This month marks two years for my Vista install on my laptop. It is absolutely the best operating system I’ve ever used. Here’s what would have happened to me had I installed a different operating system two years ago:

Windows XP – the next logical choice: My laptop would have been reloaded 3 times since and I would be getting ready to reload again now. Most of my XP installations had to be reloaded every 6 months.

Linux: Month of my life wasted on emerge (if Gentoo). Months of my life wasted on troubleshooting hardware and getting sleep, wireless, etc, just right. Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux, but I’ve never had any success making everything work perfectly on a laptop, and by perfectly I mean that I can keep it running for a month without rebooting it – just putting it in sleep and hibernation when not in use.

I’m looking forward to upgrading to Windows 7 when it comes out. I’ve been running Windows 7 on another test machine at work and so far it seems pretty nice, and faster than Vista on the same hardware.

I’m having something happen to me that has never happened before. I’m getting bored with an install. Nothing is going wrong on my laptop. There’s nothing for me to tweak, nothing to fix, nothing I need to change. It just works exactly how I need it to when I need it to. Maybe it is time to start dual-booting something else.

That is what I heard from a Microsoft trainer recently. Does anyone have any direct knowledge of whether this is true or not? The problem with any metric like this is that there are so many more variables than just Windows Vista and Windows XP. For example, take a 3-year old Windows XP machine and refresh it with a brand new PC and a fresh operating system and I guarantee help desk calls will go down, at least temporarily.

Here are some possible reasons that Vista may cut down on your help desk calls. Read the rest of this entry »

To Vista or not to Vista: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The UAC warnings of outrageous caution,
Or to take arms against a sea of malware,
And by virus software end them? To die: to shutdown…

We’re trying to figure out whether or not we want to go with Vista or Windows XP for our 3-year refresh. The decision is difficult because we will live with it for the next three years. There is no incentive to perform an upgrade mid-cycle. There are many different factors and there are pros and cons on either side.

Read the rest of this entry »