This is a post I have been meaning to write for a while.
There has been a lot of discussion of late about Vista and its readiness - or lack of - for the public. Lots of people have lamented that Vista is just not there yet. That it came out too soon. That it is a failure. Some have even reverted back to Windows XP as they believe that it is more stable and performs better.
Lots of people have voiced opinions one way or the other. James Kendrick was one of the first to speak out against Vista, and his post included most of the key gripes.
First and foremost in the area of performance. I have not seen adequate performance running Vista on anything less than a Core 2 Duo processor. Those are only available in the larger Tablets so the UMPCs and smaller Tablets are out of luck. Vista also needs 2 GB of memory to run well and the smaller mobile devices usually are only offered with 1 GB, which isn't enough.
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If you use Sleep and Resume you quickly fall victim to the dreaded Vista la-la land where the device fails to resume properly. Sometimes the device comes back fine but without a screen which is oh so useful. Other times it comes back but hangs the entire device up in just a few seconds.
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One of the most beneficial things you can do to improve the mobile device experience is use it with a dock. Don't even get me started with how badly Vista handles docking and undocking of these mobile devices, especially if you hang an external monitor off the dock.
Other general concerns are performance, battery life and mysterious disk thrashing. These are all real and valid concerns. However, they are not the end of the world and they are not unique to Vista. In fact - I believe that many of them are not the fault of Vista at all.
I disagree with those that say that Vista is a dog and I will not be going back to XP on any of my machines - ever.
The first point I will make in Vista's defense is to point out that not everything bad that happens in on a computer is the fault of the OS. On every single computer there are hundreds of device drivers and bits of software that could be the culprit for some of the issues outlined above. Specifically the resume from sleep and docking station issues described above are most likely driver issues. XP has been around for a while and hardware manufacturers have had a lot of practice writing nice, stable and functional drivers for the XP platform. Vista is both new and very different. I am disappointed, but not very surprised, that driver support is not that great.
Secondly, none of this is new to Vista. I am an IT consultant. I worked on a very early Windows XP deployment for a government client in New Zealand. And guess what? Driver support was appalling across the board, but it was worse for mobile PCs. Performance was a joke. There was no way Windows XP could really run on a machine that just met the minimum specs. Blue screens and hangs were common. When XP shipped it was worse than my experience working on a project with Vista in the Technology Adoption Program using beta code. The released code is far and away more stable than Windows XP was at the same time in the product lifecycle. What is significantly different is that the flaming and debate happened in the newsgroups rather than on the blogs we have today, which was much more of a closed community.
When Microsoft ships a new OS they tend to lead the hardware. By that I mean that it is the hardware that comes out 6 months after the OS that runs it really well. I think this is probably intentional - perhaps because it then extends what they can include in the product at ship date, bearing in mind that it will need to be a viable product for a couple of years. I suspect that this will be the same for future OS releases.
The short version of all of that is that the issues we are seeing today are normal for a new OS and they are much more complex than "Vista is Bad". Some of the blame rests with application developers. Some rests with hardware manufacturers and some rests with Microsoft, but it will all be fixed in the fullness of time.
Until then I won't go back - simply because the benefits out weigh the pain. The tablet functionality is way better. The networking is better. The Mobility Center is better. Presentation mode rocks. All of that functionality is nothing compared to the security enhancements. When XP shipped the world was a different place. The general public knew about viruses but had never heard of root kits, malware or spyware. The Internet was not the efficient distribution system of nasties that it is today. User Access Control (UAC) and protected mode IE go a long way to preventing then initial infection and Windows Defender makes it easier clean up after the fact.
Vista is here to stay. I'm not going back and the experience will get better as the hardware catches up.