Discussion on:

Windows XP service pack 3 internal schedule leaked

While we're at it, why not take the above poll and tell us about the number of systems in your company that are still running Windows XP. What is stopping you from upgrading from Windows XP?

All of the workstations currently on my network are running Windows XP. I would not even consider allowing a new Vista machine on the network until at least service pack 1, and I would never consider upgrading an XP machine to Vista. It's just to buggy and resource hungry.

Vista is as useful as Windows 98 FIRST edition or Windows ME while using 10x the resources. It seems like you need dual quad cores and 4GB of RAM to make it run like XP on a P4 with 512MB of RAM.

Initially I was not impressed by Vista but after a few months I'm converted. Vista is an excellent operating system. Ok, it's on a new Vaio with dual core processor and lots of RAM. Plus, with the addition of readyboost the system really flies along. Although still liking XP, Vista is the future, so far.

The best setup for Vista is with the OS installed on a SSD, 4GB RAM, 512M graphics, dual core. Ultimate runs great on my home built.

for a home user. For my corporate needs, rolling out 1500+ new desktops to handle Vista, training the users in it's quirks and having several critical corporate applications rewritten to work with Vista is not going to happen Real Soon Now. Not unless I wake up tomorrow to find that Gates and Ballmer decided to make a very generous donation to our IT budget.

I have a hard time saying its crap. There are indeed issues with it that bother me, and yes I do think it requires more resources then we as a business are prepared to throw at it, BUT, it has been stable on my "test" box. It has good performance in all areas except video games (about 17% fewer fps in quake compared to XP). It boots much faster then XP does on my laptop. I like the gadgets, it is a bit more secure then XP.
But the largest reason we will not be moving to Vista anytime soon is that our core business software does not run on Vista yet. If EFI ever gets on the ball and releases a Vista client, then we can add machines in over time. But will never happen otherwise.

that Vista SP1 has been out for a month now. Not that I am saying to move to Vista by any means though.

We have upgraded all our machines (approx 250) to Vista and absolutely love it ! Going back to XP on my home laptop (only 256mb ram so no vista there !) feels antiquated and old. Only slight compatibility and performance issues.. Maybe the people who bang on how bad it is just aren?t very competent

Roll on our Windows 2008 Server / Exchange 2007 project

Wasn't in Mr. Gates who promised us that with Windows we would not have to worry about our computers anymore, because M$ would take care of that? I am not an IT-specialist, but I need the computers to get a job done. I don't have time to try to figure out all the bloody details to make Vista work, as that doesn't pay the bills. And XP runs fine with me, so why spend a lot of money on (expensive) new hardware and license fees when I have something that gets the job done. No thanks, I prefer to stick with XP until I know for sure that Vista works properly without having to be a tech expert.
It is my opinion that many IT people have completely forgotten that IT should not be a goal in itself, but that it is there to SUPPORT the core business of a company.

Regarding your comment about IT supporting the core business of the company, we do realize that Vista is here to stay, and in a few months will be our only option on new computers. As such, we started testing Vista a year ago, taking the time to learn its idiosyncrasies and figure out how to make it work with our apps and network. By the end of last year, we began installing our first systems running Vista Business and, due to our prior homework, had very few problems. We are now using Vista for all new installs, and our users love it.

I have to wonder about those in these threads who complain so loudly about Vista. I find its performance on a par with XP, better at some tasks. Perhaps spending the time to get to know it actually is paying off. By the way, I did the same thing with XP when it came out, and had few of the problems that many reported with it back in the day.

As you say, our job is to support the operation. Looking ahead and being ready to support new technology is a large part of our job. Waiting until the last minute and then having problems with new systems is very disruptive of the core business and reflects poorly on our professionalism. Some of the techs who post here need to learn that fact.

What a wonderful blue sky apple pie attitude. It only took you a year to be able roll out a reliable Vista package. You must have very understanding clients.
I can roll out XP in under an hour.
As for Vista being the future -- so was ME (missing everything)and it died very emphatically.

Hal, You are just like me. Tell it like it is, Been there, done that, and you know your stuff. I just love reading your blog replies! They are the best!!!!!!!!
I totally agree with what you said about Vista being the future. As usual, you had me gutten it - :+)
Hey Blogger's, listen to Hal, we've both been around for, well, I won't date ourselves, but we've been through the mill and time tested everything under the sun.

Mike,
Technology Director and Computer Hardware Specialist.

Ok, you can run out and deploy XP in under an hour, could you do that back in it's infancy and not run into any issues? Not saying it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, however looking at the other individual's comments just shows to me that they took the time to understand what to do/not to do and how it best fit their environment. Maybe you can blow an image of XP out in an hour, hooray for you.. I can blow down any OS image I need to bare metal in less than 30 minutes, you're point? If you don't like it, don't use it, and when the rest of us are on solid images in the real world..you can ask for help..

