Vista Migration in the Library

We are a couple of weeks in to the semester and computer use has been very heavy. In fact, heavier than I remember last year at this time. At this point, I think I can give some reasonable first impressions of using Vista in the library commons.

First thing is that it seems to work. Our environment consists overwhelmingly of Dell PCs. These range from one to Four years old though most are one to two. We don't seem to be experiencing driver incompatibilities so commonly discussed on the web. I have to give our C-Tech Nick most of the credit but I suspect that many of the reported issues were a bit exaggerated. One exception is a problem we are experiencing printing from Firefox. It appears that special consideration must be made with default printing from that app that we didn't have to deal with in XP. The solution is likely simple but with over 270 frozen computers, the implementation of such a fix may be a chore.

The greatest chore was the development of the image. Without going into great detail, the tried and tested tools used to develop and deploy images to PCs do not get along with Vista and Microsoft's own replacements were sorely lacking. It isn't a user issue but it caused enough time and pain to be worth mentioning.

The best thing so far is that Vista appears to have eliminated an annoying problem we had with computers occasionally hanging during the login process. This would happen just prior to displaying a usable desktop. We never found the cause so the solution was to ctrl-alt-delete, log out and then log back in again. I haven't seen a Vista machine do this and that is very nice.

On a negative note, Vista is slower. This shouldn't be a surprise. I think every version of Windows is more resource intensive but it takes longer to boot, longer to log in and the applications, specifically Office 2007, are not as snappy. The login time is the most annoying and Vista seems to be in no hurry to give users a desktop. Once again, Nick has put a lot of effort into streamlining the library's image and I will stack our computer performance up against anyone else on campus but it is still tedious. I hope to alleviate some of this by upping the memory in our computers to 2GB (from 1GB). This may not help the boot and login times but should impact the application speeds.

Overall, the move to Vista is not a bad thing. If the additional memory can resolve the performance issues I mentioned than we will have a better commons than we had with XP. Just be sure to note that this "upgrade" cost us a considerable amount of behind the scene's work and will cost us in hard dollars.

I'll revisit this again at the end of the semester to give a longer term impression.