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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.'"
"We are not here to promote Microsoft and tell people they should buy it. We can show them the advantages of Vista and what they need to put in place to begin to move across. "
"Vista is big and complex and there is a lot to it. It requires a lot of testing. You can't just shut off XP on Friday and start Vista on Monday morning. There will be training. There are things to learn."
and then..
"However, he still thinks that business should go ahead with the migration and not wait for Microsoft to release its first service pack." He wants clients to upgrade to Vista, buy new hardware AND not blame Dell if any thing goes wrong.
Or is it a hedge against a rush of demand with supply failing causing clients to go to other sources than Dell? Imagine you've got 1000000 computers and 2000000 sticks of 512MB RAM. Then comes Vista. That's an oversimplification, but I believe it's also quite valid. It would be better to stagger the upgrades than lose clients to other vendors that might have the supplies to serve demands faster.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
By giving an advice which is not intended to generate more sales in the short term, Dell just boosted their credibility with the CEO's, CIO's, CTO's and other non-technical people who'll decide which brand to buy the next time they need to upgrade their 10,000+ PC's. ...Unless they get IBM or MS size, in which case dishonesty isn't punished because people will buy from them no matter what.
The nice thing about big businesses like Dell, is that they have a lot to lose; keeps them at a certain level of honesty.
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While Fitzgerald accepted that some business are holding back from migrating to Vista, he denied that there is a widespread feeling that it is better to wait for Service Pack 1. "I have heard that, and I don't buy it," Fitzgerald said. "It used to be a thing people did, and it might have been the case with, say, Windows 2000, but not now."
I would disagree. My company's IT department waited until they felt that IE7 was stable and patched enough for a rollout to start offering it. Most of the "techies" that I know think the same thing about Vista. That the really big reasons for not upgrading will be fixed after SP1.
Speedy thing goes in; speedy thing comes out.
But by '2GB image' does it mean deploying a new Ghost image for machine upgrades or builds? And would desktops be deployed in place across an office network or on a dedicated replication network? I would say that that is a logistics problem - the greater problem is the migration training.
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.
Why do they even want to upgrade?
I'm on XP Pro and I have absolutely no desire or see any reason to upgrade to Vista. And from what I've seen so far about Vista, my next hardware purchase will not have Vista on it.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I'm hard-pressed to think of ANY reason for companies to "upgrade" to Vista.
What does it offer to businesses? The improved security is irrelevant in a corporate environment, because companies have everything locked-down pretty tightly already.
Beyond that, there isn't much Vista does better than XP. At some point, businesses will HAVE to upgrade, of course, but didn't Microsoft say that Vista's successor is only 2 years away? That's not a very long time. I imagine most businesses are just going to stick with XP until they just can't make it work on new hardware anymore.
Microsoft reached a plateau with Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It's going to be harder and harder for them to convince people they need a new operating system.
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'll just stick it in my gmail account, and mail a copy to everyone in my org. The Exchange Server shouldn't have a problem with that...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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
By the time Microsoft stops supporting XP, the costs for hardware will probably have dropped to the point where Vista capable hardware is affordable.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Now that Michael Dell is back at the helm, I [hopefully] believe we're seeing a trend of recovery of the respect Dell once commanded. By laying out the facts as they see it, they are helping their customers make better decisions. The respect and loyalty of their customers was once a very strong asset to the company, but at some point in the past, they started squandering that asset by outsourcing support and all sorts of shenanigans that were once the repertoire of their competition. But once Dell started playing the competition's game instead of their own, they started to lose.
I see this as indication that they are reversing course on this and going back to what worked for them in the past... earning customer respect and loyalty.
Praytell why a CIO would be looking at a home and home office computer page?
Dell doesn't offer Ubuntu for corporate customers, but they have offered RHEL for quite some time, and don't make the insinuation you pointed out. However, on a 'home and home office' page, this is very important to do, as you can't expect Joe Blow to just know Ubuntu from anything else.
Imagine you've got 1000000 computers and 2000000 sticks of 512MB RAM. Then comes Vista.
.but it would be a one-time investment, and one single learning curve.
