When Is It Time To Upgrade?

July 6, 2008 by Clair Button.

The people who worked in the auto factories where I grew up had a saying about buying a new model of car, regardless of which company brought one out. “Give ‘em a couple years to get the bugs worked out.” Despite the engineers’ best efforts, new car owners always found problems with any new design. The workers knew better than to have too much faith in the company efforts to road-test the new products.

Apparently, the same can be said for computer operating system software. You might think it would be a simple matter to find solutions to software security holes as they are discovered, and provide refinements and new features by building on the existing base of program design, but this is not the case for Microsoft’s newest Vista operating system. About two years ago, Microsoft rolled out a huge publicity advertising campaign for what amounted to a software “Edsel.” Those folks who “upgraded” to the new software on their old computers were instantly disappointed and wanted their old operating systems back. Vista ran slower than Windows XP, required more memory, wouldn’t install or run many old software programs, and no longer supported the drivers for old printers, fax machines, or other peripherals, even though they ran just fine with XP.

Judging by the online discussion forums, the only people who have anything good to say about Vista are those who routinely spend large sums of money to upgrade to the newest and best hardware, just to play the latest computer games, and even they have problems with it.

After two years, Microsoft, in the historic tradition of other monopoly giants, has stopped sales of their better previous product on new computers (with exceptions for underpowered computers), and institutionalized planned obsolescence. However, the dissatisfaction with Vista is causing many former customers to convert to the minority product, Linux, long considered to be a difficult, “geeky” operating system to learn and install. My own experience with Vista, even on a new, well-equipped computer, is that it takes a lot of knowledge, experimentation, and constant technical work, just to make certain things work. If you are not a serious computer geek, experienced in software repairs and work-arounds, STAY AWAY from Vista. It is such a pain in the butt, that I am thinking of looking into the Linux operating system myself.

The unofficial word on the street is that even Microsoft knows they have produced a lemon, and they may speed up the release of yet another new operating system “upgrade” originally scheduled for sometime in 2010.

I upgraded my computer because my old one had begun to reach the limits of what its hardware configuration could do with the types of software programs I wanted to run. Serious photo editing and publishing software could sometimes cause it to slow to the point where I could go out and mow the lawn between saving a file and resuming work on a document. Luckily I have enough hobby interest, patience, and technical experience to find ways to make Vista accept my old printer sharing device and network peripherals, but it took me a lot of hours to do that. Most people would have thrown the stuff into the trash and gone out to buy new “Vista-compatible” hardware. But even supposedly compatible equipment and drivers may not operate well, and Vista may block or lose the drivers. Microsoft Vista deserves its own “Lemon Law.”

The bottom line is that if you can still do everything you need to do on the equipment you have, and it ain’t broke, think many times before trading it in on something that may only force you to upgrade a whole lot of other stuff. New isn’t necessarily better or more functional.

Clair Button is the author of the Thomas Kreuger Mystery Series, and occasionally makes attempts at humor.

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