July 1, 2008

Well, it's finally happened, Microsoft is no longer marketing Windows XP.  What does this mean for the computing public?

Most of my business customers have continued to order their computers with Windows XP because of the compatibility issues with Windows Vista.  The corporate environment has been very slow to accept Vista, but now, won't have a choice.

In the hardware area, there are a lot of older items which just plain won't work with Vista.  Even some of the new stuff doesn't work well.  This has been an issue with almost every new version of Windows.

Waking up from sleep of hibernate modes, which was an issue with XP, is still an issue with Vista.

One of the main issues with Vista has been the lack of any performance improvement over a system using XP.  In fact, Vista usually performs slower than XP with most software.  Service pack 1 for Vista was supposed to make things better, but, instead, made things even worse.

The biggest issue with businesses in particular, has been the software issues.  Many programs, particularly specialty software, either won't work at all, or has a lot of issues with Vista.

Bottom line is, that since the only operating system available now is Windows Vista, we are going to have to figure out how to live with it.  Continually check your hardware and software vendors' web sites for updates to software and drivers and hope that those updates will solve your problems.

There are rumors that the next Windows will be released sooner than originally planned, because of all the issues with Vista and the corporate environment lack of approval.  I hate to say it, but I think Vista is going to turn out to be a red herring like Windows Millennium was.