Doug's Mailbag: Vista Memories -- Redmondmag.com

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Doug's Mailbag: Vista Memories

Readers share their thoughts on Vista as the OS moves out of mainstream support:

I think of Windows 7 as Vista Service Pack 3. Vista originally took a beating because Microsoft closed so many security holes, forcing all the drivers to be re-written. And, because the holes were closed, some drivers for interactive devices (such as scanners, cameras, photo printers) had to be scrapped. A lot of the manufacturers were not willing to spend the money to rewrite them. Windows 7 64-bit OS with at least 8GB of memory is so much faster and smoother than XP that you would never want to go back.
-Jerry

We finally went to Vista about two years ago at my government agency. That's after testing it for over three years. This was a massive effort for over 100,000 machines nationwide. We are now moving to Win7/Office 10 within the next few months on all these machines. As an IT specialist, I have many worries about how this rapid change will sit with my users, particularly the confusing Libraries feature on our heavily networked systems with multiple mapped drive locations. Here's hoping it goes better than I fear it may!
-Tom

I have yet to find someone, who thinks Windows 7 is great that can explain adequately what was wrong with Vista. Don't get me wrong, I like Windows 7. I think it's great, and there are minor improvements over Vista, but let's face it, they aren't much different. Both are a significant improvement in so many ways over XP. PowerShell alone is worth the switch; not that you can't run PowerShell on XP, but you'd be missing a lot. Security is much better on either system. My theory is that the only reason Windows 7 was 'so much better' was that it gave some cover for vendors to get their drivers fixed.
-Dan

Share your thoughts with the editors of this newsletter! Write to [email protected]. Letters printed in this newsletter may be edited for length and clarity, and will be credited by first name only (we do NOT print last names or e-mail addresses).

Posted by Doug Barney on 04/13/2012 at 1:19 PM

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