Vista is the latest release of Microsoft Windows for the desktop. It replaces Windows XP, which is now five years old. Vista was made available to larger corporate customers in late 2006 and will be available to the general public on 30 January 2007.
Microsoft has a Web site with information about Vista. This link will open Microsoft's Vista site in a new window.
Probably, at some point in the future, but not right now.
As a general principle, it's not advisable to be among the first to upgrade to a new major release of a software product. Microsoft has earned a reputation over the years for their point-zero releases being rather buggy, but to be fair, the same can be said of many other companies. Vista has been in development for a long time, and was in beta for a substantial time as well, but there are always issues which don't crop up until later. For example, within days of Vista being made available to corporate customers, a security bug was announced; this bug had not been found during internal or beta testing. It is pretty much inevitable that as the product gets installed and used on tens or hundreds of millions of PCs, issues will occur which had not been discovered during testing.
As time goes on, you will find that hardware and software vendors will start to drop support for older versions of Windows, just as Microsoft will (see the section entitled "Will my old Windows version still be supported?" below). So eventually, you will need to upgrade.
Based on the above, we would not recommend upgrading existing machines to Vista, or deploying new machines with Vista into production, until at least later in 2007.
If possible, you should evaluate or pilot Vista prior to rolling it out to your end users. As is common with a new release of Windows, there are changes which will affect users and support staff alike, and you should become familiar with them before your users start asking for support. There may also be compatibility issues with your applications, particularly if your applications are older and designed for much earlier versions of windows. If you have a testing environment, it would be wise to use that environment to test Vista with your existing systems.
Microsoft has a lifecycle support policy which defines what sort of support is available for how long after a product is released and how that support changes after the product is superseded. This link will open Microsoft's support lifecycle policy in another window. For details on the support lifecycle for specific products, click this link (which also opens in a new window) and choose the product for which you want support information.
If you are currently running Windows XP Professional, mainstream support will continue for approximately two more years, followed by five years of extended support. So you have some time to plan your upgrade strategy. If you are running Windows 2000 Professional, mainstream support ended in mid-2005; extended support will end in mid-2010. Microsoft does not promise to release security fixes past the second year of extended support, so XP security patches will be available for at least four more years, but 2000 security patches may cease later this year (Microsoft can, at its discretion, release patches beyond this time).
Vista's hardware requirements are much higher than those of previous versions of Windows. As is common in the software industry, Microsoft provides two different minimum configurations: minimum, and recommended minimum.
Minimum is the level below which the product will not run, or may run but will not likely be stable or usable. This link will open the minimum requirements in a new window. Most new PCs purchased in the last two or three years should meet the minimum requirements. However, we would not recommend running Vista on a machine which only meets the minimum requirements; this will typically be a frustrating experience for users.
Recommended minimum is a more practical minimum; it is the minimum configuration which allows the user to use the full feature set. The "Windows Vista Premium Ready PC" specs on this link, which will open in a new window, represent a recommended minimum system configuration.
Note that these are still essentially minimum requirements, and a user will typically find the experience better on a system which exceeds these requirements. As well, consult the requirements of any major software packages you run to see if they will require additional hardware; for instance, a machine which is to be used to run Photoshop for photo editing will not run well without additional memory, and will also benefit from a CPU which is substantially more powerful than what is required by Vista itself.
As noted above, we do not recommend putting Vista into production at this time. However, given the hardware requirements of Vista, it does not make sense to buy new machines which are not capable of running Vista well, as you will probably want to get a few years' service out of a new PC and there is a good chance that you will be upgrading to Vista before the end of the PC's service life.
At the time of writing, in early January 2007, many hardware vendors are offering new PCs which have Windows XP preinstalled and include a free or low-fee upgrade to Vista when it is released. We believe this is a wise route to take.
Make sure that any new PCs you purchase are designed as Windows Vista Premium Ready, which means that they meet Microsoft's recommended minimum specs. In addition, we would make some further recommendations. We would suggest a dual-core CPU running at 2 GHz or higher. While 1 GB is the minimum memory for Vista Premium Ready PCs, more is better; if at all possible, get 2 GB. And we believe that the 40 GB minimum hard drive is too small; aim for at least 80 GB on a laptop, and higher than that on a desktop, where additional hard drive capacity tends to be less expensive than on laptops.
No, just as there was no server version of Windows XP. However, Microsoft is planning on releasing a new version of Windows for servers later in 2007; this version will replace Windows Server 2003. At this time, official information on this new version is scant. This link will open Microsoft's "Longhorn" FAQ in a new window.
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