I received my new notebook PC a few days ago. A nice HP machine with 2.4GHz Dual Core processor and 2GB RAM and a huge harddisk...... and of course Windows Vista.
This was going to be my first encounter of Windows Vista and I was kind of looking forward to it since the hype at work had been big when it was launched and many of my collegues just love it.
Well, first of all it took over two hours to get it installed and up and running. That alone should have forewarned me that this is not going to be fun :-( Anyway, Vista alone is a really nice operating system, a little slow but it looks great. I had no problems in navigating and finding the advanced features I needed so that felt good.
So, now I wanted to install the applications that I regularly use in my daily work and I started of with the CAD software that we use. Installation went fine, no indications of any problems. But after that I have nothing more positive to add about Vista. The application just will not start. It uses a License manager that keeps crashing in different ways. After trying to resolve this issue for a while another problem appeared. Suddenly Vista could not connect to the "Group Policy Manager Service" which rendered the computer completely useless and after an hour or so I simply restored everything to its freshly installed state.
Now, I am persistant little bugger and did not want to let this misshap get me down so i tried yet another time to install the CAD program to see if I could get another result (Now what was the definition of an idiot again). But as you no doubt hav already guessed it bombed again.
To see if this was an isolated incident I also tried out another of our main applications that we use in our company, a C-toolchain for developing embedded software. The same procedure here, installation works fine but the application gets thrown out before starting up. I tried some suggestions that i googled up but nothing works.
To be honest, I have absolutely no time at all to fuck around with an operating system that will not run our applications that we have invested more than 20K$ in. Yes it looks cool, but that is simply not enough. It needs to be able to handle our applications, it needs to be compatible with with previous operating systems. If it aint, I could just as well kick Microsoft products out all together and go over to using Linux instead.
Sorry Microsoft, this just aint good enough.
Also, can I get back my 20+ hours I spent on trying to get the crap to work in our environment. Didn't think so =) Going back to XP again.