Lukas, I am not sure if it is hard for home users. Usually, they only have to replace one or two devices with new ones. That might be annoying, but it is doable. For small business, it is usually also not a big deal to move to Vista. However, the improved security is probably the only important feature for them. Bigger companies face other problems. If you have several apps that are not supported by Vista, things can get really expensive. Most problematic probably is that you have to live with having XP and Vista in the same network for some time. That costs extra money because it complicates the manageability of your network.

Jim, do you really believe that you can escape the compatibility problem by just waiting for Windows 7? What makes you believe that you won’t have even bigger problems if you have to move your Windows XP infrastructure to a far more advanced Windows 7?

Those who we upgraded to Vista that wanted it lasted only a couple of weeks before they begged to go back to XP. Our plans all along were to trickle it in where people were willing to try it and then move all 2000+ system here to Vista this fall. Sounds reasonable, right? Not so…no one wants it. In our labs we’re finding we have scanners and printers where no drivers exist and these are devices about 3 yrs old(despite what some say…3yr old hardware is not old hardware). The software and hardware we have work fine under XP though.

Now we’re looking at delaying yet another year and depending on whether a good roadmap appears for the next version of Windows we might wait for it and skip Vista.

Of course MS already has our money due to the volume licensing but it is making an impact on the students who use our systems that Vista isn’t all some might believe. Sure, a home user would likely be fine with it but the fact we can’t utilize it due to the costs to bring everything else up to speed(hardware, software, and training), they see that if the college can’t/doesn’t run it then it’s not for them.

I won’t call Vista another WindowsME as I see it as having alot of potential but it really is hard to justify to anyone strong reasons to use it if XP is working fine for them already.

What kind of external hardware is used on a company desktop?

First and foremost, printers. Most customers i work with have a centralised printing setup, using workgroup printers. In my office (where i hardly print anything) i have an aged InfoPrint 1120. It worked flawlessly on Vista – and even if it didn’t, i could just use a Generic PCL/PS driver.

All other printers, HP LJ C 4700 / HP LJ 4250 / HP LJ 4350 had working drivers from the start. The InfoPrint 1332 and 1532 also worked from the start.

What other equipment is there? Well SD cards, memory sticks, etc, but they’re all supported out of the box.

So what’s next?

Scanners, Multifunction Devices. Using Scan to Share / Scan to E-Mail, they’ve been OS independent anyway.

I had an older HP AiO Device at home. It stopped working when i upgraded to Vista, so i threw it away. That’s my line of thinking, but not that of a common user – he’d expect to be able to use his HP AiO further.

For home users, it’s a lot more complicated. Cameras, USB Headsets, Cheap AiO Devices, Cheap USB Printers, etc. pp.

However, other manufacturers have the same problem. Upgrading to OS X 10.5 broke a lot of HP AiO Functionality on Macs.