The IT Guys Blog

Full Story at the Telegraph

Major PC Manufacturers such as Dell have begun to offer alternatives to Windows Vista. Vista was launched in January of this year with great hype. Like all new “must have” products people camped out in the parking lots of retailers to be the first to get their hands on a copy of this ground breaking operating system. You know times aren’t tough when thousands of people pitch tents to wait for a freaking operating system or a cell phone Here we are 8 months later and the verdict is in, Vista sucks.

Sorry Bill, good security isn’t asking me every 15 seconds if I want to let something happen. If I click on something, guess what, I want it to happen! Vista for the workplace is an even worse idea. Most business users aren’t computer savvy enough to know if they want kulsvc124.exe to run anyway. Half the time IT Guys don’t know off hand what a particular process or application is. Case and point: we use Trend Micro Officescan for our corporate desktop protection. It does a pretty good job but it has an application that runs as a random name every time the system boots to prevent malware from disabling it. How would our users ever know if they could trust a random name? Lastly don’t require me to run special hardware or tons of RAM. America is the land of the free and the home of the brave but it’s also the land of the cheap and the home of Walmart. Americans want things cheap, simple, and worry free. Apple does so well because they mastered the last two. Microsoft decided to flip the table and make it expensive, complicated, and a pain.

The secret to a secure operating system isn’t in validating every program or process that may startup. It’s in eliminating the vulnerabilities in the first place. Sure protect the files that the system relies on but do it in a way that doesn’t cause me to make a decision about every little thing. When major manufacturers like Dell start offering Windows XP in place of the new Vista take note, because people want new technology. If they aren’t getting it from Microsoft they’ll get it somewhere else.