Windows 7: When to upgrade

When is the right time to upgrade to Windows 7 and when is it likely to happen across the industry?

By Nicole Kobie, 22 Oct 2009 at 12:05

"Software bugs are par for the course for newly released programs, and operating systems are no exception," John Bogue, an expert with Which? Computing, told the Telegraph.

"Unless you like downloading patches and updates, we recommend waiting a year," he added.

Aside from security and stability, there’s another good reason to not rush right in: costs.

Anyone running XP will likely need to upgrade hardware, and with the economy still struggling, many firms might be well advised to hold off on new capital investments.

What will happen?

It’s hard to say, but the consensus seems to be that Windows 7 will start arriving on corporate computers next year.

A survey by Forrester Research showed that two-thirds of businesses will eventually move to Windows 7, with seven out of 10 skipping Vista. Over half the businesses surveyed said they would be running Windows 7 within a year.

“Because Windows 7 will largely be deployed in line with the natural PC refresh cycle of the business, companywide deployments will take a number of years for most organisations,” Blah blah wrote in the report.

“Today, Windows XP is installed on four out of five new PCs,” the report continued. “When we asked IT professionals to forecast their anticipated new PC deployments within 12 months from now, we discovered that Windows 7 will already be the primary OS deployed, with Windows Vista shrinking from 15 per cent to 10 per cent and Windows XP shrinking from 81 per cent to 34 per cent per cent.”

Ovum analyst Jens Butler agreed that adoption would take off in 2010.

“Expect enterprise uptake and migration programmes to start to appear during the first two quarters of 2010, with greater acceleration once budgets become released on the back of the greenshoots of recovery and when XP support is phased out by Microsoft’s channel partners,” Butler said in a statement.

He added he saw “the Windows 7 launch as an opportunity to undertake some serious housekeeping, especially for organisations that have stuck with XP.”

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Blimey

Is this true? “Today, Windows XP is installed on four out of five new PCs”

By trevor_learoyd on Friday Oct 23

Windows 7 - no drivers for new hardware

I have never been particularly happy with Vista due to the lack of support even a year after launch. Windows 7, so it was claimed, is Vista with some internal rewrites and faster. Drivers should be the same as Vista. I find that many hardware and softwave vendors do not support Vista 64 and have no support for Windows 7. Although you can shoehorn in Vista 64 bit drivers you need access to those first and some install applications tell you that your computer is now inadequate. I have SCSI for CD-RW, DVD-RAM and Scanners. Adaptec have been supporting very old cards with XP and Vista. It has been one of the few companies where I can load Unix and Windows and every new release is ready. They do not support Windows 7 for even current controller cards and many not do so. Vista 64 bit drivers work, but there are no instructions of what you need to do to get the computer up and running again. I am not sure if my DVD-RAM drive works or not as some CDs inserted are not recognised, but others are. The biggest problem was with the motherboard. Intel have new drivers for the onboard sound and network but not for the chip set. The Vista ones work, but you have to install under compatibility mode as Vista SP2. The instructions might be clear to the authors at M$ and Intel but not to the majority of us. Problems I have had with Vista 64 are still there. Applications slowing down and browser and TV cards freezing. Performance at other times exceeds Vista, particularly on file copying. The upgrade became a new install meaning I had to load all the software packages again. On Vista 32 bit Ultimate to Windows 7 Pro upgrade was not possible so I installed on a new partition. Vista and XP before it where slow installing but fast compared to Windows 7. 4 hours on the last section and no idea if it was doing anything or not. I still run old systems (98, 02 spec computers) and still have a need for Win98 as DOS applications run and allow the transfer from old CP/M discs. Some of the hardware needs the older computer as film scanners have SCSI and others only have software running under XP. I'll stick to XP on my laptop as well. I doubt that the four year old laptop has drivers for anything else although if Win7 is faster on Atom processors I might have a gain on the 1.1GHz Pentium M.

By Ip_gfge5146c4406 on Tuesday Oct 27