About half of corporate PCs are not equipped to run all the features of Windows Vista, and companies should plan to gradually deploy the upcoming operating system through new computers, rather than take the more expensive alternative of buying new hardware for older machines, a research firm said Monday.
Desktops or notebooks with less than 50 percent of their useful life left when Microsoft Corp. ships Vista, expected in January, should not be upgraded, since the cost would exceed replacing it with a new Vista-enabled machine at the end of the older computer’s life cycle, Gartner Inc. said.
“Based on what we have seen so far, we believe that, for most large organizations, it will not be possible to fully justify the cost of a full forklift migration of all PCs,” Gartner said in its research note. “This is partially because of the cost of most companies’ manual migration process.”
Isn’t this going to be special?
Cant really deny that most of us expected this anyway! We will have to wait and see what Vista is going to offer us in the extended hardware department before we get too stoked about it. For all we know it may be dumb shit like the ability to use talking/animated mouse cursors unless we are running a 3.6GHz machine. If it’s just a bunch of stuff like that – who cares.
I personally wait at least 6 months before upgrading to Microsoft *anything* – we all know their software doesn’t work right until the first service packs come about. By then, all the “features” could be mostly security holes that are removed anyway?
The next year will be fun !!!
Two things I just don’t get about this.
First, how does a new OS release make your current computer obsolete?! You can still do all the things you currently use it for and probably 99.99999999999999999% of everything else coming around the bend.
Which leads to my second question, why does the average user (either home or corporate) ever feel a need to upgrade their OS?
If it’s security people are after, switch to Linux or OSX for godsakes!
To use Vista out of the box — you need a gig of RAM and a new video card — for most PC’s.
If you want to take advantage of “virtualization” — if you’re buying a new PC with Intel’s CORE series cpu — you’ll need an additional 512mb RAM on top of that first gig.
Whoop-de-doo!
From the article it sounds like they’re only referring to virtualization, which doesn’t seem necessary for the majority of end users, and the fancier Aero effects. We already knew Aero was going to have three (?) modes depending on your graphics capability. This just says most existing corporate PCs aren’t going to get the fanciest version. They’ll just have an XP-ish interface instead of an OS X-ish one. Not really a big deal.
SN is completely right…. there is probably no reason of the vast majority of corporate desktop XP user to need Vista. I am currently working doing PC support work and find that there is no difference to the user in any substanstial “user experience” way between those desktops running 2000 and those running XP. None. All the same software can be used, and the ‘security’ features of XP are usually taken care of by the firewall and other central support mechanisms.
Really, the only difference is the 2000 machines are older, so tend to have more crap on them, and slower hardware, so they seem slower. That’s it.
I’ve worked at a lot of companies whose computers can’t run XP. We’re also still about a year away from Vista’s official release so why is this news?
…not equipped to run all the features of Windows Vista…
Now, if half the PCs couldn’t run all the features of Office, then I would think about upgrading… 🙂
Why would a business want to upgrade right away anyway. There are bound to be bugs galore, not to mention that most IT departments would want to test Vista thoughly before deploying it.
Is this a case of won’t install or will be rendered inoperable (either due to dog slowness or some unknown show stopper)? Or will the system be like every other Microsoft OS and be installable but just barely tolerable?
That being said, my 300 Mhz iBook runs Mac OS X 10.3 surprisingly well.