Finally happened

[technical.angel]

We had our first request for Vista today from a staff member.

We're still trying to figure out how to talk him out of it.

[Broomjockey]

You don't have to talk him out of it. You just have to convince him it's not possible. Tell him the upgrade budget didn't have room to upgrade everyone to Vista, and you can't upgrade just one system at a time because it's cost prohibitive.

[technical.angel]

Well, my manager will probably end up saying no. He has one gb of ram, so we'd have to update that.

[Rapscallion]

I'm using Vista right now. Not too bad, though it did hang twice when doing the install on my parents' underspecced machine. Mind you, I have 4Gb of Ram and dual core 6Ghz CPU...

Rapscallion

[Broomjockey]

Meh, my laptop runs Vista x32 Home Premium fine with 2GB RAM and a 1.5GHz Duo core. For a business setting, you don't need a ton of power to run it.

[technical.angel]

I'm using Vista at home, and as a second computer on my desk (I heart KVMs). The problem is that I can only test so much software used on campus, and he's not the type of user we'd want to test.

Just a little scary.

He seemed to have the impression that we were just going to move everyone to Vista in August. So, he wanted to get it now so he could get used to it before classes started.

[Rappunzill]

I just got a laptop with Vista on it. I didn't want to--it would have cost about $200 (US) more to get anything else!

I am going to see for myself if it's as bad as they say, then maybe I'll get a nice Linux build...

[The Gatekeeper]

Send him this link and tell them that the school is waiting for the next OS before upgrading http://windows7news.com/

[sld72382]

A couple of days ago I finally put SP1 on my Vista box and it smoothed out a lot of things. Vista has actually been OK for me, but maybe that's because I have 2GB of memory, a dedicated video card and a dual-core CPU.

Only problem I really have is that Vista lacks "official support" for Firewire devices (In computer speak when an O/S drops "official support" for an interface it causes performance with the interface to be worse than the previous O/S, as a goad to get you to upgrade to a newer version, in this case USB 2.0 or eSATA). I have a Firewire external hard drive that will cause random blue screens because of this. Now I have an eSATA external drive that is pretty much problem free, not to mention super fast.

Side note: Vista also dropped "official support" for dial-up, mainly because many of Vista's features are optimized for broadband. When Vista first came out I had a lot of customers calling up because their dial-up was slower than on XP. I had to tell them the reason, to which many said: "I wish the salesperson told me that!" One even said, "Microsoft is discriminating against dial-up users now!" Now I could understand if someone was in a rural area, but in a major city there's no excuse to still have dial-up.

[Gurndigarn]

Now I could understand if someone was in a rural area, but in a major city there's no excuse to still have dial-up.

Possibly the $40 per month difference?

[RichS]

Possibly the $40 per month difference?

Depends - I'm upset at AT&T, because they raised my dial-up rate to $15.95/month. Their DSL starts at $14.95/month...which means I'm paying $1 more for a slower connection. And, of course, I can't get their DSL service - too far out of the service area.

I've been looking at a wireless solution, but I need $200+ for the equipment, then $34.95/month for their basic service.

[technical.angel]

Rich, check into Charter Cable if its in your area(or any cable place offering internet). I have a 5mbs connection and expanded basic cable for $25 a month. This was compared to about $40 for 1.5 and home phone service (which I didn't want) with AT&T.

[RichS]

Rich, check into Charter Cable if its in your area(or any cable place offering internet).

No cable here, unfortunately. Or maybe fortunate - cable provider out here is Comcast.

So it's either satellite or wireless.

[sld72382]

Possibly the $40 per month difference?

Not really, low-end DSL starts at $20 per month.

[Thrifty]

The low end DSL starting at 20 bucks all depends on where you live. If you live in a trailer park (at least in my trailer park) the only high speed internet we can get is comcast. That wasn't too costly for the first year or so but now it costs about 60 dollars a month, dial up would cost us around 20 or so.