Re: Vista

[Michael Norman michael.norman@xxxxxxxx]

For what it's worth, our departmental director of technology/sysop, a
careful and knowledgeable man, is not upgrading our machines to Vista
any time soon. Neither are many of the other sysops at the
university. The consensus is clearly to wait, a year or two, they are
saying. Some of this is fiscal, of course. They feel Vista machines
need a minimum of 2-4GB of RAM and their vendors are not currently
offering this as a base configuration on new machines, so the notion
of buying and installing extra memory leaves them, and their tight
budgets, cold. They also echo the chatter on most tech sites on the
WEB about Vista being convoluted and so forth, all anecdotal, and
somewhat atavistic, of course. Finally they cite many of the reviews
of Vista, which seem to be luke-warm, at best. I'm retiring one of
the computers in the house, a W98 machine, a Dell Optiplex (runs like
a tank) because there's software we use that it can't handle and some
new hardware that would require too many work-arounds. University
offers two new Optiplexes -- both Vista-ready, they say, with 1 GB of
RAM (the bare minimum) -- that come with XP PRO and an
upgrade-to-Vista coupon. I'm going to put 4GB of ram in one of them
and get it, roughly $950. And I'm going to run XP. Six months or a
year down the line when my work load will be lighter, I might
consider an upgrade. Until a year ago I was using W98. Progress.

michael.norman@xxxxxxxx