For smaller organizations with only a few machines and no centralized administration control, Microsoft’s Windows Vista does make sense. It does have better security than Windows XP, although a robust antivirus solution is still mandatory, as this does not come standard with Vista — and it will warn about this until you load an antivirus solution.
 Windows Vista has now been out since late 2006, with consumers able to purchase the product since January 2007. It had been a good five years since the launch of the previous desktop operating system Windows XP, whereas previous versions of the Windows operating system had much shorter release timeframes. As Windows Vista has now been in the marketplace for nearly two years, it raises the question as to why so many businesses and home users are reluctant to upgrade to Microsoft ‘s latest desktop operating system. Businesses usually wait for the release of the first service pack to correct important bugs and other problems and then go through a program of testing against hardware and software before allowing the product to be released to their user base.Microsoft released Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) around March 2008 and it was made available to consumers around April 2008. If you have automatic updates set on your Vista operating system, it is not a large download if your system is up to date. There were some incompatibility problems with device drivers, but these have now been resolved. SP1 could also be purchased on disk or downloaded as a full executable file, which was just under 500MB.One of the reasons for the reluctance to accept Windows Vista is that users seem very comfortable with XP. There are many programs available for XP, most hardware has drivers for it, and most of the bugs have been ironed out of the product. The last service pack for XP, known as SP3, has now been released and it doesn’t really add a lot of new features. Again, if you have kept your XP machine up to date, this is not a huge update, less than 100MB.Today, if you purchase a new machine with an operating system pre-installed, you would be very hard pressed to find one with Windows XP unless there is some sort of license downgrade from your Vista product available from your service provider. As at July 2008, I could still purchase OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) versions of Microsoft XP as a system builder, but soon even this may no longer be available. With the release of Vista SP1, I finally took the plunge and built a new machine for home using the latest hardware and I installed Vista Home Premium edition, which includes a media center, the Aero interface, movie making and DVD burning capabilities. |
