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Dell Warns of Vista Upgrade Challenges
Mattaburn writes with a story up on ZDNet UK reporting that Dell is warning businesses of the migration challenges that lie ahead as they move to Vista. The article notes what an unusual step it is for a company of Dell's size to be "toning down its sales pitch for Microsoft's Vista operating system" — particularly because "one of the issues the hardware vendor is warning business about is the extra hardware they will need to buy." Quoting: "'They need to be looking at the number of images they will be installing and the size of these images,' said Dell's European client services business manager, Niall Fitzgerald. 'A 2GB image for each user will have a big impact.'"
The hidden migration problem is with multi-billion dollar companies who you'd assume would update their drivers. When I upgraded to vista I had to use xp drivers for my current model HP laserjet with a workaround I found searching on google. This is the kind of unprofessional stuff that companies wont be doing so waiting probably makes sense because a lot of equipment you can buy now brand new still has no drivers.
According to this, MS will continue to support XP until April 8, 2014. I'm sure most companies will be into Vista long before that date comes.
Speedy thing goes in; speedy thing comes out.
I must use a server for administrative work. (yes, I know I can use registry tricks to make ADUC work but I shouldn't have to)
I can't run multiple monitors on my existing hardware that's certified for Vista, using the recommended drivers, configed the way MS said to.
I can't easily change the NIC binding order.
The sidebar thingy moves on it's own.
Eats my notebook's battery like Pez.
Decides my network is a new one that it's never seen before at random... hence network number 12!
This is just what I could think of in 10 seconds.
It's not a bad try but I see this as the ME of XP. I'll move when I have no choice... but at this point we're simply buying machines without OS and imaging or wiping them. We don't HAVE to upgrade and I'm not planning to for a REALLY REALLY REAAAAAALLLLY long time.
"Chinese Amazons, power armor, laser swords.... things just meant to be." - Shampoo, A Very Scary Bet
Sort of. You see, Dell makes one installation, updates it, and installs they're crapware. Then they sysprep it (with the appropriate answer file) and reboot into some other OS (Linux, maybe, since it has the tools to deal with this. It could be Windows based as well, like BartPE or even some bootable form of partition magic. It could be something highly modified but I doubt it. They rarely have to do this, so I'm quite sure that they only have a couple of people who can, and those people probably don't care so much about optimizing the procedure. It really doesn't matter, anyway.) In this alternative environment, they shrink down their clean, sysprepped image to as small as it can get. This is the image they put out on every hard disk they ship. The only thing that's differs between shipped disks is the partition table between hard disk sizes.
Anyway, during the mini-install on first boot, Windows will automatically resize the filesystem to fill the partition it's on. Because of that feature, Dell only needs one image for all HD sizes, and it can be ridiculously small. The smaller the better, in fact, so that it takes less to write that image to all 8 billion of the HDs they ship. Although I'm quite sure they have specialized hardware and software for this, it still takes time to write out the OS image, and 2GB for Vista is four times longer that 500MB for XP.
A friend just bought a new Compaq notebook with Vista (home basic) and 512MB of RAM. It was dog slow, especially booting up, so I had him add RAM. Still slow as hell with 1.5GB.
This thing has a Sempron processor, but c'mon. I've never seen a speed issue on Windows that couldn't be fixed by throwing RAM at it... until now.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...