Windows 7: Intel faces challenges in Windows 7 migration.

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Intel faces challenges in Windows 7 migration

Yeah, a lot of old apps will break because programming styles and the technology have changed drastically.

A tad late now though !

Fortunately I have no known problems (apart from my games colour issues when Explorer is running).

This is good reading for all those "corporations need to get with the program and upgrade" people who say corporations are too slow to upgrade.

That Intel worked with Microsoft on the OS and is still taking a careful approach should tell you something about arbitrarily updating to an OS without thought.

Upgrading is not as easy and seamless as some would like to believe. There's a lot of thought that goes into these things.

A most practical decision by Intel.

I don’t have problems with my car, but that doesn’t mean high ranking officials can just get in and go. Security, amongst other things come to mind

And the average everyday home user doesn’t require the security and other features required of a large corporation like Intel

That's pretty much every company out there.

yep, and if all that software that breaks on 7 had been coded properly in the first place, this wouldn't be as much a problem.

An upside to this is Intel is jumping on x64, this is a good thing. They are stating to take it more seriously and that means many will follow.

In the business world, it is imperative that upgrades are seamless with no interruption of business communication and services. It is only natural that business are slow to upgrade. Their IT folks want to know for sure that everything will will work - their jobs depend on it.

It is relatively easy for me to try a new OS. If I don't like it or it creates problems, I can roll back. It is certainly not that easy in a business network.

they should have been planning a long time ago, and should have budgeted to upgrade that legacy software. I'm sure whatever old software they run has some better version now.

XP is on extended support already, and support will end in 2014. This makes it even less secure than it already is compared to Windows 7. All has been known for a long time.

Our IT are "testing" Windows 7 this year to see if they use it next year for new PCs. this means (we are on a 3-year PC replacement if budget allows), there will be XP PCs for years to come, even when W8 will be out. When they test it this year, what were they doing last year while I had the RC at home? And i suspect they only will do 32-bit. This brings me with my CAD applications that need 8+ GB in a problem. At home on 8GB Windows 7 64 AutoCAD MEP works flawlessly and fast. At work with the 4 GB XP 32 it crashes, has problem starting and is slow. As long as they pay me by the hour they have the right to make my work as inefficient as they want. :-)
(they gave us Office 2007 this year, so we spend much money on almost outdated software)

change always will hurt and cost money... but once you plan on doing it, and doing it right, it will be more beneficial. Waiting too long doesn't help. It would have taken Intel (and our IT) the same effort last year to investigate that as it does now.

Sure, most IT folks wait for SP1 to roll out Windows 7. But that doesn't mean you could plan before SP1 comes out. Since Windows 7 only has 5 years full and 6-10 years extended support, we only will have 2-3 years of the OS with full support, some of the PCs will get it once Windows 7 goes into extended support (only security patches). that all with the same money and pain as doing it right away.

One concern for corporations is that XP 'downgrades' will only be done through Sept. or Oct. so any new machines coming through will HAVE to have Vista SP1 or better. I do support for a large company, we still use Office 2000, XP SP2 and IE6. They are looking at rolling out Office 2010, XP SP3, IE8 and start with Win 7 on new machines in Sept. or Oct. They have beta builds out for app. testing as we speak, and I'm using their Office 2010 RC package, the Win 7 package isn't production-ready yet. You can bet I'll be using Win 7 as soon as they have a production image out.