Vista rollouts set to overtake XP

Forrester Research recently surveyed 962 decision makers in companies operating in North America and Europe with regards to their adoption of the Vista operating system. During this survey they discovered that Vista deployments could shortly replace Windows XP as the operating system of choice in the enterprise.

An article published in on on http://www.computing.co.uk/ dated 5th February '09, goes on to state that the study shows that Vista is currenty running on nearly 10 percent of corporate desktop systems. However, a third of those people surveyed said that they had already started rolling out Vista, with 26 percent citing plans to deploy later this year.

It goes without saying that as more of our users move to Vista, anyone deploying OpenInsight systems will need to begin to cater for the Vista operating system very soon.

The good news is that I have been running very successfully on Vista Home Premium throughout the 9.0 beta program and all of my work, demos, etc are now undertaken using the version 9.0 commercial release.

I have run into a few issues, one of which I have already highlighted on this blog (support for fonts between XP and Vista) and I’ve also had an issue the was a result of my Vista machine reporting itself to be an XP machine – watch for a posting on this coming very soon.

One of the few known issues is that of OpenInsight being left running in the task manager when OpenInsight is closed. It will not be any surprise to you that this reults in some undesirable behaviour. Revelation jumped on this issue very quickly and the latest RCL4.dll file resolves that issue. Although the previous link will give you access to the latest file, I would strongly suggest that you save a copy of your existing rcl4.dll file in case this new file gives you any problems. The official recommendation will be to upgrade to OpenInsight 8.0.7 or more preferably 9.0, to be as ready for Vista and Windows 7 as possible, especially as Revelation are offering 25% off the cost of OI WORKS during February ’09.

Note: Although I am using the lower end ‘Home Premium’ version, this is not going to be a supported version for use within networks. I would therefore recommend that you opt for Vista Ultimate or Business, preferably the former. It should also be noted that, as I understand it, there is no upgrade path from the Home Premium edition to Business. I would therefore suggest that you do your homework before purchasing a computer with Home Premium.