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I have had a standard policy since the early 1990s: I do not install any new or upgraded Microsoft products until a minimum of 6 months after release. I have yet to regret waiting, and there have been many times I have been very glad I did. This appears to be yet another case where waiting for the maintenance release will pay off.

I don't begrudge Bill Gates his money, but I do figure that he really could afford his own guinea pigs.

I don't begrudge Bill Gates his money, but I do figure that he really could afford his own guinea pigs.

One of the biggest disadvantages of having the most popular "platform" is that you can't possibly account for all of the various hardware combinations that are possible.

I just did a search for video cards at bestbuy.com, they currently stock 6 different ones. And there's at least 10 different variations of processors (probably more like 20), and at least 4 different versions of Office (95, 97, 2000, and XP) that people would try to run... so, once you do the math on just those 3 issues alone, you're looking at 240 possible configurations. And the more software and devices you add on, the configurations grow expotentially.

Gates and Co. can spend two years, allow two hundred people each day, testing every "reasonable" combination of hardware and software, and still miss something that you or I have and work with on an "every day" level.

That's one of the reasons why Jobs eliminated the licensing agreements that Gil Amellio had set up with the Mac Clones. Jobs knew that in the PR war, Apple wins because they don't have so much conflicting hardware/software problems. But once the Mac Clones were introduced people started running into the same problems that Windows had -- too many different things could go wrong that Apple couldn't control.

Linux will have the same problems if/when its market share increases to a certain level.

I have had a standard policy since the early 1990s: I do not install any new or upgraded Microsoft products until a minimum of 6 months after release. I have yet to regret waiting, and there have been many times I have been very glad I did. This appears to be yet another case where waiting for the maintenance release will pay off.

I don't begrudge Bill Gates his money, but I do figure that he really could afford his own guinea pigs.

I agree, except my rule is to wait until at least the second service pack has been released. Every new Windows release is buggy until Bill get's around to fixing it -- and then fixing it again, and again.... (NT 4.0 had at least six fixes.)

I'm just now updating all of my boxes to Windows 2000. I really love the Server version. It's saving me loads of admin time.

For XP, I think I'll modify my rule to wait until the second service pack and until Bill finally gives up his new absurd licensing scheme.