Handy note to keep ready for the boss when he asks if we should upgrade to Vista or not.

InfoWorld:  Our tests show that Windows Vista and Office 2007 not only smash Redmond’s previous records for weight gain, but given the same hardware diet, run at less than half the speed of generation XP.

Now, to be honest I really do like Microsoft's Office 2007 and most of my people would give it a thumbs up.  It is Vista that I have a hard time accepting.  How do you justify Microsoft's Vista in the office...especially when everything just seems to run slower on Vista..

Last Tuesday evening, I upgraded my Windows Vista desktop to Service Pack 1. If you regularly visit my blog, you know that I'm a long-time user of both Windows and Linux. You also know, that I've been deeply disappointed in Windows Vista.

The install of Vista SP1 went smoothly and I haven't discovered any of the driver issues other Windows users are having. This shouldn't be a surprise since I did have good luck running my box on the SP1 RC1 Refresh. Performance has been slightly improved since the original version of Vista. More importantly, I don't have to reboot my PC once a day just so I can get my LAN connectivity back. In short, Vista users will want to upgrade to SP1, but I still recommend those happy with their Windows XP, Linux, or Mac desktops to stay exactly right where they are.

"At day's end, what I found was that Vista SP1 really has not improved that much from Vista. The Linux desktop, on the other hand, has improved since I first compared MEPIS 6 to Vista. It's not so much Linux has improved its performance as it has increased its ease of use and hardware compatibility. The Linux desktop of early 2008 is clearly better than the Linux desktop of early 2007. The same cannot be said of Vista."

- Steven J. Vaughan-Nicholas, "Vista SP1: Still lagging behind the Linux desktop", DesktopLinux.com, March 4, 2008

I have a long history of using Windows and Linux systems at my place of work. I'm not into Windows bashing as the operating system and other Microsoft software historically has been a much needed standard for the business world. When my workplace had a choice of either installing a Windows 2003 server or a Linux server to support administrative functions, I chose Windows over Linux. However, as much as I wanted to see Windows Vista succeed in the office, I just don't see a future with Vista. Vista reminds me too much of Windows ME.

The latest review I've read on the KDE desktop is from Ars Technica, A first look at KDE 4.0 release candidate 2. While the author notes that a lot of improvements still need to be made to KDE 4.0, overall it should be an impressive desktop. I'm contemplating that my next laptop will be fully Linux and hoping KDE 4.0 will bring enough Wow to impress others on why I didn't choose to go the Windows or Mac route.

Last summer, I reluctantly chose Windows Vista for my home desktop computer. I mainly bought the system knowing I needed an edge for when we finally introduced the new Microsoft operating system at work (so far we continue to downgrade our boxes at work from Vista to XP). Needless to say, I'm not too impressed with Vista.

There are some that argue that Vista was released too soon, but I'll argue that after five years of development, it was released to late. I can't help but wonder if post versions of Windows XP had been released in a 1 to 2 year cycle how much better developers would have a handle on the bugs and users would have understood the new features.

With a bid underway to obtain the blessing of the Open Source Initiative for two of its software licenses, Microsoft is working to burnish its open source credentials. Here are the 25 most active projects, as of August 21, on Microsoft's CodePlex open source project hosting Web site, along with the licenses under which the projects have been released.