that Vista is going to be a support headache for everyone, and I do not recommend that people upgrade.