Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Vista Upgrade: Bad Decision or Worst Decision?

Yesterday, Case Western Reserve University overhauled its internal software-providing website with a new design and, among other things, upgrade editions of Windows Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

Clearly, your God is a soulless pit of hatred for humanity.

Users, on the whole, are not smart. Microsoft's Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor certainly isn't infallible. And, luckily, there exists at least one program on the Case Software Center that, if you don't uninstall it before upgrading, will render your Vista upgrade hosed upon booting it the first time. This, friends, is what as known as a "recipe for disaster". We've already gotten our first ticket in about an issue in Vista, and it quite certainly won't be our last. I'm betting we're going to have to issue some sort of report on common issues in Vista and how to work around them, or we're going to be stuck reinstalling people's operating systems ten thousand times because they didn't uninstall Symantec Antivirus before they upgraded their system. This isn't even taking into account the number of people I've seen buying half-baked "budget" systems that come pre-installed with Vista Home Basic to go along with their Celeron M processors and 512 Mb RAM and onboard graphics (yes, someone brought that base system above in - I'm still trying to wash my hands of it) that will inevitably lead to a sour Vista taste in people's mouths.

If there's any upside to this, it may drive even more people over to the Mac side of the fence. One can only hope.

Here's to a long eternity of bailing users out of poor decision-making and worse operating systems.