The Browser Den

This article is not intending to be critical of Microsoft but of UK computer retailer PC World (part of the Dixons Stores Group). I needed a copy of Vista for professional reasons and the nearest place to buy it was PC World.

What should be a relatively simple process was made needlessly complicated in the name of security (so much pointless hassle it was like being at an airport). First of all I picked up a box of Vista and Office Professional both had stickers on them saying that they were empty and to take them to the cash desk (fair enough, a common practice to avoid theft) but then it took 10 minutes at the till for the cashier to work out what to do, the queue was building up behind me (only one till open at the time), once the cashier worked out how to process these new products, I was given a receipt and told to go to the service desk where they would exchange the empty boxes for the full packages. At this counter it took them about 25 minutes to find the disks, turned out they were having trouble looking for Office Professional so I ended up with the Standard Edition. This is something their stock control system should have indicated immediately.

After this I was told to go to the security desk and they’d stamp the receipt to show all items were received and would deactivate the security tagging. At the security desk after asking to search the bag to make sure nothing else was slid into it, they stamped the receipt, however, I later realised when walking into Sainsbury’s that they never even managed to correctly deactivate the security tagging.

I expected this to be just a quick in/out trip to buy the software but they added needless steps into the process, if I’d known that it was going to take so long I’d have given my custom to another shop more worthy of my business, I’ve managed to avoid PC World for many years but I thought it would be ok for a quick purchase.

As for Vista, my initial impressions are that it’s only worth upgrading to if you need it for professional reasons for example testing applications on this operating system or gaining experience of the OS for support purposes. Overall, it seems better than XP but the system requirements are quite high so make sure that your system exceeds the recommended spec. However, in reality for an OS that’s been so long in development it is not particularly impressive. There’s going to be loads of head on reviews comparing Mac OS X and Windows Vista, personally I can’t see any feature that’s in both Windows and Mac OS X that Windows does better. However, Windows is a reality for most people, there’s a whole range of programs that only run on this platform and so improvements to the platform a definitely welcomed. For most people, just wait until you get your next PC before going to Vista.

I’ll probably not write a full review on Vista or Office 2007 unless it proves to be either so good that I switch to it as my OS of choice over Mac OS X and Linux or if it proves to be so bad that I end up preferring XP to Vista whenever I need to use Windows (except when needing to test something under Vista).

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Misc, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.