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Subject: Avoiding Vista?

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Roxster

Newbie
Posts:8

14-03-2008 12:57 PM
I've been quite sucessful so far, running an organisation with 70+ PC's / laptops, and keeping them going for much more than the typical three year replacement cycle Mostly XP Pro, running Office 2000, but 1/3 still OK on Windows 2k. ( I was quite sad to pension off my last Windows 95 machine running as mail server) The mighty world of Microsoft runs on, and we now are facing the mammoth upgrade costs of moving to Windows Vista (which cannot run on existing kit in the main) + moves to Office 2007 In my mind it is sensible to keep extending the lives of existing kit, possibly going for the interim upgrade to Office 2003 as a standard, and for new purchases of kit to still to be at Windows XP Pro ( I've already got ready the MS download of how to read Office 2007 file formats inside Office 2000 /2003 , so that if the rest of the world starts to use Office 2007 we won't be cut off. ) Is anyone else out there faced with similar decisions ? - I haven't yet seen any sales pitch which offers my charity any real business benefit from upgrading to chunky software which needs new graphics cards, 500Mb of RAM and chunky Hard disks just to install. We have enough difficulty getting core costs funded without wasting money on un-needed features / additional depreciation costs OK one response would be to convert to Linux + OpenOffice , and while I'm a fan of Freeware, the pain of transferring over the numbers of users & existing applications is a bit daunting + I haven't yet been convinced on Open Source Database applications I would recommend Firefox to anybody, and even Foxit, which is a lighter-weight pdf reader than the standards and bloated Adobe product

Morpheus

Newbie
Posts:8

17-03-2008 10:11 AM
We have a similar set up, about 50 PC's mainly W2k with office XP although some WXP machines. Although we have a good arrangement for licenses via our links to the NHS I have always tried to think about contingency if we ever had to pay. The route I was thinking was thin client / virtulisation. I recently found an open source VMMare equiviliant called Virtialbox from Innotek. Also VMWare offer a free server version. This way you could run say Linux clients yet connect to a virtual Windows Box with your applications on? Or even just those applications e.g. your databases that you didn't want to transfer across. In terms of authentication the only thing I know that says it work across OS is Novell edirectory, thic can authenticate you from Linix or Windows client (apparently). Its been a whilse since I used netware/edirecotry though so I can;t say for sure. In terms of upgrade we aim to keep within 2 current versions e.g. all my 95/98/ME machines have been phased out now Vista has arrived. When the next version of Windows in launched I would look to phase out w2k and so on. The same is true of office. We only upgrade for 1 of 2 reasons. 1) There is a clear benefit / requirement for upgrading. E.g. making use of ribbions in office 2007 (hypothetical!) 2)Software redundancy e.g. some of our legacy applications require a certain OS/Office version installed. If a version came out that required XP, we would have to move in that direction. Or the software becomes obsolete because the current version is at least 2 behind the latest release. Hope this helps.

RedKnight

Posts:9

18-03-2008 10:08 AM
I had a thoroughly miserable time when I installed Vista. At first, it ran really slow despite it being a very high spec machine. Videos wouldn't play at all. It also kept crashing, driving me mad. It steadily improved though but I think that's from downloading a lot of Windows Updates. It's been ok lately. My advice would be let others be the Guinea Pigs. Only buy something when the market's had chance to find all the bugs in the system. Failing that get a Mac! Now that I've got used to Vista, I like it. There are still things that get on my nerves but there's also a lot of things that it has over on XP.

Asterix

Apprentice
Posts:22

19-03-2008 10:25 AM
RedKnight's comments echo those of an article I've read recently on Vista. "Windows XP with SP2 is now a very stable and well developed operating system, and we would recommend staying with this for the foreseeable future until the bugs have been ironed out". We would be interested to hear anyone else's experiences of Vista and how it is being adopted by organisations.

RobJ

Apprentice
Posts:11

20-03-2008 12:28 PM
Yes, I'm just about to purchase a PC with Windows Vista on it and I'm not really looking forward to it. It'll be used by my son for gaming and media and I know that there's sure to be games soon that won't run on XP. But in a work environment I couldn't see the reasoning. I guess the time to change operating systems is just before software upgrades don't work or are not available so that you're not forced into doing it in a hurry. But deciding when that point has been reached takes a bit of judgement. I remember cautioning people about upgrading too quickly to Windows eXPletive when it first came out....

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