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Poll: After a year in the wild are you ready to deploy Windows 7?

Have people really waited to deploy Windows 7? Where were the poll options for the likes of "Ihave already deployed Windows 7 in my organisation"? Surely people aren't stuck in the early naughties with IE6 and Windows XP, or heaven forbid... Vista (or even Windows 2000).

We now have thousands of Windows 7 computers on site, and we're running most as 64-Bit, and on touch-enabled covertable tablet computers (yes, the iPad technology isn't new people - we've had fantastic tablet computers on site since 2003).

The only computers that AREN'T running our W7 x64 image are the non-Core 2 Duo, non-64-Bit systems, which will be retired at the end of this year anyway. Any old hardware has already been upgraded to Windows 7, all new hardware was deployed with Windows 7.

The next phase is to include features from "Windows Live Essentials 2011", "Microsoft Office 2010", and to upgrade to "Microsoft SharePoint 2010" and "Microsoft Exchange Server 2010"... all are scheduled for this year (2010).

Are people that afraid of change that they can't handle a new product until it's one year old. Eeeesh.

Out of circa 90 systems, about 82 are Windows 7, 6 are Vista, and 2 are XP. (Enterprise, x86.) Most users are on Office 2007 SP2 (most users were migrated from XP to Win7 before RTM of Office 2010); growing number are on Office 2010 and only 2 are on Office 2003.

Servers are still 2003, and multiple legacy apps from numerous vendors who dont even support IE8 yet. Looks like living in the stone age for a year or 2 anyways until vendors get up to speed....

I just left a company of over 33,000 employees (each employee had at least one computer, some with two each). They were still running WinXP as well as IE6, which was absolutely terrible. Some of their proprietary applications were 15-20 years old.

I'm no IT guy, but it seemed like a mess to me.

Sounds like a defense plant to me.

and we have no reason to replace our XP hard drive images.

it's sad to admit it but it's true. we're still with XP. the main reason at this point is budget, we can't replace/upgrade our HW to have Win7 in our workstations.
I work for a school district where money is tight and there are other priorities where money goes.
So, maybe in 1 or 2 years we'll be deploying Win7 in all our machines..
Cheers

I also work for a School, albeit a likely better-funded one. We found that our three-year-old hardware was more than capable of running Windows 7 - even the 64-Bit version. We did not need to buy any additional storage, memory, graphics, etc... it all just works. The biggest issue was finding W7x64 drivers for a three-year computer (particularly laptops)... but we did, and it's all been great.

Like I've said in another post, we need to maintain a tight ship with regards to software licensing, version control, etc. As such, we perform (at a minimum) an annual refresh of all software (to include new updates, service packs, etc - even if this require repackaging). It also means adding in any requested/required changes to the SOE (either image or profile), and also means an annual image update process.

As we needed to repackage and test software, and rebuild profiles and disk images... it was just too easy to get Windows 7 up and running rather than try to make Windows XP do what our users needed. In the end, the users are happier, our deployment system is smoother and faster (twice as fast as XP, and much more stable), and it really didn't cost anything more than the normal refresh - other than some additional homework and overtime for me to get it all working.

In our experience, the cost saving in supporting the operating system has made upgrading everything to Win 7 worthwhile. About the only thing we have problems with is Cisco VPN client, and we just run it on a virtual machine.

Perhaps you should move to Edubuntu or some other open source alternative that would be more secure, cost less and you could this without the hardware cost

We upgraded all our machines over 9 months ago using System Center Configuration Manager. Very stable and our users love it. We had an old program that balked, but we put in on a virtual machine and let the users that need it (which is rarely) attached through an RDP client to run it on an xp box.

After all, that's its version number.
We tested it on a couple of PCs, but applications are not running correctly, so we are waiting for our programmers and third party vendors to "convert" or at least make their software compatible with Windows ***6.1***

...with Windows 3.0 -> 3.1?

You're going to be that petulant about it?

Windows 3.1 was a complete overhaul of Windows 3.0 and was considered at the time to be "A major step forward from Windows 3.0".

Isn't that exactly what's going on with Windows 7 (6.1) vs. Windows Vista (6.0)?

Yes... when there is an upgrade the version number changes... what is your point? How do you explain Windows ME?

I perfectly understand that Mac and Linux (at least) prefer to use a numbering scheme based on the version of the software they release, but Windows stopped doing that with the Windows 3.x series. since then they've named their operating systems with a different naming scheme.

I'm not saying he's wrong, just that he was being petulant about it.

Windows XP has an end-of-life of the spring of 2014. Work out what your life-cycle for new hardware is and work backwards. That way you avoid having to do upgrades and you remain on a supported platform.

Chris

So glad you're able to do as you say. The rest of us have to deal with the real world. Enjoy your taunts.

I hope not. No taunts or misinformation. We just got it done by being open-minded, working hard, and not being overly fearful of the cutting edge

We haven't made the upgrade because our POS isn't yet operational on Win7. I'd upgrade in a minute if we had support for the POS.

Any figures?

