Maxintosh Posted February 9, 2008 Share Posted February 9, 2008 British schools should not upgrade to Microsoft's Vista operating system and Office 2007 productivity suite, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) said in a report on the software. It also supported use of the international standard ODF (Open Document Format) for storing files. The agency was equally skeptical about the benefits of Vista and Office 2007 last January, when it published an interim report based on its evaluation of beta versions of the new software. Then, it advised that the added value of Vista's new features was not sufficient to justify the cost of deployment, while Office 2007 contained no "must-have" features. "We believe that these arrangements present sufficient technical difficulties for the majority of users to make them disinclined to use competitor products and this may weaken competition," the agency said. link This is good news, as it shows that these agencies are not acting like lemmings. There are many other better alternatives for them to use. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A Nonny Moose Posted February 9, 2008 Share Posted February 9, 2008 It doesn't matter so long as IT departments are "Windows Zombies." The agency can recommend not doing it, but the IT departments don't have to listen to those recommendations. So they will have Vista. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vbetts Posted February 9, 2008 Share Posted February 9, 2008 I don't see why, Vista isn't bad... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(MoC) Posted February 9, 2008 Share Posted February 9, 2008 They need something stable. Vista just came out in a way and has hell written all over it for most people including myself. I think I'm forced to downgrade today because of incompatibility reasons. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhyguy Posted February 9, 2008 Share Posted February 9, 2008 word 2007 has some cool featurses in it (smart art for one) and i reckon the schools should upgrade to that Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soliber Posted February 9, 2008 Share Posted February 9, 2008 It's all a question about needs, why should schools upgrade to Vista? Because it's new? More often than not, schools don't really have all that great computers, good enough for XP, but Vista would be a stretch. Same thing with Office 2007, why should schools upgrade to that? I like Office 2007 mind you, but I am not really aware of any must have features, that could persuade a school to upgrade, when most of the time all Office is really used for in classrooms is basic features. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vbetts Posted February 9, 2008 Share Posted February 9, 2008 They need something stable. Vista just came out in a way and has hell written all over it for most people including myself. I think I'm forced to downgrade today because of incompatibility reasons. I think that's the biggest problem with Vista. For any computer, any person, Vista goes either 1 of 2 ways. Good, or bad. I love Vista, way better than XP ever was for me. However, I think most of these problems will change once SP1 hits. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ecrid Phris Posted February 10, 2008 Share Posted February 10, 2008 Well, somehow I like XP better than Vista... Ran into a lot of trouble with Vista... Consider a Vista, consider buying a new computer... It ran so slow... I heard somewhere that for you to operate vista smoothly you need around 16 GB of RAM... And of course you need a powerful processor too... Don't know whether that's true or not... But the thought of it scares me.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxintosh Posted February 10, 2008 Author Share Posted February 10, 2008 It's all a question about needs, why should schools upgrade to Vista? Because it's new?More often than not, schools don't really have all that great computers, good enough for XP, but Vista would be a stretch. I think you hit it on the head Soliber, and that was one of their concerns. Not only were they worried about how badly written vista is, but they'd be forced to upgrade a ton of equipment, and why? Just because it's new? Vista doesn't offer them anything that they can benefit from, so they're wisely looking in other directions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colonel Posted February 10, 2008 Share Posted February 10, 2008 I don't see why, Vista isn't bad... Exactly, especially with the release of SP1. I've been using Vista for months now, and it's run every app I've thrown at it. I haven't had any problems yet (except for dreamweaver not working after upgrading to SP1 ). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(MoC) Posted February 10, 2008 Share Posted February 10, 2008 They need something stable. Vista just came out in a way and has hell written all over it for most people including myself. I think I'm forced to downgrade today because of incompatibility reasons. Drivers help though..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. Harrison Posted February 23, 2008 Share Posted February 23, 2008 I've got Vista Ultimate (don't worry I didn't pay for it) on my PC 735 MB of RAM and 2.4 GHz Athlon 64, and Radeon Xpress 200 32 MB. I've got Aero working fine, but it takes up 60% of RAM upon startup. It runs responsively in most places, except for some places, particularly Media Center. I have to run it at 800x600 res. or it is unusable. Most of the computers at my school are Dell Optiplex's with 256 MB of RAM, that have Windows XP Pro on them. There's no way, even with more RAM, that they could run Vista acceptably. Although some of the computers are brand new from HP (Pentium Dualcore, 1GB RAM, Intel GMA) that could run Vista perfectly, but it still not worth buying because they're operating perfectly fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ongeloof Posted February 26, 2008 Share Posted February 26, 2008 I can see it now, plastered all over Number 10. "British Schools told to Avoid Microsoft, Heartless Corporation is full of Viruses!" I wish... Think Mark Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vbetts Posted February 26, 2008 Share Posted February 26, 2008 Hate to say it, buy any Windows OS is full of virus'. This may sound bad, but I'm glad people make virus' targetting Windows OS'. That's a symbol that the OS is big enough for them to target. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
