About a year ago, we posted a newsletter regarding the then-brand-new Windows Vista operating system. We advised a cautious approach to Vista during its initial release period, and provided links for more information (please see that newsletter for more details). Many others took the same approach, to the point where hardware vendors who had stopped offering XP on new computers had to begin offering it again to satisfy customer demand.
A year later, many businesses are moving to Windows Vista, but many still are not. However, the choice will soon no longer be available; this spring, Microsoft will cut off sales of Windows XP, and only Vista will be available. Already, many of the computer vendors who continued to offer XP on many of their models in 2007 are cutting down the number of models on which they offer XP.
If you haven't yet started to prepare for having Vista systems in your business, it's time to begin. Listed below are some things to consider. We would be happy to assist you with planning and implementing Vista in your environment; please contact us for more details.
Vista has much higher hardware requirements, both as a minimum requirement and as a recommended configuration, than XP. If you are planning on upgrading existing PCs with Vista, you should run Microsoft's Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor on those PCs to evaluate whether they are suitable for running Vista. If you are buying new PCs which come with Vista preinstalled, they should meet the minimum requirements, but if you have the option to increase memory above the base configuration for the computer model you're considering, it would be a good investment to make.
Windows XP was available in a handful of different versions; two of the most common were Home Edition and Professional Edition. Vista is available in several versions, which are detailed on this page on Microsoft's site. We would advise avoiding Basic if possible, just as we advised avoiding XP Home, for business use. Home Premium and Business are both suitable for most tasks for many small or medium businesses. Ultimate is the safest choice in that it includes all features, but may be overkill for most users; Business will typically do everything that most business users need, and Home Premium will typically do everything that most home users need.
In general, yes. If you are doing an in-place upgrade (installing Vista over top of a system which already has XP installed), your apps will usually work just fine, particularly if you're running reasonably recent versions of those apps. If you are starting with a brand new installation of Vista, you will have to reinstall your applications, and while most of them will install properly, there may be some which will run into installation problems (and, again, this will be more frequent with outdated versions of applications).
Whether or not your applications will be officially supported by their vendors is a different issue. If you have any mission-critical applications, it would be wise to check their support status before upgrading. You may need to upgrade to a more recent version of the application, or install a patch from the vendor, in order for it to be supported on Vista.
One category of application which is more likely to have problems is anything system-related: anti-virus programs, system maintenance utilities, backup programs, and other programs which have to deal with the internals of Windows in order to do their job. This sort of application is likely to require an upgrade in order to work at all with Vista.
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