Vista 1 Year / 6 Months out

My Personal Experience (Using Vista for 1 Year)

I have been now using Microsoft Vista for 1 year now.  I purchased a brand new Dell Latitude Laptop last July.  It had a core duo 2 processor and 4 gigabytes of ram.  Here are some observations:

• It has only crashed once and that was because NetGear storage drivers were causing issues.  I put in the Vista disk and did a system restore and it resolved this problem
• I have not gotten any viruses and spyware is a minimum (I run trendmicro)
• Outlook 2007 is the most problematic program I run and I do have Autotask, Skype, Gotomeeting, Anagram,  NewsGator, and Adobe hooked into it.  Outlook does crash occasionally
• I like the sidebar
• It has not slowed down like XP would have.  I wiped my XP Machines twice a year
• SP1 noticeably sped the system up
• As the year went on, 3rd party applications became more reliable

My Clients Experience (Using Vista for 6 Months)

I have Vista installed at two client sites and those were sites that I junked everything they had and bought all new equipment.  All Clients are running Vista Business with SP1.  They are also using SBS Server 2003 R2 with Quad Core Xeon Processor and 4gbs of Ram, Dell Optiplex with dual core processors, 2gb of ram, gigabyte switches, ScanSnap Scanners, ect.

• Clients complain less about Vista then they did about XP
• They love the sidebar
• No Virus outbreaks (Again they also use TrendMicro)
• Some Printer Drivers issues, especially when sharing printers.
• It is for me to maintain (Meaning I charge my clients less for support)
• 3rd Party Support has gotten better as time has gone on
• Could not get Palm Hotsync to work

Conclusions

• Speed -  If you were to run two boxes that were exactly the same next to each other, one with vista, one with xp, the XP Machine would run faster.  And if you were to run and XP and Windows 98 Machine machines next to each other, the Windows 98 would probably be faster.  New software usually requires better hardware.  That is usually all the case.
• Security - Everyone bitched about security in Windows XP.  Microsoft came out with Vista, which in my experience is very secure.  I rarely here Vista critics bring up the security argument anymore.
• Software - 3rd Party software was problematic on Vista at first and it got better.  That is not Microsoft's fault.  It is going to take awhile for  
• Service Pack - Any VAR worth his salt always tells their clients to wait to SP1 comes out and then install the products.  Amicus 2008 SP1 really stabilized the products as did TimeMatters SP1.  That is a fact of life.  With a few exceptions I  did not install Vista until SP1 was about to come out and did not run into problems a lot of the earlier adopters did.

Legal Software:

I / My Clients have run Amicus Attorney 2008 PE, Amicus Small Firm, TimeMatters 8, PCLaw 9, HotDocs 2008, without and significant problems on Vista Machines.

Comments

[Jeff Krause]

Craig,

My experience has been very much like yours. In my office, I run two new Dell workstations with Vista Ultimate and my laptop runs Vista Business. I also run SBS 2003. I have had no problems other than the two days when the driver for my Sony ICD-MX20 Voice Recorder caused my laptop to crash sporadically. The same drivers run fine on either of the desktops.

I have had no viruses or spyware. I think Vista's security is one of its best features.

The only problem any of my clients have with Vista is one site trying to run Vista in a peer-to-peer network configuration. In this case, Vista's security seems to be throwing up roadblocks when workstations try to communicate with the Vista "server."

As I see other bloggers complain about Vista, I see two patterns, both of which I have aluded to above. One, they try to run it on a peer-to-peer system. Running it on a network with a server will give you far better results because the network controls the security. Second, they are running it on laptops and trying to connect a lot of gadgets to it. I wish it worked better in that environment and maybe that will improve.

Great to see you last week in Mobile.