impulsion Posted February 26, 2008 Share Posted February 26, 2008 vista home premium came on on my hacintosh when i bought it. i did like the interface, used it for a couple months and it crashed from a bad update! hosed the system and reinstalled it again without all the sony garbage in it, ran fine for god know's how long! microsoft did keep up with compatibility updates which is nice! i couldn't find anything that it wouldn't run either. then low and behold i found black xp ultimate 6.0.11, xp sp2 based with vista sidebar, aero glass skin from vista and leopard's toolbar. runs 10x faster than vista and uses half the resources. does take an hour to install though! if you check out the show your os desktop thread i have a pic of it on one of the last pages. it also contains drivers for most systems that came with vista pre-installed on it and driver genius for the ones it doesn't have! i'd recommend it to anyone that has a vista based system that wants to go back to xp. you can find it in the usual locations if you look hard enough! here's a pic for the lazy ones! if u want to see a pic with aero glass skin, let me know, i'll post one Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Superhai Posted February 26, 2008 Share Posted February 26, 2008 It is not required or necessary to run aero if you have vista Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gabotron Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 I've got Vista Ultimate (don't worry I didn't pay for it) on my PC 735 MB of RAM and 2.4 GHz Athlon 64, and Radeon Xpress 200 32 MB. I've got Aero working fine, but it takes up 60% of RAM upon startup. It runs responsively in most places, except for some places, particularly Media Center. I have to run it at 800x600 res. or it is unusable. Most of the computers at my school are Dell Optiplex's with 256 MB of RAM, that have Windows XP Pro on them. There's no way, even with more RAM, that they could run Vista acceptably. Although some of the computers are brand new from HP (Pentium Dualcore, 1GB RAM, Intel GMA) that could run Vista perfectly, but it still not worth buying because they're operating perfectly fine. Superfetch. Its that improved cache service they introduced in Vista wich basicly preloads your most used programs. And what good is unsused ram anyway? Superfetch actually does a kickass job to free space for big apps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flowero4ka Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 This is good news, as it shows that these agencies are not acting like lemmings. There are many other better alternatives for them to use. Will they continue to use XP or will they migrate to Mac? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxintosh Posted February 27, 2008 Author Share Posted February 27, 2008 That's a symbol that the OS is big enough for them to target. That's just ignorant. Will they continue to use XP or will they migrate to Mac? Most likely they will just use whatever they currently have. One of the big concerns was to not spend money on new hardware, whether for Macs or for vista upgrades. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Forceman Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 Superfetch. Its that improved cache service they introduced in Vista wich basicly preloads your most used programs. And what good is unsused ram anyway? Superfetch actually does a kickass job to free space for big apps. Assuming you have the ram in the first place and superprefetch takes up disk IO while doing it on every boot, apps should start fast on a good spec system regardless, it's just another reason for people not to optimize their apps because superprefetch does the job for them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gabotron Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 Well if you don't like it, go the smart way and disable it, why complain? Run (win+r), services.msc. Find Superfetch and disable it. Voila. Edit: Also, ram is a non-issue here. As stated, it is really good and fast at clearing ram needed for bigger applications. With 1go of ram, you should be OK with Vista (2go is the sweet spot really). And don't forget that unused Ram is pretty much worthless... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Forceman Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 Yer talking about Windows, most other OS's use the ram properly, it's only Vista that till now makes more use of it ,some would argue it's the wrong way of doing it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vbetts Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 That's also another problem of Vista. People expect ram like 512 mb or even 1 gb to be enough. Although, having 1 gb of ram, it depends on the interface and speed of the ram for performance. Vista is a new OS. Of course it's going to need more, but I can say out of expirence of having only 1 gb of ram with both Vista and XP, Vista uses and allocates my ram way better than XP ever did for me. Even more when I didn't truely have 1 gb of ram, when I was running the Xpress 200. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Forceman Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 Yes, it's ironic that Vista uses memory far better but alot of people find it slower :censored2: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vbetts Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 Like I said before in another thread, maybe even this thread. Vista can go both one of two ways, good or bad. While there are a lot of people having problems with vista, including the speed of the OS, there are also tons of people who Vista has done good for. Plus, most of the complaining of Vista was around when Vista came out for the first few months. Hardly you see the problems people used to face with Vista. That right there is why some people do not trust Vista. They're going off of articles that were made when Vista first came out. XP had the same problems Vista faced, the only reason people didn't complain so much about XP was Me was the OS that came out before XP. ME compared to XP, is nothing. 2000 compared to XP when it first came out, you could hardly spot a difference in performance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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