(Oh, OK, I just used that subject line to annoy people – and\u00a0whilst tipping my hat to Tim Hall, who used it a while ago. Deep breath; flame-retardant jump suit on …)<\/p>\n
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been using my new PC (with Windows Vista installed) for everything, remote DBA support work included. First things first … I have found using Windows Vista a complete joy in my short time working with it. That’s in despite of reading the following comments from good friends …<\/p>\n
“Vista is a [expletive deleted] awful OS”<\/p>\n
“And as for Vista – I couldn’t agree more! Load of [expletive deleted]. I certainly won’t let it anywhere near any machine I have. Don’t know where you get your ideas from Doug, but if you publish hyperbole, prepare for a response!”<\/p>\n
“I’m glad I never loaded Vista after finding out a little more about it!”<\/p>\n
“Vista sucks!”<\/i><\/p>\n
Mmm, where have I got my ideas from? Perhaps by actually using<\/i> it? What a strange way for me to develop my own ideas! Far better to read a few articles about it and form my opinions that way, eh? In this, I’m reminded of Howard Rogers recent blog<\/a>, particularly this sentiment.<\/p>\n Keep an open mind, in short; and use the right tool for the job, whatever that may turn out to be. <\/em><\/p>\n Do I think that businesses should rush to upgrade? Absolutely not – that sort of exercise is complicated, time-consuming and, therefore, expensive. Worse still, if even one existing application doesn’t work, why on earth would any business take such a retrograde action? It’s not as though Vista offers anything startlingly important for businesses.<\/p>\n No, that’s definitely not my argument and, what’s more, I very much doubt that I would have gone for a Vista upgrade as a personal user. I don’t like the latest and greatest of everything – I’m too old to be dazzled (I thought) – and it’s far too expensive for a home or small business user. Actually, of the various tech people I know, I would say I have one of the lowest opinions of Microsoft’s operating systems.<\/p>\n The only reason I have Windows Vista is because it came with the new PC I bought for my business. (This is important, as you’ll see later.) I needed a new PC because, frankly, my laptop is driving me nuts with it’s slow performance only a year after I bought it. I put this down to a few factors.<\/p>\n 1. I am convinced, based on long experience of using Windows-based PCs, that they have to be reinstalled regularly to clear-out all the rubbish deposited in the registry by all and sundry. That’s the ironic thing, here – I have some pretty poor opinions of Windows, having used many versions.<\/p>\n 2. I under-estimated the memory requirements of modern applications. 512Mb just doesn’t cut it, sadly.<\/p>\n 3. I’m now dependant on my laptop for my work. Whilst it worked pretty well for browsing, using Putty and writing a couple of presentations, it can’t cope with the multiple applications I have running concurrently while working.<\/p>\n I ordered my new PC, had to wait too long for it to turn up, was not that excited about Vista, dreading cutting over all of the applications I need for work, but pretty excited about having my first desktop unit at home for a long time (4 years or so?). Laptops are great but, for the same money, a desktop still seems to me to offer more. What’s more, I need never deal with over-heating or slow disk drives again and, when things aren’t as I want them to be, I can upgrade easily!<\/p>\n What about Vista, then? Well, when I first booted up the PC I was, frankly, stunned by the visuals initially. Visuals do matter – I remember a guy I knew who never worried too much about his base unit, just the monitor, keyboard, mouse and printer, because that had this biggest effect on his working experience. I’m not sure I would go that far, but I could see his point. However, if I just focus on the visuals, I might be deemed an easily-dazzled boy, which I am most definitely not.<\/p>\n What’s truly dazzling to me is that whenever I want to do something, it seems completely obvious to me how I do it. I haven’t taken any refreshers, am rarely bothered by minor differences and yet find an O\/S that I’ve spent a short amount of time with to be more obvious than the existing versions of Windows that I’ve been using for years. To date, every application has worked without the slightest hiccup, although I needed a beta Cisco VPN client that I learned about from Tim Hall’s blog<\/a> and comments.<\/p>\n That’s my experience of actually using it<\/em>. I hope readers will note that, of the Oracle bloggers I’m aware of who are using Vista, the two that spring to mind are Howard Rogers and Tim Hall. Far be it from me to speak for them, and they can pop along here and post their own thoughts no doubt, but I recognise a distinct lack of criticism in their blogs. Do you think, just maybe, that three people who are not known as the cheeriest, least critical souls who have actually used the software might have something worth saying?<\/p>\n So why the animosity from people who I respect and yet have no personal experience? Well, there are many issues around Microsoft protecting content, on behalf of content providers they say, and one friend emphasised the 200 checks per second Windows performs in this area. I say, as a political issue, this is crucial, and they will no doubt pop along and add their rants as comments. But, when I’m using the thing, I don’t give a monkey’s. Which is to say I’m finally moving towards that boring middle-aged guy who doesn’t fight for his beliefs fervently that I always feared I’d become.<\/p>\n Look, I suppose DRM issues are important but what this blog is really about is this. At least one of the critics (he knows who he is) proudly stated that it was a good job he knew Vista was terrible because it saved him from installing and trying it. Well, if that isn’t the most blinkered nonsense I’ve heard in a long time, I don’t know what is 😉<\/p>\n Oh, I said I’d come back to the PC and I feel it would be unfair to point out that this is a nice dual-core PC with 2Gb RAM. The likelihood is that this is why the bloated nature of Vista, with all of it’s security checks, doesn’t seem to impact my experience because it has more than enough horse-power to cope. So what? For the machine I’ve got, Vista is doing a marvellous job and much, much better than I expected. It’s still <\/em>the case that if I’d installed Linux, I would have been faffing around with everything getting it to work. Trust me, I know, I love\u00a0Unix and have used lots of variations of Linux! I’m just telling the truth here about the respective experiences I’ve had.<\/p>\n Do you want to know the real scandal at the moment, at least for ordinary internet users? I’ve been occasionally approving comments to an old blog on Yahoo mail problems. More on that later …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"