Australian company takes Vista SP1 plunge with full-scale rollout

Ian Grayson
Wednesday, 12 March 2008 14:08

Business IT - Technology

Testing by the initial group of 20 users did not identify any application compatibility issues and no changes were required before it was rolled out across the fleet.

The company still has some 350 notebooks running Windows XP, however Stevens says this is not due to issues with Vista but rather issues with Internet Explorer version 6. Some internal line-of-business applications are not compatible with IE version 7, however Vista does not support IE 6. So, until these are ironed out, the second half of the notebook fleet will remain on XP.

Since releasing Vista, Microsoft has attracted significant criticism from many users who claim the recommended hardware specifications are too low to achieve acceptable performance.

Stevens says that getting the OS to run properly needs at least 2 gigabytes of RAM, a “circa 2007 processor” and a hard drive of at least 80 to 100GB. “CPU is one thing, the hard drive is another, but it is RAM that’s really the key,” he says.

When it came to the rollout of SP1 across the notebook fleet, Stevens says the biggest challenge faced was the fact that the upgrade takes around an hour to install itself on each machine. While this does not pose a problem for desktop PCs, which can simply be updated overnight, it was a challenge when it came to mobile workers.

The DiData tech team opted to “drip feed” the upgrade to notebooks when they were connected to the corporate LAN. Users were then notified once the software had been downloaded and could choose a time convenient to them for it to be installed.

Stevens says his company will be able to use the experience gained from the SP1 upgrade to help its customers with the process.

“I spend a lot of time talking to customers and there is no secret that there has been some hesitancy when it comes to deploying Vista,” he says. “With SP1, some of the hesitancy will disappear. We saw the same thing with XP, and I think that was reasonable.”