Dell Warns of Vista Upgrade Challenges

Mattaburn writes with a story up on ZDNet UK reporting that Dell is warning businesses of the migration challenges that lie ahead as they move to Vista. The article notes what an unusual step it is for a company of Dell's size to be "toning down its sales pitch for Microsoft's Vista operating system" — particularly because "one of the issues the hardware vendor is warning business about is the extra hardware they will need to buy." Quoting: "'They need to be looking at the number of images they will be installing and the size of these images,' said Dell's European client services business manager, Niall Fitzgerald. 'A 2GB image for each user will have a big impact.'"

Migration...

[Jaaay]

The hidden migration problem is with multi-billion dollar companies who you'd assume would update their drivers. When I upgraded to vista I had to use xp drivers for my current model HP laserjet with a workaround I found searching on google. This is the kind of unprofessional stuff that companies wont be doing so waiting probably makes sense because a lot of equipment you can buy now brand new still has no drivers.

Re:so what will this mean...

[j.sanchez1]

According to this [microsoft.com], MS will continue to support XP until April 8, 2014. I'm sure most companies will be into Vista long before that date comes.

A sysadmins POV

[Shadowruni]

I played with Vista in a production capacity and I'll only move at gunpoint. Here's why:

I must use a server for administrative work. (yes, I know I can use registry tricks to make ADUC work but I shouldn't have to)

I can't run multiple monitors on my existing hardware that's certified for Vista, using the recommended drivers, configed the way MS said to.

I can't easily change the NIC binding order.

The sidebar thingy moves on it's own.

Eats my notebook's battery like Pez.

Decides my network is a new one that it's never seen before at random... hence network number 12!

This is just what I could think of in 10 seconds.

It's not a bad try but I see this as the ME of XP. I'll move when I have no choice... but at this point we're simply buying machines without OS and imaging or wiping them. We don't HAVE to upgrade and I'm not planning to for a REALLY REALLY REAAAAAALLLLY long time.

Re:I'm not familiar with Windows deployment

[BKX]

Sort of. You see, Dell makes one installation, updates it, and installs they're crapware. Then they sysprep it (with the appropriate answer file) and reboot into some other OS (Linux, maybe, since it has the tools to deal with this. It could be Windows based as well, like BartPE or even some bootable form of partition magic. It could be something highly modified but I doubt it. They rarely have to do this, so I'm quite sure that they only have a couple of people who can, and those people probably don't care so much about optimizing the procedure. It really doesn't matter, anyway.) In this alternative environment, they shrink down their clean, sysprepped image to as small as it can get. This is the image they put out on every hard disk they ship. The only thing that's differs between shipped disks is the partition table between hard disk sizes.

Anyway, during the mini-install on first boot, Windows will automatically resize the filesystem to fill the partition it's on. Because of that feature, Dell only needs one image for all HD sizes, and it can be ridiculously small. The smaller the better, in fact, so that it takes less to write that image to all 8 billion of the HDs they ship. Although I'm quite sure they have specialized hardware and software for this, it still takes time to write out the OS image, and 2GB for Vista is four times longer that 500MB for XP.

You mean HP?

[brunes69]

Actually HP is now the #1 computer maker. They surpassed Dell in 2006.

http://www.cio-today.com/news/Strategy-Shift-Gives -HP-Lead-over-Dell/story.xhtml?story_id=12300BCZCB J9 [cio-today.com]

http://www.courant.com/business/hc-ymleckey0624.ar tjun24,0,4681941.story?coll=hc-headlines-business [courant.com]

Re:Welcome this!!!

[Jaaay]

Ubuntu is a very nice OS. The problem is with stuff that doesn't work. Most stuff you buy right out of the box will work on XP and might work on Vista if you're lucky :) Of course in one year everything will probably work on Vista that you can buy off the shelf. The problem stays the same with Ubuntu that reverse-engineered drivers may or may not work. When I installed Ubuntu I had hardware that had some user-created drivers which I selected and they didn't work. Until big companies care enough to make sure all their devices ship with official drivers there's going to be problems getting the masses to look at stuff like Ubuntu.

Re:so what will this mean...

[asills]

Vista capable hardware isn't expensive and I'm baffled why people keep saying this.

