Weekly quickTIP

Standing Tall on My Vista Soapbox

You haven't upgraded to Vista yet and you call yourself a savvy IT administrator?

• By Greg Shields
• 03/31/2008

In those presentations, I find myself still at odds with administrators who utterly refuse to consider a Vista upgrade. The level of vitriol from administrators who absolutely hate it disturbs me. I've heard all the excuses:

• Vista requires excessive hardware that I don't have.
• My applications don't work with Vista.
• There are no drivers for Vista.
• Vista is slower than XP.
• Vista will break my network.
• Vista is buggy and will cause more trouble than it's worth.

Considering these, strangely enough with many of the loudest administrators I also find that they're running on old information. They took one look at Vista during its initial release, made judgment, and haven't looked back. In many cases, their information about what works and what doesn't work is now dated, doubly so with the release of Service Pack 1.

In my small office here, we installed Vista early on and never looked back. Yes, there were some applications like Quickbooks that didn't work. But for those, we simply moved them to a Terminal Server and made them remote applications. The movement of applications from desktops to Terminal Servers actually made our lives easier with fewer apps to manage across the network. Vista has, in many ways been a boon, to Terminal Services.

So, now that we're over a year past Vista's release and shortly past Service Pack 1, it's time to give Vista another objective look. Still got excuses why not to upgrade? I want to hear them. Drop them into this column as a comment or send me an e-mail. I'll post the most intelligent arguments in a future column.