Windows Vista - Our Plans or Lack Thereof

Also see: Vista License Downgrade Rights for Volume Licensing

Please see the current FAS pages on Vista for up to date recommendations and information:
Vista Compatibility Guidelines
Application Compatibility Matrix

PLEASE NOTE: Originally posted 2006-11-20 - This document is out of date and some things have changed (WGA and licensing, for instance). However, due to ongoing incompatibilities and increased cost (for no mean gain), our plans currently find us with the expectation that we will not move any machines to Vista before May 2008 [due to slippage of SP1 and ongoing issues] early 2009.

Physics Computer Services presently has no plans to migrate any of the PCs in our stable to Windows Vista. We do not expect to make any move on this until, most likely, 2008. A report from the Gartner Group is making this same recommendation for most business users. There are many reasons for delaying a Vista migration and I will attempt to cover the major ones here for those who are interested. If you are looking for general information or opinions which might help you decide about whether or not you should move to Vista on your laptop or desktop, I will add a section on that at the end.

You may also be interested in reading FAS's official comments on this subject.
UPDATE 5/07: FAS has finished testing Vista and issued a recommendation. Click to read. In brief, the recommendation is to avoid Vista at least until October when, it's hoped, the 1st service pack is released.

UPDATE 9/07: Microsoft has delayed Vista SP1 until early 2008.

UPDATE 1/08: Microsoft has delayed Vista SP1 again. We do not expect to make any move until 2009 as a result.

UPDATE: 2/08 With the pulling of the pre-SP1 update KB937287, we've suspended any testing until SP1 is in wide use and new compatibility issues reported in SP1 machine have been addressed and resolved.

Issues Which Give Us Pause

SMB2 - Vista implements a new SMB protocol called SMB2. As our entire Windows environment is actually built on Linux using Samba, we rely quite heavily on SMB to interface with our Windows computers. SMB2, it would seem, is meant to thwart users like us in the hopes that we'll give up and deploy dedicated Windows servers instead. This would increase our support burden. Also, SMB2 is slower (contrary to claims otherwise - individual packet speed may be faster, but when the number of packets increases... that's not faster...) than SMB and can break normal SMB usage. This is unacceptable. While SMB would, presumably, still be usable (we'll see when it's released), the Samba project is busily implementing SMB2 support to help those who are forced to use Vista, we, happily, can avoid the whole ordeal by not voluntarily submitting to being force-fed this 'feature'.

Windows Genuine Advantage Vista (or WGA Vista) - (UPDATE 6/07: Issue has been addressed, for the most part, to allow us to avoid license servers.) Vista will not allow for the corporate key structure any longer and all Vista installations must be validated against a license server. So no longer will you get a CD with a key on it which you simply type in while installing, you will be required to acquire a key from a license server and validte against it. As shown by the unreliability of WGA on XP, being at the mercy of any sort of WGA in our environment is too risky until proven otherwise. WGA has shown itself to be unreliable judeging by the number of false positives in the wild with current WGA system. Further, if a machine fails WGA it will be slowly crippled by the licensing mechanism! Being locked into bringing up a license server just to install Windows is unacceptable. Still risking a false positive which may render one of our machines useless is totally unacceptable. (The pirates will figure out a way around it, while we, the honest, will be burdened with paying for additional infrastructure to show our honesty and praying we won't get any false positives from WGA. The more honest you are, the more it costs you. "Microsoft's Volume License Activation will require organizations to do additional planning and work to help Microsoft recoup revenue lost to software piracy." M.A. Silver of Gartner)

Licensing - I made this a separate bullet point because I find this to be the most grating of the non-technical issues. Re-installs: you get one. That's unacceptable. If you buy Windows Vista you can install it exactly twice. Upgrade your machine more than once and you need to pay Microsoft for another copy. You don't own your copy, you bought a license, and that license is very very restricted. For any user, much less here where we expect to be able to have a stable of licenses and use them wherever and whenever we need to, that's unbearably Draconian. Tie this with WGA and you have a recipe for a great deal of frustration and wasted man-hours. No thank you.

From Gartner, Inc., "Microsoft's Express Upgrade to Windows Vista program provides low-cost upgrades to the new Windows version for users that buy the current version. But a limit of five per buyer excludes all but the smallest businesses." Yet another unacceptable licensing issue. We will still have to pay our licensing fee for each new seat even if the machine we just purchased has an express coupon.

Performance Gain - For the corporate customer, which is what our use is most akin to, there is no mean gain over Windows XP. No remaining new feature sets are aimed at providing performace gains for the corporate desktop (some of those promised never made it into the final version of Vista). In fact, some of our hardware will perform more poorly if Vista is installed. Windows Vista has a very high hardware requirement to drive the visual bells and whistles. That same hardware, however, performs well under Windows XP. The eye candy media and graphics updates in Vista would require us to install high-end video cards in our machines in many of our machines. This is both expensive and unnecessary. Business machines don't need to have high-end video cards just to display Excel... Even if Excel would have a nifty drop shadow. Especially not when they work just fine now, thanks very much. Yes, the 'business' edition can be run without all the visual enhancements, but the difference between that and XP Pro is practically a zero sum game.

