05.17.10
BusinessWeek on Vista 7 Being Bad for Business, Reducing Efficiency
Summary: Another sincere take on Vista 7, courtesy of a businessman who has tried the operating system for 6 months in his small enterprise environment
THE reality behind Vista 7 is distant from perception. Microsoft has spent so much money on marketing and bribed so many people (we have given actual examples) that a lot of people perceive Vista 7 as a success and Vista as “merely a mistake”. Intel has learned from its own experience that Vista 7 does not work for business, but it’s good for increasing sales of chipsets.
One who offers apologetic words to Microsoft is still not satisfied with Vista 7, not even after half a year. He is the owner of the Marks Group, which he describes as “the author of four best-selling small business books.” He wrote an article which BusinessWeek has just published, in which he says:
I kvetched when Windows 7 came out, and then again six months later.
Here is the article he points to (an article which we missed, dating a month earlier). He basically says that Vista 7 has harmed productivity where he works.
After installing Microsoft’s latest operating system, one business owner finds his staff covering less ground
[...]
Yet so much of Windows 7 resembles Microsoft’s operating systems of the past. Some of my applications still freeze, and I still reboot and start over, hoping it won’t happen again. Networking still takes an information technology professional to set up.
[...]
Running a business? Buying a new computer? Don’t get too excited about Windows 7. It’s fine, but our upgrade didn’t improve our game. And I’ll never be able to cover as much ground at shortstop as I once did.
“It’s a small improvement over Vista,” explained our reader Ryan about Vista 7 (he has used both Vista and Vista 7), “but you’d be doing a lot better to get a RAM upgrade or a new CPU and sticking with Vista if that’s what you already have. CPUs get pretty damned cheap if you get them as an OEM part that’s a couple years old. I remember I got a system in 2005 with a Sempron 3100+ and by 2006, I upgraded to a Athlon64 3400+ for about $20. I saw a nice across the board performance improvement of well over 30%.
“Vista to Windows 7 will speed your PC up about 5% and cost at least $120.”
–Ryan Farmer“Vista to Windows 7 will speed your PC up about 5% and cost at least $120. It’s better to upgrade a Vista era PC with more RAM and a new CPU than with a copy of Windows 7.”
Microsoft still relies on bundling here. Microsoft doesn’t need to sell Vista 7; it just needs to ensure — using illegal tactics most of the time — that OEMs do not offer anything but Vista 7 and then convince people to spend their money on a new PC.
Those who are looking for a well-behaved and light operating system should take a look at GNU/Linux. Increasingly, Linux gets preinstalled on devices (tablets and smartphones for example), often with GNU. █
stonebit said,
May 17, 2010 at 8:46 pm
Tests are being run in our corporate environment (hundreds of thousands of PCs with nearly 100% running XP) to start introducing Vista7. The results of all tests are disasterous. Vista7 crashes more often and is, in general, more difficult to administrate due to incompatabilities between tools that work with XP, but not Vista7. Networking slowdowns and server service crashes are also creeping in, but were never an issue before Vista7. I’m sure a lot of this has to do with the fact that Server 2008 is not stable enough and too big a CPU/memory hog, so we run 2003 R2, which still is not the greatest option by far. Several years ago, corp hq started phasing out our old UNIX and Linux servers used for critical ops and replacing them with Windows Servers. It seems now there is a strong effort to move databases and other critical systems back to Linux. Oops. It also doesn’t help that we’ve got old M$, HP, Compaq, Dell, and Okidata folks on our board.