The title is not strictly true since the change happened in December last year but I’m now using Vista on my work laptop. The old Dell laptop went back to the company and I got a new Lenovo Thinkpad with Vista Enterprise on. And I have to say that it works. I’d heard all sorts of stuff about Vista being a pile of rubbish that shouldn’t be allowed on a PC but I’ve not had any issues with it. Having said all that it isn’t doing much other than running some Oracle databases and allowing me to read email, view the web and develop TCL code. The main issues I have had have been getting used to SAPs corporate environment.
So would I buy a copy of Vista? Well I did, sort of. My wife has got a new laptop for her business and it came with Vista Business installed as well as the Windows XP disk for up/down grading (Delete as appropriate). And so far she has been running Vista because I couldn’t be bothered down the change and Vista has worked for me and seems to be working for her. She has also got Office 2007 which took her a few moments to get used to but I think if I tried to get her to use any earlier version I would have a fight on my hands. I’ve got to agree. Apart from a few oddities (Open, Save) the Office ribbon works well.
On the other systems, the server is still going strong with Centos 5. The only change there has been to encrypt the database partition in case it goes walkies. The family PC has just been reformatted and XP put back on along with Ubuntu 8.10. The Ubuntu installation has got to be the smoothest I have ever had with Ubuntu; the installation recognised that the video card was using the DVI port (rather than the VGA port) and even found the Belkin USB wireless card. In fact I was on the internet quicker with Ubuntu than XP!
I’m hoping to get some non work related code written this year. More of this on the next post.
I believe the main issue people had with Vista was the amount of memory and processor it required for doing practically nothing extra compared to XP.
I’ve used Office 2007 briefly, and I’m not entirely sure that the ribbon actually brings anything additional to it. Also, it took me 5 minutes to work out how to do a print preview, which pained me. Can’t say I anticipate either Vista or Office 2007 being rolled out at work at all.
I’m now on Ubuntu 8.10 too, and have been using Ubuntu at work since I got my new laptop in Q3 last year. It’s been interesting to see how it can stand up to every day usage, and I’ve been both surprised and delighted as to how well it seems to work. It’s not perfect, but then neither was XP…