I agree...why should I bash my brains out fixing M$ bugs? Let those bleeding edgers do that. When they have a solid product that all my custom apps will work on, then we'll consider it. In the meantime, I have stocked up on extra licenses to accommodate our growth over the next year. Hopefully VISTA will be more reliable by then.

As a note XP SP3 has been deployed.

Liz

I have seen both good and bad Vista systems. The worst are the old XP to Vista upgrades. If you old system doesn't exceede the hardware requirements for Vista don't upgrade. (Just go out and buy all new systems for your staff. How much could that cost!!!)
There are also software issues as well, not all manufacturers/developers are writing drivers and updates for Vista so there are some hardware problems as well.

How long ago did you upgrade your machines to Vista?

I ask because most if the issues I have encountered have developed over a period of time. It also seems to depend on the primary uses and potential (and possibly increasing) load the machine endures.

If you don't sharing more information on your circumstances, I would be most appreciative.

I have thin client desktops still running W2K, though I did take them from 64MB to 512MB on memory, 10G to 120+ on HD and replace the 1 or 2 MB built in VGA with an AGP 2x board. But even with the upgrades, no way a 800Mhz Pentium 3 is going to run Vista in *any* flavor well. If W2K does every get too long in the tooth, I'm sure I can find a good Linux distro to replace it.
On the rest of the desktops and laptops, XP works just fine. Don't need to spend the Buck$ just so BillG can have another obscenely profitable year......

will give us some help by way of private grants.

I already run XP SP3RC on my system. We alkl know by now that the next os that M$ is going to come out with is jast a repeat from the past. Watchj it will be called Vista 2nd Edition. But it woun't even stack up to 98 2nd Edition. And the OS fun just keeps rolling on!

Most of my users don't even know how to use XP. I'm not about to try and teach them Vista. Not to mention the cost involved here.

If it ain't broke don't fix it.
Why would I want to risk a network that runs well.
Other reasons = un-necessary expenditure - there's a recession on in our organisation.
Added confusion for staff/retraining which will put us back 6 months.

I anxiously wait to hear those words, so I will no longer have to deal with this nightmare! All the workstations on my network are running Windows XP Pro. I tried Vista when it first came out, decided that it was crap, and uninstalled it. My assistant loaded Vista on a second drive in his machine, and hasn't booted to Vista this year!

Vista is destined to be the next Millenium!

Only one system on my network is running XP, and that's in
a virtual machine in a Mac. The only native Windows box on
my network is still running 2000 while all other machines
are various models of Apple's Macintosh.

What is keeping me from upgrading my XP machines? In one word,

VISTA

We actually had one laptop running Vista on our network and it was a nightmare. The user, who is a techie person finally begged me to take him back to XP (after insisting that we buy an upgrade to Vista Enterprise for his laptop).

Never, I repeat, never upgrade the OS on a machine. That user's laptop was designed for XP, and probably was running it quite well. Why mess with it?

On the other hand, I have installed many new computers, both desktops and laptops, on our network runnng Vista Business with excellent results. Those machines were designed for Vista, and it shows in great performance. I have absolutely no inclination whatsoever to attempt upgrades on the 200 or so XP machines that we have. They will continue to do their jobs just fine until they are replaced on our regular cycle.

Where to start! Test all applications, including old legacy apps, make sure all will run or have work arounds. upgrade all old equipment that is not vista ready. Train all users in vista and office 2007 changes (yikes!). Do this for 500 or so computers with a staff of 5 who already have full time technical service/help desk jobs. We haven't even upgraded to IE7 yet, and 50 of our XPs are at SP1 because they're running apps that might crash with SP2. Yes we should upgrade everything and dump old apps, but you can only be so right before you're dead right. You have to deal with what you've got and make it work as best you can.

server infrastructure that can't handle Vista, 3,000+ users to train, the majority of which are not the least bit technical and spread out over 70+ offices, an IT staff of 25, all of whom are at the corporate office, a couple of legacy applications so old we had to keep a few 98 PCs to run them, and no one willing to approve the funds to go forward even if we were ready.

Cue the theme to survivor. Heard on some tech talk show that 2010 there will be another OS coming from microsloth and that if you are on the XP/Vista divide to wait on the XP side and Vista will be reborn. Not sure if that is a good thing but if it means not having to roll out the hatchet job OS called Vista, I'll wait.

I have a Beta of it for over a month now and wondering WHEN the real SP-3 will make it out the door to bad they will not have a SP-4 !
Then More people might even use XP Pro ! I have Seen a lot of computer with XP Home version on them which I have up dated to XP PRO !

