12-31-2008, 05:07 PM
I manage about 200 PCs at 3 different sites in Washington and Illinois. None of the PCs have been significantly updated since Win2k. It has been a replace-as-needed schedule. The Win2k machines all upgraded to XP just fine. My boss asked me to look into installing Vista and was disturbed to find that we'd need to replace nearly 150 machines out of 200. It isn't the cost of Vista that is the obstacle. It is the hardware. I'm sure that we'd do OK with Vista, but it would be a pain for a while. The bigger problem is the hardware. No printer drivers, video drivers, needed software upgrades, etc are all problems that we could work around. But there is no good reason to upgrade if it doesn't really improve anything. It is no more resistant to viruses than XP. It is slower, requires beefier machines, and provides not tangible business benefit. He was not happy about it. I was actually able to provide a better argument for switching to Macs than upgrading to Vista. Linux looked even better because it ran faster on older existing machines, meaning that not only would the user experience improve, but hardware replacement costs would go DOWN. I would actually be able to bring older machines out of retirement and start using them again. For now we've decided to wait until Windows 7, but I think that will probably be skipped too. From what I've read, Windows 7 is just Vista with some UI tweaks.