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October 29, 2008

10 Reasons Not to Deploy Windows Vista

With these irritating problems, why would any company make the switch?
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Executive Summary: Upgrading computer operating systems (OSs) has to make business sense, and many companies find too many problems with Microsoft's Windows Vista to make it worthwhile. Vista usually requires expensive hardware upgrades if not new hardware, and legacy applications generally need to be upgraded and in some cases simply won't work. Training costs, excessive boot times, and laptop performance problems all contribute to a limited payoff in productivity when upgrading to Vista.

With a weak economy, businesses need to do more with less. When it comes time to consider upgrading a Windows XP environment to Windows Vista, many companies are choosing not to. Ultimately, upgrading has to make business sense, and many companies find the cost to upgrade outweighs any benefits they receive. Here are my top 10 reasons why companies are staying away from Vista.

1. Vista requires new hardware or significant hardware upgrades. To get acceptable performance on Vista, you’re probably looking at significant hardware upgrades, if not a new computer. In my work environment, we’ve found the minimum requirement for a Vista desktop is 2GB of memory, a dualcore processor, 80GB hard disk drive, and a video card with at least 256MB of VRAM. For most users, these specs mean getting a new computer because upgrading an existing system isn’t cost effective. . . .


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Reader Comments
"Vista installs the patch, reboots, runs another process to complete the patch installation, then reboots again before you can use your computer."

The only time I've seen this is with SP1; all other patches install with only one reboot.


"Windows XP works well"
So does Windows 3.1 / 95 / 2000. For that matter, none of them boot as quickly as MS DOS 6 - maybe we should all have stuck with that?


"Windows 7 isn’t far away"
Windows 7 is essentially Windows Vista R2. If your hardware or software doesn't work with Vista, it won't work with Windows 7.

richard_d November 06, 2008 (Article Rating: )


All the fancy rubbish serves little useful purpose for SMB who are already suffering from the downturn. I advise "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
The substantial cost of further training for my staff (the support team) and the clients' staff is harder to justify.
Vista is, in my opinion, another ME. Dump it, and wait for the next version. Oh! By the way, the upgrade had better be FREE......

gary@informatics.co.nz January 08, 2009 (Article Rating: )


I don't agree with Richard_d, Windows 7 is now running faster than XP and Vista, tests show that it outpaced both previous OS's on slower machines.
Microsoft did refine/trim the new OS to boot faster and run more effeciently.

ezakaria January 09, 2009 (Article Rating: )


I have laptops with both XP Pro and Vista. I found Vista so annoying I installed opensuse 11 Linux on it, making it dual-boot. I found Linux to be intuitive, am already faster on most tasks, and can run most of the Windows apps under wine faster than they run on Vista. If some apps didn't need Windows, I wouldn't run it at all.

ljkramer January 09, 2009 (Article Rating: )


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