Chris Pirillo says he’s breaking up with Windows Vista. It’s vintage agitprop from Chris, and I was going to respond.
And then I read Dwight Silverman’s response. Dwight basically said everything I was going to say, starting with this:
He has a list of 10 complaints, most of which have to do with software that isn’t compatible with Vista and hardware for which there are not yet drivers. In other words: He’s working with a brand new operating system, and he’s suffering the slings and arrows that almost always accompany doing so.
If he were to take a moment and look back, chances are he’d find he was jumping through the same hoops 5 years ago, when he was working with the initial release of Windows XP.
There’s rarely a penalty for delaying a switch to any new platform, hardware or software. This time around is no exception. Despite the provovative headline, Chris’s actual column has this astute observation:
It’s NOT horrible at its core (by any stretch of the imagination). If all of your hardware and software are fully baked, you’re good to go – but that’s not the world I live in. I will continue to recommend Windows Vista for some users, mind you. I wish I could take the best parts of Vista and bring them back with me to XP. I’m still more than willing to help Microsoft improve Windows and get the message out to users, but I simply can’t sacrifice my own time and productivity without benefits in clear sight.
My overall judgment is the exact opposite. Despite the glitches (and yes, I’ve had a few), my productivity is up, way up, thanks to Vista and Office 2007. On balance, I prefer Vista over XP. I do, however, have an XP system running in one corner of my office because the drivers and supporting software for my Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner won’t be ready until April.
Chris, you should invite Dwight on to the show for a debate. I’d tune in.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
I have one machine running XP (because I must) and the other running Vista. As far as I’m concerned, it is no contest. Vista wins hands down. It runs better, it looks and sounds better, it is easier to maintain and optimize, I find my stuff MUCH easier, and it enables me to be more productive.
Note that most complaints come down to either not running Vista properly or trying to run it with incompatible software or hardware. Well, duh! What the heck do they expect?
Chris lives from links and clicks and this is pure linkbate.
Chris linked to me once and most of the traffic that followed were young European Linux users, but he’ll be back knocking on Microsoft’s door begging for sponsorship.
I to find Vista to be the winner as well. I will keep XP around, just in case. But, I use it because I have to, not because I want to; which isn’t to often.
I made an image backup of my XP partition before installing Vista, on the grounds that if I needed to fall back to it at any time, I could. I have since deleted the XP disk image. I think that says everything.
The only complaints I have are things which are not Vista’s fault, and in fact are things that should have been fixed long ago anyway.
Would be nice to see HP releasing some software update and drivers for their PC and Printer. When i bought my Vista upgrade i thought HP was ready to release things that are needed they even provided a website all related to Vista and now their saying customer have to look elsewhere for drivers and the bad thing they don’t even provide a link.
Vista is no big deal. I prefer XP. I had Vista Ultimate installed on an HTPC for over 2 months and removed it to go back to XP MCE 2005 because it is a better media OS. Eye candy will only go so far.
I’ve been saying for some time now that if people think eye candy is all there is to Vista they are definitely not getting the whole story.
I don’t like either Vista or Office 2007 because neither represent an improvement (for me). Vista’s UI takes a day to tweak all the crud out of it, and Vista Explorer is a god-awful mess, as is Office 2007’s OXML. I could go on. Love Vista’s disk management; hate the control panel, start menu, aero, and so on.
Computing should always get faster and better. Vista did neither, leaving me with the emotion: Microsoft, you spent five years on THIS? Shame, shame, shame, to quote Gomer Pyle.
I have no idea why anyone links to Chris Pirillo or considers him influential or relevant in any way.
He’s like the angry, ranting IT guy you keep isolated in a basement cubicle. Whatever trivial thing is bugging him at the moment becomes the most important thing in the world.
STOP PICKING ON CHRIS!
Sheesh.
He is entilied to his own opinion.
If you can’t accept that, DON’T LISTEN. Simple.
Remember what we learned in kindergarten? The golden rule? Treat others the way you want to be treated.
If you don’t like my post, I wouldn’t be surprised if you deleted it! But, remember this… people do NOT appreciate how you treated Chris. Show him some respect, instead of accusing him of spreading propaganda.
Thank you very much.
-Andy
Andy, please read Jeff’s post, the one right above yours.
And no, I’m not going to delete your comment. You obviously haven’t spent much time here.
@Andy, of course he is entitled to his opinion, but when he makes his living from being a technology writer of sorts he can expect others to voice their opinion when they disagree with him, or is it only allowed to those who agree with you.
Personally, I have been test running RC2 on a number of machines, some with old Athon XP+ 1400 CPUs and the like. The only extra cost has been increasing RAM to 1GB on a couple of them and one cheap graphic 128MB card upgrade on one PC to enable Aero. To my very pleasant surprise, especially after all the negative press about Vista performance and requirements, I find it runs at least as fast as XP on all of them, even with all the so called eye candy turned on.
As soon as my free upgrade comes through from Modus Link, hopefully not too much longer now, it will be replacing XP Pro on my main work laptop. For when I tried RC2 on it the general increase in performance compared to XP, was notable in most if not all situations.
P.S. Love your Vista book Ed, it is a definite must have.
chris just needs to stop whineing hes been working wiith windows for a long time and should know when i new OS comes out hardware and software vendors
it seems are the last to know it even though they have access to the os to write drivers and patches
but it seems like chris is acting like the noobie croud and blameing microsoft for hardware and software vendors not haveing there act together
i installed windows vista ultimate and besides haveing beta sound drivers for my X-FI Sound Blaster and haveing to upgrade my dvd software everything works like a dream and the old software that will not work with vista i will be replaceing just like i had to when i went from windows 3+ to windows 95 and so on and so forth that just the way it is
windows vista has better graphic content than windows xp, but you can’t do anything with it because its not compatible with anything and it is hella slow
I am not sure if any of you actively support any Technical Support forums, but since Vista has been released it has been a technical nightmare.
I have probably seen more issues with people buying new computers running Vista then people just upgrading their 2 year old computer to Vista. Many of the people buying new computers are wondering how they can downgrade to XP because they are having so many issues with Vista.