[senit] vista

The choice of when to move to a new operating system is always a major one - where one has complete control over the timing of investment, waiting may be a reasonable stance. However where one is involved in major initiatives such as BSF, a decision about an earlier rollout of the new OS may be necessary. Vista offers a number of opportunities to people with a disability including speech recognition, ease of access centre and video training material and demonstrations. As well as frustrations with compatibility.

If you are currently investing in new systems for school or local authority, you are investing for the next 3 years - and hence are likely to want systems with Vista on now, rather than need to upgrade the new hardware with a new OS in 6-12 months - that is why it is important to do a gap analysis on the applications you are currently running and determine whether they will run from day 1 on Vista, not run at all or run with a series of patches or fixes - but remember these are dependent on the developer of the solution not Microsoft. 

Understanding this last point is important - Creative Labs decided not to issue drivers for many of its webcams instead a search for a driver told you to buy a new webcam ! That was a commercial decision by Creative for good or for bad

There are many issues to consider when implementing a new OS and the features we want in schools, networking, security, speed are important - application compatibility is equally important and Id be interested to know what people are finding works and doesn't work on Vista - Id only say that the argument is painfully circular 

Customers - "We wont buy Vista till my fave software is upgraded to run with it" 

Developer - "We wont invest in writing upgrades until there are enough Vista users out there wanting them"

The result, sadly, is always longer waiting periods for us all to get the benefits of the new OS and the reliability of our old software  

David Banes
Director of Development

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-----Original Message-----
From: senit-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk [mailto:senit-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk] On Behalf Of Alex Hammerstein
Sent: 30 November 2007 20:13
To: 'Mandy Griffin'; senit at lists.becta.org.uk
Subject: RE: [senit] vista

Excellent Policy - Vista is current Completely Redundant Application Programming .  My understanding is that SP1 is January 2008, which is where they should have been on Release, so I personally, would wait for SP2 due June 2008

Alex

-----Original Message-----
From: senit-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk [mailto:senit-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk] On Behalf Of Mandy Griffin
Sent: 30 November 2007 19:55
To: senit at lists.becta.org.uk
Subject: Re: [senit] vista

I personally wouldn't touch Vista (or any new operating system) until 
at least the first service pack has been released. Mr Gates has a 
wonderful policy of testing his new software on the public.

Our county policy in schools is no vista yet.

Mandy

----Original Message----
From: davidfettes3 at yahoo.co.uk
Date: 30/11/2007 16:02
To: <senit at lists.becta.org.uk>
Subj: [senit] vista

hi does most software you would find in an SLD school
work on windows vista? anything popular that doesn't?
david

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Mandy Griffin
Senior ICT Technician
Southview School
T: 01376 503505
F: 01376 503460

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