That's a million PCs. With the amount of money required to license and maintain the beast called Vista on a million PCs, I'd rather pay RedHat or Canonical to give me a customised OS for the lot - and switch over to Web-based apps. Yes, it's a big ask...
By the time it takes to get a million users get trained on UAC, IE7, Office 2007 and the support guys figure out how to get these running... the CIO could confdently move to Phase 2 with Linux-based web services, CRM, Business Intelligence etc. The army of MCSEs can be sent to Dell to support unfortunate CIOs stuck with Vista.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
...for companies when Microsoft stops supporting XP? Nothing. Just because M$ stops its support, does NOT mean the OS will stop in its tracks. Companies are still successfully using DOS, Win 3.1, Win 95 and Win 98. These OSes have long been out of support, but in each of their own cases, the task they are accomplishing is probably still be accomplished just as effectively.Bearded Dragon
Ubuntu is a very nice OS. The problem is with stuff that doesn't work. Most stuff you buy right out of the box will work on XP and might work on Vista if you're lucky :) Of course in one year everything will probably work on Vista that you can buy off the shelf. The problem stays the same with Ubuntu that reverse-engineered drivers may or may not work. When I installed Ubuntu I had hardware that had some user-created drivers which I selected and they didn't work. Until big companies care enough to make sure all their devices ship with official drivers there's going to be problems getting the masses to look at stuff like Ubuntu.
From TFA: "he denied that there is a widespread feeling that it is better to wait for Service Pack 1"
I'm not sure who might be saying that they are not waiting for a service pack before Vista deployment for their business. It's certainly none of the people I've been speaking with. Due to the number of problems with application compatibility, the problems with Vista itself, and the nearly non-existant benefit to my business that Vista would provide, I will be waiting for SP1. At the time that SP1 is released, more time will have passed so that our application vendors will have re-written or updated their code to match Vista's changes. We'll also have less of an expenditure for new equipment to meet Vista's hungry requirements since we're constantly retiring older computers and purchasing nearly top-level systems to replace them. We will _not_ be transitioning to gain access to any new "features" that Vista provides, rather, we will transition because we can no longer buy computers with XP installed. Even though Vista provides some positive enhancements to application/OS separation, we have found that user education is vastly superior to feel-good allow/deny prompts that an uneducated user will botch every time. It's more work, sure, and would be a significant effort with a company larger than our 90+users, but the savings come in time. The "trusted computing" and DRM features within Vista allow _much_ greater control of the computer to be given to the software vendor than any reasonable sysadmin would be comfortable with. Due to these concerns and others, my company has been exploring a move for all users to Linux and MacOS. I know of several other 100+ employee local companies that are doing the same.
-write unit tests, or else.
Vista capable hardware isn't expensive and I'm baffled why people keep saying this.
/use/ Aero on any of the other machines.
Machines I have that have Vista on them:
4+ year old gaming rig: Athlon 2Ghz, 1.5GB RAM, sound blaster, ATI Radeon 9600, small hard drive. Today's cost is about $400 for a whole unit from online retailers.
3 year old work laptop (Dell Latitude): Pentium M 1.7Ghz, 2GB RAM, bad video, bad sound, small and slow hard drive. Cost $1800 new (or thereabouts).
0 year old wife's PC: Core 2 Duo 2.13Ghz, 2GB RAM, on-board sound, old Nvidia 7950, small hard drive. Cost $600 from NewEgg and I could have gone with a $80 video card instead of reusing an old 7950 I had.
0 year old business PC from Dell: Core 2 Duo 2.13Ghz, 2GB RAM, low-quality dedicated Radeon video card, big hard drive. Cost a bit over $700.
Every one of those machines is "affordable". Two are from Dell. All machines except the laptop run every feature of Windows Vista Ultimate. The only feature the laptop doesn't have is Aero and I have yet to actually
That said, the article has nothing to do with the hardware cost of running Vista. It mentions hardware once only in terms of the size of IMAGES needed to install Vista in a business setting. The other part has to do with training users and testing that existing applications work.
-- What did Spock find in Kirk's toilet? The captain's log.
The post was meant to be funny right?
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
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...