Is Windows Vista an option?

Windows Vista has been around for a little while now, but I still don't recommend it to any of my customers unless they have a compelling reason to need it. So far, nobody has found a compelling reason.

Vista managed to make an appearance in Wired magazines Top 10 Heartbreaking Gadgets of 2007 due to it's compatibility problems and poor ( I would use the term abysmal) performance.

One particular customer of mine purchased a Dell laptop that was supplied with Vista Home and 512M of RAM. They contacted me complaining that it had a virus or something because nothing would work, but on inspection the system was virtually untouched, apart from a few documents that had been created. The problem was Vista being supplied on a machine that was barely capable of running it.

Dell really should not have even offered such an underpowered laptop with Vista, something akin to selling a Toyota Landcruiser with a 1.5 litre 4 cylinder engine. Sure it will move, but won't be capable of doing what the buyer wants, such as towing their horse float or climbing over rocks and boulders up a steep mountain.

Throwing away the 512M of RAM and adding 2G of faster RAM went a long way toward fixing the problem, but the laptop would still have fulfilled every requirement of the user, and fulfilled it much quicker, if it was running Windows XP.

Many manufacturers have again started to offer Windows XP as an option, which was hard to find at the start of 2007, no doubt due to the complaints and increase in support calls that Vista produced.

And Microsoft Office 2007 is not much better. A hard to understand interface and problems with stability, particularly with Outlook, that complains about not being shut down properly every time it's opened have given me just the push I needed to abandon it entirely. Thunderbird, together with the Lightning calendar plugin gives me everything that Outlook did and more, since it integrates so well with Gmail and Google Apps mail and calendar accounts.