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Corporate America Not Ready For Vista

Posted by kdawson on from the intel-giveth-and-microsoft-taketh-away dept.

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.

4 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Their main market? by igb · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The computer industry needs to face up to the fact that computers are now `good enough'. For most current desktop purposes --- email, word processing of small documents, web browsing, running corporate applications (usually client/server) and so on, a 2006-spec PC will do the job. There's not been a compelling feature in desktop Windows since NT 5 --- witness the reluctance for Windows 2000 shops to move to XP --- nor in Office since 2000. Except for providing toys for your younger employees to play with (a dubious benefit), why would any shop with >1GHz machines running NT>=5 and office >=2000 want to upgrade? How would you show the cost/benefit?

    ian

  2. What about... by postmortem · · Score: 5, Funny

    Corporate Africa? Are they ready?

  3. we are holding off by p51d007 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Power Use? by twitter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Faster CPUs these days are comsuming LESS Power, Memory is consuming less but not as much so as CPUs, Hard Drives are smaller and use less energy (smaller = less mass = less energy to get to speed) ...

    This has always been the case, but power requirements for Microsoft systems have climbed from 150 to 500 watts over the last fifteen years. Most of it has been driven by Microsoft bloat, which has delivered the same features at ever greater clock cycle cost. I'm writing this on a PII laptop. Debian Etch runs well on it but XP won't even install. At the same time, I doubt you can show me a Vista ready laptop that uses less than 50 watts as this one does.

    The most important thing missing from your list is GPUs which can consume up to 350 watts on their own. If you are going to Vista, you are doing it for games and eye candy and want a super card. Vista computers are going to suck power, as the usual M$ upgrade does.

    Outside the M$ world, people are doing more with less. Playstation manages to provide outstanding graphics while Xbox is setting carpets on fire.

    --

    Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.