Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Information Technology Pros Debate Windows Vista

Posted by Zonk on from the six-of-one-half-dozen-of-the-other dept.

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?"

3 of 377 comments (clear)

  1. As an IT manager by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As an IT manager, I can plainly see Vista offers no benefits to my company. The only feature that piqued my interest was the Bitlocker technology but we use PGP's Whole Disk Encryption product already and that works fine.

    I see nothing that will make our employees more productive or save us money on IT. We'll be sticking with XP.

  2. Been using it for 3 days now by Monkeys!!! · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've been running Vista Ultimate for 3 days now.

    So far, my experience with Vista has been mostly positive. The intergrated search is quite useful and the re working of the explorer shell is a noticeable improvement.

    On thing I have noticed is that Vista has re-done the menu layout and prompts and it now closely resembles KDE, imo. Not a complaint or a compliment though I do imagine the layout change is going to confuse a lot of people. I can see why it was re-done though and I imagine once I've gotten used to it I will find it an improvement over XP.

    Really I can't say much else as I've only just scratched the surface of what Vista can do. Is it better then XP? So far yes. Is it worth years of delayed devlopment and several hundred dollars? That remains to be seen.

  3. Two Weeks w/ Vista, From a Mac User. by rizzo320 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My day job is supporting Macintosh computers. However, due to the ever changing IT market, I always to stay up to date on what's going on with Windows and Linux. It's in my best interest to be cross platform, especially when I need to explain to a Windows user how to do a specific procedure on the Mac, and vice versa. I have been a Windows user much longer (3.1) than I have been a Macintosh (didn't get involved with Macs until circa OS 7.6.1) user, so I've seen my fair share of kernel, UI, graphics, and other changes on both platforms over the years.

    I was excited to hear that our Windows Vista (Business) Licenses had arrived via our MSDNAA account at work. So, I grabbed a license for testing and went at it. I wanted to leave my Mac alone and not try to force a Vista boot with Boot Camp + hacking. My original test box was:

    Dell Optiplex GX270 P4 2.4 GHz, hyper-threading enabled.
    1.25 GB DDR 400 RAM
    80 GB HD (7200RPM/8MB Cache)
    GeForce 4 MX 400 64MB Video Card (AGP 8x)
    17" Flat Screen display

    Install went perfect. After installation was complete, there were three or four Windows security updates awaiting me. After installing those, I started to play around. Unfortunately, my computer scored a 1.0 on the performance scale, mostly because of the video card. I was also disappointed that Aero was not supported on my video card as well, so all I had was the "Windows Vista Basic" theme available to me, without any of the new eye candy I was looking to see.

    I really wanted to see what Vista had to offer, so I didn't want to settle for the reduced package. This is significant though. Microsoft wonders why they haven't seen to many upgrades to Vista yet- well this is one of them. A large amount of users with existing computers will not see the biggest UI improvement that Aero has to offer. This is different in comparison to Mac OS X 10.4, where, except for not being able to run a few screen savers, and not getting a few fancy effects here and there, your experience is pretty much the same visually, from a G3 iBook, right on through to the newest Mac Pro. Sure, there are applications that need core image, but, for the basic OS X install set, your experience is pretty much the same right on down the line.

    Getting back to Vista... I decided to upgrade the computer as much as I could to get the full Vista experience, so I bumped myself up to 3GB of RAM, a 250GB 7200/16MB Cache hard disk, and, a GeForce FX 5200 128MB video card (best I can get for a low profile card w/bracket for this Dell). This brought my performance rating up to a 2.5, again, with the video card being the weak point.

    Now I was getting Aero in all of its glory. Despite my video card being the bottom of the barrel for Vista/Aero, I haven't had any performance issues with any of the special effects (all of them are turned on). The only thing I'm kind of peeved about is the lack of NVidia support for this class of video card. NVidia has newer drivers out, however, but I had to use beta drivers from November for this card, because it looks like NVidia is in the process of dropping support for it. Despite being beta drivers, I haven't had any BSOD's or issues with them, and they are still faster than the default Microsoft drivers.

    As for applications on Vista, its a mixed bag. Most things installed and worked OK. All my typical Internet applications and plugins (Firefox, Adobe Reader, Flash Player, Sun Java JRE, etc) worked without a hitch- even Gaim/GTK worked. Divx and RealPlayer are giving me issues where Windows has to switch out of Aero mode when they are running. It's kind of weird... the screen goes black for two seconds, and then comes back in Windows Vista "basic" mode. When you close the application, the reverse occurs, and you are back to Aero, with transparencies etc. VLC won't show most movies, just a bunch of changing colors in its window. iTunes worked OK for me, but I don't have my library saved on this computer. Office 2003 worked as well.