I have tried Vista SP1. It was a disaster. In Microsoft's defense, it does deliver on many of the "notable changes" most importantly a big improvement in speed and decrease in memory usage. It also does now report a full 4GB of RAM if that is what you have installed, but unless you are running the 64bit version, it still does not take full advantage of the extra RAM natively (requires the /PAE and possibly other switches).
The unpublished "features" are the disappointment. They include a slight increase in crashing, trouble coming out of sleep mode (at least for my Dell Latitude D820), and the wonderful show stopper for me ... the bonus where Outlook 2007 SP1 crashing when you try to launch it. A Google search will turn up many blogs (I know most bloggers won't take the time to type the positive) which echo these problems. I did find a couple of users mislead by the statement that uninstall and reinstall of Outlook 2007 will fix the inability to use it with Vista SP1 problem. Through more research I found it was the Outlook add-in's (including the Microsoft ones Outlook ships with) that were the problem and disabling all of them allowed me to launch Outlook again. This was not a guaranteed fix and Outlook still crashed when trying to open on occasion. I unfortunately spend most of my time in my inbox managing support and for monitoring notification. The lack of ability to use the latest version and patches for Outlook 2007 with Vista SP1 has forced me to uninstall the Service Pack. Also the SP1 takes longer to install than any Windows SP I have ever applied. Oh, and sorry, but the uninstaller takes even longer! I did not time the installer, but if I had to guess I think it was about 2 hours on a 2GHz machine with a 7200 RPM drive and 4GB of RAM. Here are my warnings to those buying new business machines: If the option is available choose Windows XP Pro SP2 over Vista (the fact that many vendors still offer XP Pro as a choice for a new machine should tell you something). Don't assume any hardware or software will work with Vista until you have tried it. You may find yourself scrambling for drivers and patches only to find out the application or device (especially printers) just won't work. If you are forced to run Vista, get vmWare and run XP Pro in a virtual machine to be productive (this is how I do it). Since this in a U2 List, let me include this; I have been able to run the following U2 client apps in Vista Business Edition (no service pack) without problems: SBClient 5.4.1 and 5.4.2 You can run UniAdmin v.1.3.4, but the enhanced video features of Vista will automatically turn off causing your screen to go blank and come back up (similar to when you change video resolution) when you start UniAdmin and when you close UniAdmin. -------------------- Louis Perez F.W. Davison and Company, Inc. Sandri Technologies ------- u2-users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
