Half of North American Business PCs Aren't Ready for Vista

 

Vista's stiff hardware requirements leave many PCs in the dark

Even though analysts predict that over 90 million copies of Windows Vista will ship next year -- far greater than the 67 million mark reached by Windows XP at the one year mark -- it might be a bumpy upgrade path for many businesses. Vista pushes PC hardware further than any previous version of Windows. Many business PCs will get stepped over when it comes to upgrades as a result.

Softchoice Research has determined that roughly half of all business PCs in North America won't make the grade when it comes to baseline requirements for Windows Vista. Likewise, only 6% of business PCs meets the baseline requirements for a "Vista Premium" label. eWeek reports:

The inventory data used in the study represents a total of 112,113 desktops from 472 North American organizations in the financial, health care, technology, education and manufacturing sectors... Vista's minimum CPU requirements have increased 243 percent from those of Windows XP, which in turn had a much smaller increase of 75 percent from Windows 2000's CPU requirements.

Vista's stiff system requirements in relation to currently available hardware represent a significant jump over Windows XP and the hardware available when it launched in 2001. "At the time of release 71 percent of the PCs met the system requirements for Windows XP, whereas only 50 percent of the PCs included in this study meet the minimum requirements to run Windows Vista," said Dean Williams of Softchoice.

The poor state of readiness of today's business PCs can be attributed to companies adopting longer cycles between PCs upgrades. Some companies are waiting 5 years or more before significant upgrades or replacements are made to PC inventory. "Most organizations planning to deploy Vista within the next two years will have a PC life cycle that is affected by these factors, which, taken together, present a significant operational and financial stumbling block if not planned for well ahead of time," said Williams.

For those companies that have already planned ahead for a Vista rollout and have made the appropriate hardware upgrades there will still be software/driver compatibility issues to deal with. Companies that haven't taken the plunge to bring their PCs up to par still have plenty of time to work out the hardware/software/driver kinks before Vista gets its secondary boost with Service Pack 1. In fact, surveys show that 33% of businesses will wait six months to one year to adopt Vista, while 27% will wait one to two years (just in time for SP1).

[original post: www.dailytech.com]