According to InformationWeek, in December 2006, 6% of business enterprises were expected to employ Vista within the first year. Yet, as of October 2007, only about 1% of enterprise PCs were running Vista. Many computer sellers were offering customers disks to revert Vista machines to XP, and other vendors offered high-powered machines with XP rather than Vista.
Despite all of the problems caused by Vista, hopes for improvement have remained high. In the past, Microsoft released "service packs" that could be downloaded from its Web site and installed on your computer to fix problems and provide you with new features in its operating systems and Office applications. But when preliminary versions of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Vista were released, hopes were dashed. This would not improve many of the problems users were having. "While it's always good to install the latest code for any operating system," says a February review by http://www.CNET.com, "installing the Windows Vista SP1 update will require some casual users to spend a few hours without any visible or tangible improvements to their systems." Such reviews were pretty common, and others offered only measured praise.
I was disappointed about this news. I had been waiting to buy a new computer for months, but wanted to see if SP1 would improve Vista the way XP had been improved by its service packs. When these reviews of Vista SP1 came out in February, I bought a 2.4 GHz PC with two gigabytes of RAM-a machine powerful enough to run Vista-but with XP installed. I have no regrets.
The weakness of SP1 has fueled speculation that Microsoft has given up on Vista, and this may actually be good news. eWeek recently published an article asking, "Has Microsoft Disavowed Vista?" "Technically, Vista is pure misery," says Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, an editor-at-large at Ziff Davis Enterprise who covers Microsoft. "It eats system resources like an elephant." Vaughan-Nichols notes that a blog by a Microsoft executive is leaking information about Windows 7, the next version of Windows. "Microsoft is hard at work, harder than one would expect, with Vista just over a year old, in getting its next desktop operating system ready for action," says Vaughan. In recent weeks, speculation in the online media about an acceleration of the originally announced launch date of Windows 7 from 2010 to late 2009 has been accompanied by reports that Microsoft has moved up important development milestones. Advisors may want to stick with powerful XP computers for now or wait a couple of years for Windows 7.