Following my earlier piece on our own experience with Windows Vista, here’s an alternative view from Australia. It comes from itwire.com :

So far, Transit has been using Vista Business full-time for a fortnight. And so far, we’ve found nothing that works better than in Windows XP … On the whole, we wish we’d never moved.

Clearly, they didn’t have the same experience as we did :

We’re writing this article on the Vista machine, so a bare minimum of functionality has, arguably, been achieved. But that is, quite literally, the nicest thing we can say about Microsoft’s newest operating system.

Read the rest of the piece.

Syntagma Digital has had Windows Vista for more than a month on brand new kit intended to replace our XP boxes here in the office. Previous posts (here and here) described our initial experiences, so I won’t trawl through them again.

Although we still have our XP machines running alongside the new Vista boxes, the proportion of usage by time has swung massively in favour of Vista. We’re now using the V-machines for 90 percent of the time.

We’ve finally got our printers working after a hiatus when nothing we did worked. Even now some applications won’t print from Vista even though they work well in other respects. There are still a lot of error messages flying around. But gradually the bugs are being overcome.

Everything else is now happily done on the much faster, number-crunching, new computers. Of course, we’d switched a lot of stuff online before moving over : all email is now done on Gmail — a huge relief on new computers — and much else too. I’ve even taken to using Google Documents for smaller jobs, but can’t quite get myself to use the spreadsheets, especially as we now have Office 2007 Excel working on Vista.

Thankfully, our desk-top-publishing program works seamlessly on Vista, but not the image-handling one. As a temporary measure I’ve been using the Office image software bundled with Windows itself. It works so well, I’ll probably stick with it for the duration, except for major Photoshop-type operations, which we rarely need nowadays as we employ a professional designer in that area.

Apart from that, the increase in performance is so good, we stifle a groan every time we have to use the XP machines.

I know a number of our readers are looking for new computers with XP pre-installed, as they don’t trust Vista yet. Let me tell you, put your doubts aside. Get as much as you can online — Google is a blessing here — and you won’t look back.

Be aware, though, that the “Protection Mode”, which is the default setting for Vista, may have to be temporarily shut down while you add new stuff or get your broadband connectivity working. Thereafter, it’s surprising how quickly you will adapt to the loss af admin powers, which is what it effectively does.

Our advice? Go for Windows Vista now. There’s nothing to keep you on XP but fear of the unknown.

I’ve had Windows Vista for a month now on brand new computers intended to replace our XP boxes, which are still running alongside the new Vista machines.

However, the proportion of time spent on Vista has increased to 90 percent and more. The exceptions are jobs which require the printers. None of the old ones will work with Vista, so I’ll be replacing them very soon.

Of course, I’d switched a lot of stuff online before moving over : all email is now done on Gmail — a huge relief on new computers — and much else too.

Thankfully, the desk-top-publishing program works seamlessly on Vista, but not the image-handling one. As a temporary measure I’ve been using the Office image software bundled with Windows itself. It works so well, I’ll probably stick with it for the duration.

I know a number of people are looking for new computers with XP pre-installed, as they don’t trust Vista yet. Let me tell you, put your doubts aside. Get as much as you can online — Google is a blessing here, buy new printers, tweak your internet connection, and you won’t look back.

The “Protection Mode”, which is the default setting for Vista, may have to be temporarily disabled while you add new stuff or get your broadband connectivity working. Thereafter, it’s surprising how quickly you will adapt to the loss af admin powers, which is what it effectively does.

My advice? Go for Windows Vista now. There’s nothing to keep you on XP but your fear of the unknown.