Microsoft Vista has suffered one embarrassing blow after another: people were shunning it, people were returning to XP, and so on. It seems that Vista is gradually gaining ground, however, and according to a new study, people are somewhat pleased with the results.
CDW's Windows Vista Tracking Poll found that about 58 percent of "IT decision makers" who were using Vista had either a somewhat or very favorable opinion of it. Another 20 percent of respondents weighed in somewhere within the neutral range of feelings.
Not bad, eh? These numbers certainly imply that a lot of upgrades will be taking place, and CDW's stats seem to back the idea. The company states, "The final phase of the year-long study finds Windows Vista gaining traction in the mainstream business market, with 48 percent of respondents stating that their organization is using or evaluating Windows Vista - up from 29 percent in the previous poll taken in February 2007 and from 12 percent in the first poll taken in October 2006."
Vista still doesn't have a huge fan base, though; there's no getting around that. The fact that anyone is impressed by a "using or evaluating" rate of less than 50 percent, and that 22 percent of IT decision makers who are using Vista retain either a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of it, is not good for Microsoft.
Given this split, service packs and future releases look likely to remain a turning point in the debate.
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Take Vista off the market
They sure didn't ask this IT admin. I've been evaluating Vista for a few weeks.
At work: vista sucks, lots of software just doesn't work on it, lots of the new features replace old tried and true methods (you should see how many steps it takes to sort a folder by "date modified" now for instance) some things just don't work (like "strecthing" a desktop image instead of centering it - just don't work, at least not on this machine.) It also moved things around and called them different names, just to waste peoples time or just to make it seem like it's different than XP?
In general: um, it take about 1 gig of ram just to sit idle. Also almost every component in Vista tries to connect to the internet (phoning home) over and over again. Disturbingly Vista's DRM software tried to connect to an IP address at my ISP! I suppose it wanted to tell them what kind of media I was watching and playing. Very disturbing for a tech company or any cmpany that likes to keep company data, in the company.
At Play: lots of games just don't work on it and the game companies are saying Vista's file permissions systems are just complicated, there will be no patch. this includes my 2 favorite games COD2 and COD4 (multiplayer mode on both). did I mention it takes about 1 gig of RAM just to sit idle?