I do, and many other poor suckers who have to support clients who upgrade even against our recommendation. Also, buyers of new computers often have no choice. Some Dell lines are available only with Vista–not even by special telephone order could I get an Inspiron 9400 with XP Pro. However, when I received it and immediately installed XP Pro using one of my extra licences, I found on the Dell website drivers for every one of the 13 devices that initially had no Win XP functionality. Get it? Dell has XP drivers for every piece of this computer, yet they won’t let you order it with XP.
As a point of fact, most of the problems of applications failing in Vista are indeed the application publishers’ fault. Many fail to follow the Windows spec and write programs that require Administrator authority to even run, because they use the registry as an information store. Still others use OS changes as an excuse to force users to upgrade to a new version of their app. Intuit is a great example of both of those sins. QuickBooks breaks the rules, and no version earlier than QB 2007 is fully functional in Vista. That’s not Microsoft’s fault.
Another problem is hardware mfrs who choose to not support legacy equipment in a new OS. HP is a culprit here. There are thousands of HP2000c business inkjet printers in use. The HP2000c cost $600 new in 2000. It’s been a troubled printer with internal parts failures and expired ink cartridge dates, but when fixed it was and is a workhorse. With the 2nd paper tray and built in print server, it is a good network inkjet. HP apparently (based on the "apology" I received from the HP CEO’s office) decided to not write a Vista driver for this printer. Contrast with Epson and Brother who provided Vista drivers for much older printers. Epson still supports 1993-vintage dot matrix printers in Vista! That’s good, because I have clients still using those 24-pin printers.
No question…Vista has its own problems–way too many changes for the sake of change. Why did Add/Remove Programs have to become Programs and Features? And why didn’t all the programmers get the word, since there are places in Vista that still reference Add/Remove Programs! Vista is a solution in search of a problem. For my money, there is little reason to go past Windows 2000 SP4, but if you need the Fisher Price user interface, you’ve got XP Pro, which since SP2 is just about as stable as 2000. wrote in message
…and WHO voluntarily upgrades an M$ OS before the first Service Pack?