Vista Experiences

Microsoft Vista has been the punchline of a lot of IT jokes in the last year or so. I had an upgrade for my desktop from XP to Vista, but couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger and switched to Linux instead. I have been very happy overall with the switch, and I have added an XP virtual machine through KVM for maximum productivity. 

Ditching Windows on my laptop is not such an easy trick, though. My laptop is an HP TC4400 Tablet PC. My research has turned up very mixed feedback on porting Tablet PC functionality to Linux, and other issues, such as wireless and 3G network support, have been either flaky or difficult to deal with. Ubuntu 8.10 promises to fix the latter issue, but we'll leave that for another day. Suffice it to say that I was not prepared to move to Ubuntu on my TC440 just to prove a point, so I stuck with XP Tablet Edition.

In July, though, my laptop hard disk crashed. I didn't have a backup of the restore partition (hands up for anyone actually backs up the restore partition), and HP didn't have XP Tablet Edition media, so I opted for Vista Business, which includes Tablet PC functionality in the OS. 

To date, I have been extremely pleased with Vista. Like a lot of other developers, I feared all kinds of problems stemming from the Vista transition (how ironic that FUD has been the major obstacle to Vista adoption this year). Apart from some minor annoyances with the permissions scheme (which seems to resemble *nix far more than the XP scheme), I have found that Vista generally stays out of my way - exactly what I want in an OS.

Of course, the TC4400 is designed to work with Vista, and with 4 GB RAM, I have plenty of memory to run it cleanly. My advice to clients is to review your desktop/laptop specs before considering an upgrade to Vista from XP. Systems that are designed for Vista and have at least 2GB RAM should run just fine. I would not upgrade the OS on anything with lower specs than that. Instead, wait for the next hardware refresh cycle to replace old machines and get Vista (or perhaps WIndows 7 by that time, depending on your time frame for the hardware refresh cycle).