I’m still surprised that many people continue to disparage Vista mercilessly. Having just installed Vista SP1 yesterday, I’m now onto my 12th month of running Vista with comparatively few problems. The biggest difficulty I’ve faced in my own experience comes from attaching external hard drives; if I plug in a USB hard drive, and try to use it too quickly, my PC will sometimes blue-screen. Sometimes.

And after I spoke with a friend this last weekend, I heard more about how Vista is “a bad thing”.

I’m left wondering if it again comes down to the human nature of being afraid of the unknown. You’d think that by now more people would know how to make Vista stable (which is to just make it look more like Windows XP). But apparently they don’t.

Even the dreaded Vista slow file copy bug has a fix now for systems running Vista SP1. (For those of you who don’t know, some Vista systems experience an issue where copying files across a network, such as from a server to the local hard drive, takes an inordinately long time.)  And again, I’ve tested it and it works.

All that said of course, there are some issues where Vista can pose problems for companies. Trying to do an upgrade of the operating system can lead to unplanned upgrades of other software, such as if your accounting package doesn’t work with the new operating system. And the hardware costs can be prohibitive for some firms as well, if they’re doing a bulk upgrade. Of course, the same was true of Windows XP when it was released as well, and people moan and complain now as much as they did back then.

I think it all comes down to needing to find the median, the balance between function, usability, and cost. And one of the best ways to do that is to have a plan of action, a mapped out course for where the organizations IT is heading. This of course ties in with my last post about making IT fit within the bigger picture.

So spend a few minutes talking to your IT service provider about your plans for your organization. Share the big picture of where you want to be and ask how IT can help you get there. You may find it’s easier to go forward with a balanced ship than always trying to steer one that’s out of balance.