You know you’ve been involved in IT too long when you start measuring time not in years but releases of Windows. The release of Microsoft’s latest operating system – originally named Windows 7 – is imminent.
Fish.net takes a look at our hopes and expectations for Vista’s replacement.
Vista was launched in early 2007, but lacked features and functionality that business’ and consumers were crying out for.
Offering improved graphics and a few more gadgets, it lacked compatibility with programs that were already working perfectly well under XP. It was also very resource intensive and not really an upgrade option for a number of machines.
As a result of this the uptake of Vista was poor.
Business Users were soon given the option to downgrade their new PCs back to XP professional. There are now a number of systems that ship from the manufacturer already downgraded.
General Knowledge for the pub quiz on a Thursday Night
For those of you who don’t know where the name comes from, it originates from the Windows NT family of operating systems.
Windows XP was technically version 5.2. Vista is version 6 and so the latest version of Windows is version 7.
What’s new?
Microsoft seems to have taken on-board the feedback from Vista and made an operating system which is compatible with current systems.
They’ve kept their shiny new layout from Vista, including the Network and Sharing Centre, and the new view on the Control Panel. (They’ve also removed the classic view option 
).
The Microsoft Orb is here to stay, and the taskbar has been re-shuffled and updated. The Aero theme is here to stay, and we now have the background playing a slide show of picturesque Microsoft photos.
What about my Programs and Applications that already work under XP?
Microsoft thought about this one and use their Virtual PC technology to provide a method to run individual programs in a compatibility mode. The computer emulates your chosen environment for a selected program and allows it to run thinking it is on an XP or Vista machine.
If the application you want is installed on another machine, Microsoft have introduced an application called RemoteApp to help you out. This allows for a single program to be controlled from another machine – pretty clever.
Is it as resource intensive as Vista?
One of our Windows 7 test systems has been our Acer Aspire One Netbook [see netbook article]. The net book has a low power processor, comparable to an old 1Ghz Celeron mobile and only 1GB of RAM.
This is by no means a powerful testbed, but it has faired up rather well, with speeds similar to those seen when we had XP installed on the same hardware.
Our recommendations
Windows 7 looks like a promising replacement for both Windows XP and Windows Vista, although we wouldn’t advise running out to pre-order a copy now!
For business use we normally recommend waiting until the first service pack is out to ensure it’s been thoroughly tested in the real world and most of the bugs ironed out.
There is no direct upgrade path from XP to 7 without going through Vista. In the past we have seen that upgrades, especially through a number of different versions of Windows aren’t as speedy as clean installs.
An upgrade from XP to Vista to 7 would not only be costy, but may not give you the performance you were expecting. We’ll have to see how it fairs up on our test bed first.
For more information about which version of Microsoft Windows (if indeed any!) would be best suited to your business, contact Fish.Net’s Systems and Networks team.
Tags: compatibility mode, remote app, upgrade, windows, windows 7, windows xp