What operating system should I have installed on my system?

So many people have asked us this question!

The response usually starts with a few questions back to them such as, “What are you doing with your computer?” and “How familiar are you with the system you have now?”

Windows Vista has been out for a while and has suffered from a number of things that make it not friendly especially in business environments. Many, many times we have had to ‘back pedal’  and install XP Pro in business situations.

Home users are usually okay with Vista depending on their applications and the hardware they are using. A lot of these installations need a fair bit of tweaking before the user is happy though.

If a person is using XP and is comfortable with it there is little need to move to Vista especially on older PC’s where hardware is incompatible.

The newest version of Windows, Version 7,  is slated for public release in October 2009 and hopefully it will be all it is hyped to be. It will have an “XP compatibility mode’ so applications will run on it.  Word is this is pretty seamless but we have not tested it ourselves yet.It certainly seems like it will be a vast improvement over Vista.

A client of ours has already said they would be happy to be the ‘guinea pigs” for the new version of Windows but we will still wait until a few months have passed before moving their 16 public kiosk systems to Version 7! Once tested there then we will look at the business workstations and the newest version of their server software (Small Business server).

So, in a nutshell, don’t move to Vista unless you have to. XP is stable with XP Pro being the version of choice. Once the new version is tested and looks stable then go to it if your hardware and applications will be suitable.

Note: An alternative, on some computers, is to install Multiple operating systems (various versions of Windows and/or Linux) by one of two methods: 1 – Dual Boot, or, 2 – Virtual Environments(Servers). We can help you with this if you want to give something a test drive!

Please do contact us if you have any questions on what is best for your business.