ah yes
because I work for a fairly large firm in the city and they have been talking about adopting Office 2007. Personally I've used it for a while and I've found it was alot better then 2003 (go the $75 Office 2007 ultimate offer for school and university people).

I find it amazing that the Vista response has far outweighed the brilliant product that Office 2007 is. I thought it might get the same negative response that Vista may have also received. But I guess not. Personally I don't mind Vista at the moment. I mean I understand where your coming from with your discussion on drivers being that Vista is unstable. But I look at the entire section of Wireless network PCI cards and I find little or no drivers for Vista 64 Bit. We aren't even talking about 32 Bit. With the massive advent of 4GB ram and in the near future 8GB you would figure they would make drivers for the only good stable 64 Bit OS out there. My friend has been using it for a while and it hasn't really given him that many problems.

I fail to see why they don't make drivers for it to be honest, for something so simple as a PCI Wireless card which most people would be looking to put on their new machine (which happens to most probably ship with Vista)

It is pretty simple , why many people opt for xp instead of vista, First of all vista takes away alot of the freedom xp has given the personal computer user. a good analogy is firefox vs IE . xp can suit various user being user friendly with good security. Vista takes up more of the cpu,memory,speed, with out reliability, and compatibility. thus making it slower than xp.vista is loaded with bugs, while xp has learned to be ammune. Sure vista looks good, but whats under the hood that counts when its a race for time and dependability. Hasta la vista, vista

you may be right, thought it's looking like 2010 - Windows 7 on track for 2010

Remember people. We're talking microsoft time here.
5 MS seconds, 4 MS seconds, 5 MS min, etc.

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Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.

Ask questions. There's no such thing as a stupid one, just stupid answers. (mostly)

Without reading all of the above commentary I'll throw my 2 cents in and say that XP is a lot better than Vista in my opinion. On my laptop with 2GB DDR2 2.0 duo core etc etc etc Vista ran a lot slower on it than my 'ancient' 5+ yo desktop with 1GB DDR P4 running XP. I gave myself 2 months using Vista so I would have experience with it before I got sick of it and installed XP on the laptop and have never been happier. I predict the next Windows OS will be a major improvement and Vista will be referred to as Windows Me version 2 if it isn't already and be ditched asap by anyone who was lumbered with it on their new at the time operating system.

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~This life must be a trial run because for the real event they'd hand out the instruction manual~

Hey I've got an idea.
Let's not bite.

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Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.

Ask questions. There's no such thing as a stupid one, just stupid answers. (mostly)

Microsoft managed to sell an estimated 300,000 copies of Windows XP in the operating system's launch week. In the first week they hit the shelves, Windows 98 was sold in over 400,000 copies. Some 25,000 copies of Windows Vista have been sold every day for a forecasted total of 125,000 in the first week. That is less than even Windows 2000 that scratched the 200,000 units sold milestone. In this context, Vista sales are affected by the operating system's hardware requirements.

Microsoft took a large bite of humble pie this week, announcing that it will continue to support Windows XP until 2014. That’s an unprecedented 13 years from the operating system’s release, a new record for Microsoft’s support of an operating system. It will take the form of critical updates and security patches, but there was no mention of major service pack releases.

Hinting at Microsoft’s embarrassment over the announcement, the news was released via a letter sent from Microsoft senior VP Bill Veghte to customers, rather than a formal press release. Within the letter, Mr Veghte claimed that “Our ongoing support for Windows XP is the result of our recognition that people keep their Windows-based PCs for many years”. Sounds nice, but the truth isn’t quite as charitable. The fact is that Vista simply hasn’t penetrated businesses as quickly as Microsoft would have liked, with many choosing to stick with the proven stability and lower hardware demands of Windows XP.

A senior executive at HP has said that sales of systems of Windows XP still make up the majority, despite the operating system being officially withdrawn from sale in June.

Jane Bradburn, market development manager of commercial notebooks for HP Australia, told media that the company was still selling XP machines, but issuing a Vista licence for them. This casts serious doubts over claims from Microsoft that Vista is selling well.

"From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP licence," she said.

"However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business licence but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today."

This would mean that in Microsoft’s books the sales would show up as a sale of Vista.

Rob Kingston, group manager of commercial product marketing for HP said: " Looking into a crystal ball, I don't think businesses will see much value in upgrading to Vista until late next year and, even so, Microsoft will probably have come out with something else by then."

Companies are not the only ones less than enamoured with the operating system. Developers are it too.

The news backs up research by Forrester Research analyst Thomas Mendel, which estimates that only 8.8 per cent of enterprises have adopted Vista. This led to an angry response from Microsoft on its Vista blog, claiming that it had sold over 180 million copies of Vista.

“Given that there's a mountain of evidence to refute this report – including multiple reports from Forrester and other top-tier analysts – this appears to be more focused on making sensationalist statements rather than offering a thoughtful industry perspective based on conversations with IT operations professionals or deep knowledge of enterprise deployment cycles,” it said.

“How is this useful guidance to customers? It's disappointing to see such a respected organisation like Forrester take this approach.”


The market has spoken and Vista is still being out sold by XP, I wonder why. lol

I recently ugraded to a high end Dell XPS730 with a quadcore cpu but don't find Vista Ultimate friendly or speedy. It goes to sleep while working and refuses to wake up. Office 2007 programs continually "stop working" and close with the message Windows is trying to find a solution - a restart is the only solution available. It's incredible that MS can't get their own applications to work with Vista! Windows Explorer in XP and previous used to inheret the properties (title, subject, etc) in PDF files and display these but now one has to open the file's properties to see these. My network keeps going missing and I can't connect to external drives or laptop, but then mysteriously reappears from time to time [over a Belkin N1 router]. It is definitely better to activate the Administrator account in order to load new programs, but I've had to buy upgraded versions. I had to go to a beta version of F-Secure-2009 to overcome problems. I had to abandon Steganos Privacy Suite 2008 because the Activation program did not like my setup and tech support couldn't supply an answer. Add-ins to Outlook 2007 and Word and Excell are tempremental at best.

I certainly don't recommend upgrading to Vista! Any product that doesn't have obvious benefits and sell itself but instead leaves folk having to ask others for reasons(excuses/justification?) to upgrade has not come of age! Maybe when a future Vista (SP2,3,4 ...) with hardware that won't balk at running it comes along I'll change my mind.

DirectX 10 is crap...hell, it's going to be run over by DX11 before it even becomes mainstream! Poor DX10, it must feel so unloved.

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Despite the spiraling cost of living, it remains a popular activity.