Long ago, I stopped being flabbergasted by folks who have no idea what their operating system is. Some, when asked, will respond “Microsoft” or “Word” or “Microsoft Office” (or just “Office”) or “Internet Explorer” or some random word/phrase based loosely on “Windows” or variation of whatever program they use most often, usually just whatever came installed on the computer when they bought it, and they’re usually obstinately vague about whatever version of that most-used program is. Most don’t know (seriously–I’m not kidding here!) any difference between whatever web browser or email client they use (not that they know what email client they use) and their operating system.
And they don’t really care, as long as things look familiar, they can type and mouse and click to get wherever their stubby lil brains can manage to go on the internet using whatever browser they have been trained however poorly to use (usually by default Internet Exploder, but more and more often now some other browser, installed by a friend or relative who is simply tired of being bothered by a naif who gets in trouble using Internet Exploder).
So who really needs “upgrading” to Microsoft’s latest-greatest OS offering?
Microsoft will claim more than 300 million installations of Vista since its release, but most of those are consumer PCs sold through retailers and direct distributors. According to a recent survey by ITIC and Sunbelt Software of more than 700 senior corporate executives, only 10 percent had deployed Vista on their desktops, whereas 88 percent reported Windows XP as their primary client OS.1
Most software and hardware works well enough with XP, and software that won’t you probably don’t really need anyway. WinXP 64-bit, for those who have made the move to 64-bit computers, is as stable as Win2K (M$’s best overall OS to date, IMO) and more nimble, less hardware demanding, than Vista. Not that Vista is a particularly bad OS, but why retrain for a new OS (with new, not always better and often more obscurantist ways of doing things) that is far more demanding of hardware when an existing OS is just “good enough”?
That’s probably one reason so many folks who’ve bought one of those new comps with Vista on them have called on techie friends or paid some tech to “downgrade” ’em to XP, and it’s certainly a big reason why nearly 90% of computers used in businesses still use XP. (Another reason many have downgraded or kept XP is likely just that they can’t handle the learning curve Vista requires them to climb–a learning curve that is in some ways steeper than simply switching to a modern Linux distro with a nice Windows-like GUI.)
Continue reading “CompGeeky: OSes, Browsers and Word Processors, Oh My!”
