Vista: the perfect example of the need for software testing
Whilst you might expect a small software company to skimp on software testing, clearly Microsoft doesn’t fall into the category of “small company” and yet Vista seems to be the most untested software product to have hit the streets in a long time.
If I didn’t know better, I’d assume that there was someone in Microsoft who wanted us to use some other company’s products. And, yet… Vista and Office 2007 are so bad that I’m planning on doing exactly that as soon as I can get the move organised.
To begin with, Outlook 2003 isn’t compatible with Vista so you’re immediately forced to upgrade to Office 2007 if you want to access your mail via a version of Outlook. That in turns brings with it new versions of Word and Excel with are neither compatible in terms of the file format that they use nor in terms of the user interface.
That wouldn’t be so bad but even Outlook 2007 doesn’t seem to be entirely compatible with Vista as it hangs up on a regular basis and seems to need to check/repair the database almost constantly. For that matter Explorer isn’t compatible either in that it hangs up after a couple of hours of use.
As it turns out, it looks like it’ll be the Outlook problems that will finally push me into moving towards Linux. The primary reason for keeping Microsoft software has been that of compatibility. You could always move to the new version of the software quickly and easily. This time you can’t do that and it doesn’t work either.
Consequently, I’m currently investigating how to go about making this machine dual boot Vista and Linux as a first step. If along the way I can find a way of importing the e-mail from Outlook into a Linux based product, I’ll be junking Vista almost immediately. It’s that bad.
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Copyright © 2008 by Arnold Stewart. All rights reserved.