Machines I have that have Vista on them:

4+ year old gaming rig: Athlon 2Ghz, 1.5GB RAM, sound blaster, ATI Radeon 9600, small hard drive. Today's cost is about $400 for a whole unit from online retailers.
3 year old work laptop (Dell Latitude): Pentium M 1.7Ghz, 2GB RAM, bad video, bad sound, small and slow hard drive. Cost $1800 new (or thereabouts).
0 year old wife's PC: Core 2 Duo 2.13Ghz, 2GB RAM, on-board sound, old Nvidia 7950, small hard drive. Cost $600 from NewEgg and I could have gone with a $80 video card instead of reusing an old 7950 I had.
0 year old business PC from Dell: Core 2 Duo 2.13Ghz, 2GB RAM, low-quality dedicated Radeon video card, big hard drive. Cost a bit over $700.

Every one of those machines is "affordable". Two are from Dell. All machines except the laptop run every feature of Windows Vista Ultimate. The only feature the laptop doesn't have is Aero and I have yet to actually /use/ Aero on any of the other machines.

That said, the article has nothing to do with the hardware cost of running Vista. It mentions hardware once only in terms of the size of IMAGES needed to install Vista in a business setting. The other part has to do with training users and testing that existing applications work.

RAM isn't enough

[Rob Y.]

A friend just bought a new Compaq notebook with Vista (home basic) and 512MB of RAM. It was dog slow, especially booting up, so I had him add RAM. Still slow as hell with 1.5GB.

This thing has a Sempron processor, but c'mon. I've never seen a speed issue on Windows that couldn't be fixed by throwing RAM at it... until now.

Re:RAM isn't enough

[ryanov]

Same deal -- I know a friend who bought a Compaq laptop with Vista on it... he was telling me over the phone that his computer was acting up and he couldn't e-mail me the file 'cuz his computer was running too slowly... here I thought he had some old clunker. No, this is a brand new PC running the OS that it came with, the opened box still sitting in the same room. Since when have companies been shipping computers that are slow when they come out of the box?

Re:so what will this mean...

[quanticle]

1) After December XP not available for sale (volumne license folks may be exempt)

Why would you be purchasing new XP licenses. If one of your machines dies, you can use its license on the next machine. At worst, you'd have to call Microsoft and explain. If you have a volume license, you don't even need to call MS, you just install XP on the new box.

2) Drivers for the new hardware you buy may not work on anything prior to vista.

That's not going to happen for a long time. Heck, most of the hardware I come across still has support for Windows 2000. I've even seen stuff in Best Buy with support for Windows 98. In fact, driver issues usually result from upgrading too early (before adequate manufacturer support) rather than too late.

Re:hmmm ...

[SunTzuWarmaster]

I'm sorry, but since when is switching over to Web-based applications a one-time investment and a single learning curve? "Yes I will take one Internet please" "that'll be $100" "Thanks" Something that people seem to forget is that using Web-based applications is not free because it comes with increased bandwidth needs when you are talking about it on a business-scale (which is usally payed for on a month-to-month basis). Also, I feel the need to mention that it is not as if web-based applications and linux-based applications never change. Yes, google office has been the same since the first time I used it, but I would bet my life savings that it will change before the next version of windows comes out. Linux changes all the time, and you have to fight to keep up with it. I'm sorry, I agree with your point that when you cost-compare using existing computers to run Linux (which will likely run faster/better) to buying new computers that run Vista that Linux will win every time. Of course, this has always been the case. The questions are: 1 - when you buy NEW hardware is it worth it to have Vista? 2 - when Vista comes out, is it worth it to upgrade? To spoil the answers, it is almost never worth it to upgrade and it is almost always worth it to have on new hardware. This is why there are getting to be an army of old, functional machines that run linux and new, shiny machines that run Vista (which will eventually switch to Linux after the Vista++ comes out).

2 GB? Try 3 GB+

[jenesais]

The Pre-first-boot Vista Business Ghost v11 images I've taken from Dell OptiPlex 745s, Latitude D620s and D531s are all well over 3 GB. This is with Ghost compression set to the max (-z9). Ghost v11 images from installed systems with Office 2003, a few utilities and one user profile are nearly 5 GB. If anything, the quotes in the article understate the image rollout issue.