Weekly quickTIP
Standing Tall on My Vista Soapbox
You haven't upgraded to Vista yet and you call yourself a savvy IT administrator?
This week's quickTIP is less of a "tip" and more like a chance to get on my soapbox about IT administrators and their distaste of Microsoft Vista. For the last 12 months or so, I've been engaged with a number of IT administrators and Microsoft, doing occasional small group presentations about new technologies.
In those presentations, I find myself still at odds with administrators who utterly refuse to consider a Vista upgrade. The level of vitriol from administrators who absolutely hate it disturbs me. I've heard all the excuses:
Vista requires excessive hardware that I don't have.
My applications don't work with Vista.
There are no drivers for Vista.
Vista is slower than XP.
Vista will break my network.
Vista is buggy and will cause more trouble than it's worth.
Considering these, strangely enough with many of the loudest administrators I also find that they're running on old information. They took one look at Vista during its initial release, made judgment, and haven't looked back. In many cases, their information about what works and what doesn't work is now dated, doubly so with the release of Service Pack 1.
In my small office here, we installed Vista early on and never looked back. Yes, there were some applications like Quickbooks that didn't work. But for those, we simply moved them to a Terminal Server and made them remote applications. The movement of applications from desktops to Terminal Servers actually made our lives easier with fewer apps to manage across the network. Vista has, in many ways been a boon, to Terminal Services.
So, now that we're over a year past Vista's release and shortly past Service Pack 1, it's time to give Vista another objective look. Still got excuses why not to upgrade? I want to hear them. Drop them into this column as a comment or send me an e-mail. I'll post the most intelligent arguments in a future column.
Greg Shields is Author Evangelist with PluralSight, and is a globally-recognized expert on systems management, virtualization, and cloud technologies. A multiple-year recipient of the Microsoft MVP, VMware vExpert, and Citrix CTP awards, Greg is a contributing editor for Redmond Magazine and Virtualization Review Magazine, and is a frequent speaker at IT conferences worldwide. Reach him on Twitter at @concentratedgreg.