Is hard to quantify in an education environment, and where only around 50% of the systems are assigned to an individual user (the rest are laboratory and general purpose computer suites).

So far, of the 50% assigned user-base, we've had a reduction of some 80% of malware-based trouble. We've seen a drop of a few thousand support cases due to how-tos, Blue-Screens-of-Death and application memory errors, and other troubleshooting - especially for use with home networks etc. Generally, the users are quite happy - even the ones usually opposed to change.

The fact that our systems are faster to deploy, easier to maintain, have less software issues, and though UAC, less incidents of phishing and other malware attacks... makes it a huge winner in our books.

The time invested in testing the software, rebuilding software packages, building and testing disk images, etc... only worked out to be around 15% more work for a single employee. We already pay annual licensing for Microsoft products, and were able to run Windows 7 on pretty much all our existing hardware - so it really didn't cost us anything more than an XP build would have.

So although I can't provide you with exact figures (or more accurate percentages), I can almost guarantee a huge return on investment.

How much did Microsoft pay you to say this stuff, 7 does not work any better than XP and you DO need much better equipment to run it no matter what anyone of the Microsoft shills here say. End of story.

Have you ever deploy win 7 or use it in any significant way? I'm run win 7 ult x64 on a 3 yr old out of warranty Thinkpad T60. Only upgrade I had done is upgrade to a 100$ solid state hard drive and boy I am happy! Load from scratch to desktop ready in 40s max. Outlook 2007 load in 15 sec. btw, this is typical speed. other users can confirm that. Even with regular hard drive, it is faster and more stable than XP for sure. checkout the facts before malign MS. Yeah, there are Windows groupies but it isn't in this case!

Your hardware is not that old. The corp I work for has several thousand toughbooks with 1.6Ghz single core proc's and 512 MiB Ram. Imagine win7 on them. They do fine for our limited use with xp and will no doubt stay that way for several years to come.
Your comparable came out with more ram and a dual core, now you added a fast hdd, hardly compares.

Your Toughbooks can hold 1.5MB of RAM I believe. So your hardware upgrade cost is about $50 per machine to go from .5 to 1GB. The performance improvement from taking a basic Atom powered netbook from XP to 7 is large. On a one MB netbook I run SQL Server Express, our proprietary app, IE9, Crossloop (VNC remote support software) and Office. It is not as fast as my desktop but the update took it from semi-painful on XP to pleasantly usable on 7. Plus, for your road warriors, hibernation actually works well on 7 and re-connects wi-fi automatically and realiably versus not re-establishing wi-fi about 90% of the time on XP.

My ability to see the benefits of a new system and to make it work in my environment should NOT be confused for "fanboy" status or suggestions that Microsoft pays me (I would truly love to get more money from somewhere - but it isn't happening).

Your inability to see the benefits and make it work is your problem. Perhaps an upgrade isn't for you, and that's fine. Perhaps you're the kind of person that runs "PhotoShop 7.0" still, because it works and you can't justify the upgrade - and good for you. But do you call all the CS5 users "Adobe Fanboys" or claim that if they post anything positive, that they are paid by Adobe?

Your opinion is just that, your opinion. Failing to get "Windows 7" to work is a failing on either the collective you (the workplace, IT staff, etc - maybe due to constraints like time/budget), or a previous bad decision in hardware purchasing that now leaves you incapable of sufficiently running the new version. Let's be honest... unless you went cheap three years ago, just about everything is a Core 2 Duo, 64-Bit compatible, and has at least 1 GB RAM - which can run Windows 7 just fine (although, maybe without "Aero" if you're using older/lower-end video cards).

Claiming that someone must be a fanboy or getting paid by the company the article is about - because they have adopted it and made it work, is pretty funny/stupid.

Every XP machine I have upgraded performs better with Win7. Win7 is easily the best OS they have produced. We encourage people buying our application to go to 64 bit Win7. It is as simple as a Mac with more choice. Win7 is also slightly feminine, just like a Mac.

Actually, I've found that if I switch it from the default Windows Aero color to the gray (or silver) color, that it isn't quite so. As far as being as simple as a Mac, well... not quite so much, in my opinion; not without some additional bits of software.

However, I do agree with the speed issue. My current home Windows machine flies with 64bit Windows 7 (Pro).

All I need to do is solve the issue of why it isn't talking to my network storage drive and I'm all set.

All ATI cards that we have, from old X300 to current HD5670, fail different scenarios.
Intel and Nvidia don't show those issues.
I am clueless. We'll just have to replace them all for Nvidia's.
ATI's support are also ridicules, keeping faulting our other hardware, that has no apparent problems with Nvidia. Things like: HD5xxx cards are PCI Express 2.1 hardware compliant. Your mobos don't support that (Where is compatible PCI-e version specified???). Or the PSU isn't powerful enough, when their basic card keeps crashing while idling and while a more powerful card does not crash once on stressed CPU+GPU, and voltages are accurate.
I just don't get this 100% failure rate. There are not even any similarities between all different PCs, not hardware, not software, except windows vista/7. We're done with their cards.

