Current Thinking on Windows Vista
The Cornell University Vista Special Interest Group (Vista SIG) suggests that members of the Cornell community wait and check with their local IT support providers before upgrading their computers (or ordering new computers) with Microsoft's new "Vista" operating system.
While Vista offers several benefits regarding security and ease of use, there are several business and research applications in use at Cornell that do not work as expected, or are unsupported by vendors. These include:
- Bear Access (Salsa Infrastructure)
- Brio
- PeopleSoft
- SAS
- Thunderbird (LDAP lookups)
- Symantec Ghost
- ...and others
Furthermore, Vista bundles Internet Explorer v.7, a browser not yet supported for many campus applications. Many users have found that the Firefox browser works for them.
The first major update to Vista (Service Pack 1, or SP1) was released during March 2008. We hope this addresses some of the compatibility issues we've seen. We will update these pages as more information becomes available.
Microsoft has announced that it will no longer sell Windows XP as of July 2008, so if you buy a computer after that, you won't be offered a choice.
If you do choose Vista, we recommend that you do NOT buy the most basic version (Windows Vista Home Basic). You'll find useful features in the Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate versions. Please visit our Vista Upgrade Recommendations page for more details on the various versions.