Corporate America Not Ready For Vista

thefickler writes to point out a TechBlorge article about a study indicating how few corporate computers now deployed are capable of running Windows Vista. The article says that the study, by Softchoice, will be released next week. The study found that 50% of the PCs inventoried (from a sample of 112,000 from 472 organizations) are below Vista's basic system requirements. Roughly half of those PCs will need to be replaced outright to run Vista. 94% of corporate PCs are not ready for Vista Premium Edition. The article notes that the need to upgrade hardware "could... mean that organizations will hold off upgrading to Windows Vista until their next hardware refresh," as some analysts have been saying for a while now.

Comments

we are holding off

[p51d007]

Our company isn't in any hurry to upgrade, nor are a lot of companies I talk to. Most like ours, have spent a lot of capital in the last 24 months upgrading from NT4 to XP, from Office 2000 to Office 2003. We have XP tweaked out, locked down, patched up and running perfectly, sort of the way we had NT4/Office2000 tweaked. If we were to upgrade to Vista, to get the same performance, we would have to dump an extra 512 meg of ram into every box, since we have them running 512meg now. XP for our purposes runs pretty well with 512 meg of ram, but on a couple of test boxes, 512 meg with Vista is like running XP on 256. Yeah it runs, but you do a lot of swapping. For now, we are holding off on Vista/Office07, until at the earliest Q2 of 07. Any NEW computers bought/built, will be built with an OS update in mind, but will come configured with XP, NOT Vista.

"Premium Edition"?

[Jugalator]

94% of corporate PCs are not ready for Vista Premium Edition

1. There is no such thing as a "Vista Premium Edition".
2. If they mean the closest -- "Vista Home Premium Edition", that's not supposed to be a common Vista edition for corporations.
3. Are these talking about meeting recommendations or requirements? I see few corporations being willing to run Aero Glass, and without that, you can easily get by with 512 MB or 1 GB RAM and no special graphics card to speak of (assuming it meets XP requirements).

Re:Vista is Broken in Many Ways

[mpapet]

Let's start with some facts:

Vista's *six* SKU's are sold in various states of disabledness. For example, if you want to use a DVD burner, you must upgrade. Hmmm,.no matter the version of XP you could use a DVD burner... That's just one of many restrictions.

Let's move to your clearly uninformed question: "Is there some magic mechanism which disables your ability to play unencrypted content?"

Why, yes there is! The latest WMP phones home to MS when you play a song and catalogs your content. When the inevitable OS reinstall happens and you attempt to play the same songs you get some bad news. It seems it's okay to play the music on that "other" OS install, but not this one. You agree to this when you click-through licenses. Here's a link to a guy that experienced it. http://www.bandddesigns.com/blogger/arch/002942.ht ml
Here's Microsoft's SDK http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/wmpsdk11/mmp_sdk/glossary.asp Search the term "component enforces those rights." on the page.

Now, Microsoft and their media friends are taking away your right to first sale as secretly as possible. Vista will help them meet that end very nicely. Set top boxes and a variety of media subscription models will help greatly as well. Add in dragging some children into court and consider it done.

I assure you, this is only the beginning. Please consider using another OS that ensures your current freedoms. Many Linux distros are good,

I'm sure the above-average PHB senses this anyway. Which is part of the reason the Vista uptake will be so slow.

Re:Vista is the new ME

[RobertLTux]

did you hapen to know that bitlocker is basically volume level DRM? so that means if any of the following happens

1 you lose the password to the account and your "root" admin gets run over by a bus
2 some random Zero day borks the account
3 a DDOS on the authentication server burns your block of COA serials
4 Microsoft just one day "decides" that your system is unauthorized (maybe you are in Their way)

You are shall we say "traversing the proverbial polluted tributary without visible means of propulsion" or "afixed via a rotated metal rod with a spiral fin"