UPDATE 2/07: I'm receiving various reports from peers of random crashing issues and also, eerily, random 'hard' shutdown (which is akin to pulling the power) on some machines. Some are in relation to particular software being used and others are general "it just crashes" reports. This doesn't appear to be a widespread thing, but I've heard enough of them that I feel compelled to update this.

PatchGuard, Security and the Unknown - WIndows Vista's PatchGuard is a can of worms which will make some security concerns very murky until it's all hammered out between Microsoft and security software vendors/experts. Add to this the inherent security model differences between the 64-bit version and the 32-bt version, and we're just as unenthusiastic, if not more so.
"Microsoft's plan to change aspects of Windows Vista security to address antitrust concerns is a positive move. But the time frame for PatchGuard changes will span years and cause incompatibility problems in the interim." - Gartner Oct. 2006

Compatibility Questions - Potential incompatibilities are not yet known. these will surely be discovered and worked out during the early months of release, however. considering the lack of any real gain to entice us to migrate, we surely want to avoid being a part of this potentially painful period.

UPDATE 8/07: Several application issues still persist.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" - UAP, being touted for 'security', is not a plus in our environment as machines are locked down already. It's taken us some time to build this integrity. Tossing it aside to start again is not something we're interested in until there's a compelling reason to do so (When's the last time you heard of one of the Physics PCs having a virus? Not during the last 1.5 years, I can guarantee you.) We already have mobile profiles and locked down user access.

I have my own machine. Do you think I should upgrade?

A great number of the machines in Jefferson and Lyman are under the control of their primary user. Faculty, research, etc. and we realize there really isn't a lot of easy advice to be had as regards things of this nature. So, I hope to provide you with some information and some opinion which, if you're seeking it, may help you decide if Vista is right for you at this time.

1. Is Your Computer Capable? - There are at least two grade designations for PC hardware as regards Windows Vista: Vista Capable and Vista Premium Ready. A Vista Capable machine can run plain vanilla Vista - no bells and whistles, just the base operating system. A Vista Premium Ready machine can run Vista with all the extras enabled (basically Aero visual enhancements). The primary difference between these two is memory and video card. The premium machine will need at least 1GB of RAM (RAM is memory, not disk space) and a DirectX 9 capable video card with at least 128MB of memory, Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32-bits per pixel color depth. All installations require 15GB of free disk space, a current CPU that runs at least 1GHz and will need a DVD drive as Vista is expected to ship on DVD, not CD.

2. What's Your Need? - There are four versions of Vista, as if this wasn't confusing enough already. Deciding what you need from the operating system (or "OS") should be your next consideration.

1. Home Basic: Basic OS. No Aero enhancements included. Not recommended for laptops. No Media Center enhancements. No remote desktop, business networking or backup. (I honestly have no idea who will find this version useful.)

2. Home Premium: Base OS plus Aero and Media Center enhancements. OK for laptops.
3. Business: No Aero or Media Center enhancements. Includes business networking and backup and remote desktop.
4. Ultimate: Includes everything.

3. Software Compatibility - It would be in your best interest to search the web for info on the various software you have, make sure you search by version) to see if it runs on Vista. Currently many software vendors are working to fix compatibility issues with some current and many older version of their wares. Make sure you know ahead of time if something you rely on does not currently work un der Vista. (see link at end of this article)

As you can imagine, most of you who migrate to Vista (or buy a machine with it pre-installed) will want to opt for Ultimate. Otherwise, at minimum, you'll need Busines, but you won't be getting the perks that are supposed to make you want Vista to start with. It's a Catch-22. You may be OK with Home Premium at home, but it's doubtful it will suffice for your university work (the Microsoft End User Licensing Agreement [EULA] is very specific on this).

Opinions: My opinion boils down to this. If you're buying a new laptop which has Vista on it, have at it. But if, instead, you're currently running XP and are satisfied, Vista really isn't going to offer you much in the way of improvements. The interface, if you can run Aero, will be prettier (if you can't run Aero, it's not going to look much different). Laptops which aren't 'brand new' or 'budget' laptops, may not work well with Vista. Machines with integrated video will probably not perform well, except with all the additions turned off. (this includes many of the Lenovo/IBM desktops and especially the small form-factor machines. But the run XP like champs.) So, basically, I'm not really encouraging anyone to move to Vista unless they're buying a new machine or just feel they're ready for a change. The gains are few, while the potential pitfalls are many. The machines under our control will likely stay XP until some time in 2008.

Potential software incompatibilities or problems list (third party site - not affiliated with Harvard or Microsoft)
- Maggie