Vista launch: wait for Service Pack 1
If you work in the IT industry, the new Windows update is mixed news. The product launch date was driven by commercial realities rather than product completeness. So that means there are features that were rushed and features that should have been included but were not. Despite the honest and best efforts of Microsoft, there will be security holes.
All of these problems are fixable - Service Pack 1 will fix a lot of the problems and the product will probably be fairly stable by Service Pack 2.
Intel, of course, says that new hardware is required:
Intel spokesman Greg Bryant, vice president of the Business Client Group, for example, flat out recommends new hardware for Vista, citing specific improvements in its new embedded graphics subsystems, allowing new notebooks, especially value-class machines, to run Vista’s full graphic experience. Intel’s new Core 2 Duo CPUs also contain specific improvements for Vista and Office 2007, with Intel citing an increase of as much as 300 percent in the speed of an Excel calculation.
So it's a really bad idea to upgrade existing hardware.
That leaves the problem of what operating system to choose when buying new hardware before the first few Service Packs are ready.
It probably depends on what the hardware is going to be used for:
-development - it's probably OK to move over to Vista
-deployment - it's definitely far too early to move over to Vista - come back in 2008
PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software