Switching to Vista Implies A Huge Financial Effort for Companies

PC users who are thinking to switch to Microsoft's new operating system, recently delayed to 2007, are divided in two categories: those who claim that the current systems run Vista just fine and those who say that without a serious upgrade Vista will only crawl.

But what about the companies who want to leave XP aside and embrace Vista? Apparently, things don't look too good for the juridical entities, because, as Gartner says, half of the systems are not ready for the greatest migration of 2007.

Gartner advises that desktops and notebooks with less than 50 percent of their useful life should not be upgraded to match Vista's requirements. Analysts say that financially speaking, it is more efficient to purchase new computers.

One of Vista's greatest problems is the amount of memory, a subject which has spilled a lot of ink, and Gartner's report only confirms the fears of many. In order to run Vista, computers will require at least one 1GB memory, and the companies that will want to use the virtualization feature will require an additional 512MB.

Techweb cites the Gartner report and says that for many organizations, upgrading the memory for one computer costs between $100 and $200.

Gartner's conclusion is that for many large companies, it will not be possible to fully justify the cost of a full forklift migration of all PCs.