When Vista was released we had several of us test Vista on our machines.
Right from the start our anti-virus would not work on Vista, so we would have to upgrade that.
Then as we tested other software that we use we found that very little of it was capable of running on Vista have we would have to upgrade at least 60% of the software we use.

WinXP runs all of our software flawlessly and there just was not enough of a reason to move forward with Vista.

100%

We evaluated Vista on several machines and found that
- it required more hardware to get the same level of proformance
- had a learning curve for users that would mean extra labor time to retun to the same level of production
- has issues with legacy systems
- why pay to have some features removed

The biggest question that had a blank for an answer was -what are we getting for the change? what features that we use?

Lot's of hassle - no benefit.

Its really funny, but I have had about 20-30 requests from folks to take their laptops or desktops from VISTA to XP (the machines came with VISTA installed). Some folks just were used to XP, and a large number of them had issues with VISTA (like it wouldn't run apps that ran fine on XP). They have to buy their own XP, and I wipe the drive, install XP, and go to their machines website and download all the drivers for their PC. at $75 a pop, its pretty easy money. I don't do this for a living, but mostly by word of mouth. Yes I know, VISTA is all-powerful (yeah, right) and is sooo great, so why does it not work with Apps that worked fine when folks went from 98 (or win2k) to XP?

Vista is not an upgrade. I advise my customers to upgrade Vista systems to XP.

The only potentially viable upgrade to XP is Linux.

but there's nothing compelling us either. We don't have any apps that require Vista. Without that, migrating to another OS, regardless of what that OS may be, is just making work.

Personally, when we are talking about SP3 in this thread, I was hoping to find out about some of the new features. I wasn't really interested in having multiple replies to XP Sp3 only venting about Vista. If you don't use it, that's fine. It's probably time for you to get on with your life and don't waste mine reading comments that are not informative about the subject the originally poster brought up. It's amazing that not one of you asked about what might be changes in SP3, but the majority of just hammered Vista. If you open a thread about new Harley Davidson features, it's pretty boring to see everyone reply about the value of their inline skates. Duh!

The article was about the SP 3 release time table, not about it's features.

The question was, "What's keeping you from upgrading from XP?" (or something pretty close to that wording). For Windows shops, the upgrade implied is from XP to Vista. (Some would debate that loading OS X or Linux is "upgrading" XP, but that'ss switching to another OS entirely.) Hence, the opinions expressed about Vista are relevant answers to the question.

We have successfully migrated SOME machines to VISTA. However, we have found that it does require "beefier" machines for it to run well, otherwise, the user experience is poor. We will wait out our PC replacement cycle and migrate fully only when the machines can handle it. On machines with the "beefier" hardware it runs very well.

1.The main software that we use for POS and Inventory will not run on Vista (thank god)
2. We would have to upgrade the RAM on all workstations
3. My boss would not want to spend the money for the RAM, new POS software and Vista

Nothing else.

Resource PIG.

Even on a P4 3.0 ghz 1 meg cache,4 gig ram,nvidia pcie 256 meg card and 160 gig 7200 rpm disk,it just does not feel fast.

XP on the same box just flies.

Printer scanner drivers for HP do not work over the network.(1 year old hp2840)

Slow bootup and sleep mode issues on Sony Vaio's.

Too many mouse clicks to do the same everyday tasks.

UAC annoying to the point where it was interfering with business tasks and then you end up disabling it.

More work for little,if any,improvement in usefulness.

My reason for not upgrading will be cost of replacing unusable accessories.
I have two machines at home a desktop running XP and a new laptop running preinstalled Vista. I have found that many of the accessories I have for the desktop, i.e. webcam, scanner, printer etc will not run under vista. It appears that my equipment although only about 2 years old, are too old. In the case of the scanner and webcam the vendors do not intend to provide a vista driver for them. This just bugs me as there is nothing wrong with them; they are just not the latest product. I do not want to upgrade the devices as they all work and I use them regularly. So I do not intend to upgrade the desktop.

Basically, that our testing has found no benefit for the company in installing Vista or even leaving a Vista install on newly purchased computers.

1. Too many computers that are happily
running Windows XP would need hardware upgrades to offer the same performance with Vista.

2. Several corporate applications that do not work properly or at all under Vista. They are going to be updated but not Real Soon Now.

3. An IT staff that does not have the time to do the hand-holding required to get our less technically inclined users up to speed on Vista.

4. Very few benefits in terms of reduced costs to encourage the beancounters to spend the money for Vista upgrades.

5. Still some issues in our testing with Vista and our network. Mostly minor but telling an user that being unable to print is minor doesn't quite work.

