Long live the king, the king is dead…or is he?
A common question from clients in the process of upgrading PCs is “Isn’t XP dead, shouldn’t we go to Vista?” While XP will soon no longer be available to the consumer, Microsoft Extended Support will continue through August 2014. This means security updates will continue to be available through that date.
While Vista offers some nice user features and may be a fine solution for home use, in the business environment there are several items that should be considered before considering an upgrade:
• Does the current PC’s hardware support Vista?
Vista’s hardware requirements are much greater than those of XP. Upgrading to Vista could cause problems afterwards of poor performance or require adding new components to an old PC.
• Do the applications currently in use support Vista?
Often the applications used in the business environment will need to be upgraded to a current version to be “Vista aware”. Be sure to validate that all critical applications will work.
• Since I’m buying a new PC, shouldn’t I get Vista with it? Then I can upgrade to Windows 7 later.
Since there is no easy path to upgrade from XP to WIN7, clients have asked about getting new PC’s with Vista then upgrading to WIN7 when it is available. This is a valid plan but my experience is that once a PC is in place, clients rarely spend the time and money to do such an upgrade later.
In conclusion, while Vista is still the “shiny bauble” that everyone is staring at, the best business solution is to stay with XP for now. Once released to the general public (and after the first major update), WIN7 will then become the preferred operating system for business.
On both my personal and business laptops I have been running the Beta version of WIN7 since January, and it offers all the good parts of Vista without any of the headaches. It even supports legacy applications that still require XP by running in “XP Mode”.

Tags: Blue Bell, CTN Solutions, Information systems, IT, IT management, NetCare, Virtual CTO

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 18th, 2009 at 6:01 pm and is filed under CTN Virtual CTO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.