we have 5 PCs at home and three in the shop, all on XP, and all on a VPN.
Had a disasterous time with vista (beta). I feel that the networking is not as solid as XP (Pro) with SP2. Vista did not integrate well with PCs running XP SP2 on a routered network, but OK if using a hub.
There is something amiss in the networking, specially if you have fixed Ip addresses (we use an entanet connecton with fixed IPs for each location - workshop x2, shop counter x1, home network. - we have one at the shop counter and two in the workshop, plus the alleged home office).
Vista, in its present form, is really not much more than a pretty makeover for XP as far as the average user or business user is concerned, it is resorce hungry and hogs RAM. |The beta version I had produced several ram leaks which could only be corrected with a third party utility (freeramxp) and at the end of the day it was an experience like going back to windows 98 with jellybean colours.
I reckon we will "evolve" into vista with machine upgrades if it happens to come as OEM, but certyainly no plans to switch from XP at present.
we have a vigor 2600 router for one LAN- and some other generic router (loosely based on the same chipset) for the other, I had problems with vista with network printing, VPN and several times lost the tcip stack in one computer or another, plus connectivity problems despite trying the latest router firmware (and betas specially rushed from taiwan). Also random connectivity problems always with one computer on the LAN losing conectivity for no apparent reason, which was unable to be restored without a cold restart.
Frontpage 2003 didn't like it, and also had major problems with file sharing (torrent) programmes, roland vinyl plotting programmes, Corel, and Dell printer drivers.... to name but a few.
It does appear that the router firmware has yet to catch up with the horrors in Vista.
imho they have just about got XP sorted, finally, so we will stick with that FTTB. Maybe a years worth of patches down the road it will be fine.
Like markw i have a lot of mixed kit, and no compatibility issued with the patched and matured XP.
some days I just effing
hate microsoft.