I have read most of the posts above, and see the same recurring complaints about Vista. As a system admin with 30 years experience, I feel qualified to answer some of the comments. Yes, I have used Vista, both at home and on our network at work (250 users in several departments). My conclusion, after thorough testing and evaluation, is that Vista performs very well, at least on par with XP and better at some tasks. Keep in mind that I don't believe in upgrading the OS on existing machines, so all of my Vista machines are new hardware.

Now, then, let's look at the common complaints:

1) Vista is slow. No, if properly configured and on decent hardware, Vista should give performance comparable to XP. My Vista machines boot in less than a minute to a useable desktop, load apps very fast, and are generally quite responsive. If yours are slow, then you need to figure out why. The usual culprits are the same as in XP: something loading on bootup. Kill the gadget bar and get rid of everything in startup except what is absolutely needed. Google desktop and AV security suites are especially troublesome.

2) Vista is horrible on a network. Not true. I do disable the indexing for network drives, and on some machines shut off the auto window sizing in tcp/ip, but after that Vista is very fast at accessing network shares and file copies.

3) Vista is a resource hog. Vista does need 2 GB RAM, but with RAM pricing today that makes very little difference in the price of a computer. Vista also runs well on most newer onboard video chipsets (assuming you aren't playing games). Vista does manage memory differently than XP, so if you check your RAM usage, it will always report that most of the memory is in use (as it should be), regardless of how much RAM you have.

4) Vista is not compatible with older programs. This is partially true. I have had great success running older apps, but some are just not compatible. Vista has finally clamped down on some questionable programming practices that made XP and its predecessors vulnerable to attack. Microsoft has been trying to get software vendors since Win98 to make some basic changes to their apps to make them Windows compliant (not using the registry as a database, for example), but some companies (Intuit, for example) refused. These changes were necessary and long overdue. Before moving to Vista, it is common sense to check your apps for compatibility. If you are still using QuickBooks 99, then you either need to upgrade to the new version, or stay with XP.

5) Vista is not compatible with older peripherals. Once again, partially true. Every new version of Windows has left behind hardware. Some hardware vendors do not write drivers for older equipment for the new OS, just as they eventually drop support for older OSs. HP, for example, no longer supports Win9x, and may not offer Vista drivers for some older devices. This is not a Microsoft issue, and for those of you who were around back in 2001 we saw the same thing with XP. I have had success getting a great many older devices to work with Vista, but once again common sense would dictate checking your specific hardware before upgrading.

6) All users require retraining. Why? I have changed users from both XP and 2K with almost no retraining. Before setting up a new machine, I always configure it for the user, adding desktop icons, configuring the quicklaunch bar, setting up their mapped drives and printers, etc. Your typical office user doesn't need to be poking around in the OS anyway, they just need easy access to their apps. Whether Vista, XP or Ubuntu, if I do my job right the user should notice little change. The real change comes from newer apps, not the OS.

7) There is nothing in Vista that improves over XP. Flat out wrong. How about improved memory management, better multitasking, serious security enhancements, a much improved GUI, DirectX10 (for the gamers), and better stability, just to name a few? Vista doesn't just look nicer, but renders fonts better and handles hi-res displays much better than XP. My users report less eyestrain at the end of the day. Vista doesn't bog down under load like XP, and even if an app crashes it is less likely to take down the entire system. Like some of the people above have said, I use both Vista and XP, and the more I get used to Vista the more old, tired, and outdated XP appears. I also use Ubuntu, and right now XP would be in third place if I had to choose among them.

In conclusion, as computer support professionals, it is our job to make the transition to newer technology easier for our users. That means that we must constantly learn to stay ahead of the market and our users. I started using Vista 9 months before switching my first user, and spent that time prepping for the change. In another year, I'll start the same thing again with Win7, and again with whatever follows that. I am also working with Ubuntu to see if it is ready for the desktop in our environment (so far, close but not quite). That is my job, after all, not to push new stuff just because its new, but to be ready for it if required. I'll stil be supporting XP years from now, but that doesn't preclude embracing newer options as they come along.

Every machine is running XP here. To my knowledge, only one of the telecommuters is using Vista. The telecommuter proclaims herself as tech savvy, which is good....

I work for a government service that moves billions of "POSTed" physical packaged pieces of information of both personal and business nature, all tracked on machines that run XP operating system. There are still some machines in service processing this product that are running QNX (a unix clone)!! IMHO..Until Vista runs on the same hardware with the same speed and reliability that XP has proven, the change to Vista is never gonna happen !!!

Micorsoft needs to really step back on Forcing users to upgrade to Vista. Their are over 3000 employees where I work & we have no intention to go to Vista. Learnig Curve will be to difficult & most likely will Blow up on our Network!!!!!!!!!!..