To Vista or Not to Vista

As I posted last week, XP is here to stay, so the war won’t be as fierce as I first thought after June 30, 2008. However, you still have to make a decision — XP or Vista? For home users it will be difficult to get XP, since Dell will make XP available on business machines only (unless demand changes their mind). Here is a Pro/Con list for why to get Vista:

PROS

• Vista looks pretty

CONS

• Vista is slower than XP on comparable hardware
  • Boot time is longer
  • Performance during regular tasks is slower
• Vista is less stable than XP
• Vista is less compatible with various hardware
• Many programs you already own may not work with Vista (e.g., QuickBooks, Adobe products, etc.)
• Vista practically requires a new computer (XP will work great on good 3-4 year old machines) —despite what Microsoft says.
• Microsoft changed the name and location of various tools and utilities, making it very confusing.

I’m still trying to figure out any other benefits of Vista, I’ll revisit this post if I find some.

Here’s a great quote that summarized my views (by Galen Gruman, executive editor at InfoWorld):

Over the past year, CIOs and CTOs have consistently told me they see no significant benefits to Vista, and really don’t want to spend the time and money to update all their computers, retrain their users, and deal with application incompatibilities for a cosmetic upgrade.