That is indeed weird. Around 150 of our systems use X300SE cards (crap, I know, but we needed something for the basic student 3D modelling workstations). And the computer I am typing this on now is an Asus notebook with a built-in X1700.

I will admit that that ATI support can be hopeless, and genrally I need to run older vendor-supplied drivers (from HP, Asus, Toshiba, etc) - but can't say that I've seen the issue.

Hopefully you can find a solution and get this working without needing to replace all your cards. That would suck.

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.

I was positive most people can get them to work or ATI would have no business.
I guess many of them are just defective, but even when the first ATI rep believed that that was the case, then a higher ranked rep denied it.
Any idea how to get to someone helpful there?

I do all kinds of things with it, photo editing, gaming, regular office stuff. Not an issue, solid as a rock.

When I see your ability to explain your problem with the 2nd grade communication skills you use, It tells me there is alot more wrong than what you think it is. Example: "ATI's support are also ridicules, keeping faulting our other hardware etc. I can't even begin to understand your problem with this english. Plus your bitching about the hardware problems your experiencing like a 4th grader,...I'm stopping now. I just realized how much this posting is a waste of time. Your boss needs to get a real tech to fill your spot in his dept.

"Plus your bitching about the hardware problems your experiencing like a 4th grader"

your is possessive
you're is the conjugation of "you are"

The correct sentence structure would be "Plus, you're bitching about the hardware problems you're experiencing like a 4th grader."

Personally, I don't care which way you want to write it as I'm not generally that petty, but since you pulled out the petty, I felt you needed to understand the imperfection of your (possessive) own English, which I'm certain is your first language.

For my business, point-of-sale and home PC builds I go with nVidia. The only time I lean towards ATI is for higher end gaming or home theater systems.

I have an ATI 3850 on my main PC. Using Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit, I initially experienced issues a few times per week where the PC would freeze for 1-2 minutes and then recover (no BSOD or reboot) with a message stating the problem had been caused by ATI drivers.

Since installing this card about 8 months ago, ATI has released at least 3 driver updates, each of which reduced the frequency of the problem. Knock on wood, this issue hasn't happened since the latest ATI driver update several weeks ago.

Microsoft stated that, based on automated system problem reports sent by Vista users, over 60% of Vista issues were caused by drivers. Of this 60%, almost 75% involved ATI drivers. The problems were more likely to occur on 64-bit versions versus 32-bit versions. While this doesn't excuse Microsoft making Vista a train wreck it does expose ATI as a guilty party in almost half of Vista OS crashes. This is relevent since ATI uses the same drivers for Vista and 7.

Although checking ATI's website for driver updates may reduce or eliminate existing issues, anyone attempting to upgrade an exisiting PC from XP to 7 should keep ATI's poor driver support in mind. The Windows 7 Compatibility Test won't always catch ATI driver issues. If building or buying a new PC, stick with nVidia unless you require extreme performance and are willing to take the risks.

Thanks for your advice and statistics.
I wasn't blaming Microsoft, but rather the situation. And ATI/AMD.
With Vista our test X300SE did change behavior with driver version, from bad (BSODs) to useless (no OS boot) to bad again, but they have long stopped driver updates for this card, so no cure for Windows 7. With the newer cards, I am not going to wait for them again.

It seems the only reason some vendors update drivers or software is due to losing market share or mass negative publicity in reviews and blogs.

It's time end users and IT professionals turn up the heat. See my reply post "It's time to light a fire under vendors' rear ends" further down in this thread for more on this.

Some of us our not afraid of change at all. We just don't see any advantages to jumping on board with Windows 7 just because everyone else is doing it. Sometimes the masses are just like lemmings in the way they adopt new technology without having a real need for the new features or gadgets they offer. We are a small business that uses our programs and applications, not the operating system, to process and control our daily work flow. So far I have deployed a couple new workstations with Windows 7 to try it out and there has been no big increase, or any increase at all for that matter, in productivity from the employees using them. They still run the same database software and other applications as the rest of our WinXp workstations. If anything there is a decrease in productivity because of the issues we have experienced getting Windows 7 set up in our environment.

This is the same situation we are having. We have not real need to upgrade simple because the masses do. For the most part, an upgrade actually hurts us during the learning curve of the users, when there is no need of it. All our software runs fine on XP (even 2000 for that matter.) We have not run into anything that merits upgrading. I have one desktop that is windows 7 simple because we wanted to judge to see if there was any increased efficiency moving from one platform to another. NONE. We would be better off simply upgrading RAM and processors and moving on.

Both of these are perfectly valid reasons to NOT upgrade. Agreed. I am not saying that everyone needs to rush out and pay for an upgrade license or buy new hardware to support it - hell no! But if you have it, why not deploy it?

And it's not like the masses (in terms of education, health and corporate) are adopting Windows 7 that quickly anyway. Over 66% of the Windows user-base is STILL on Windows XP (according to TR and Gartner, etc). All I am saying is that, if you are willing to do the testing and push a few upgrades here and there, you can achieve Windows 7 deployments quite happily - without waiting a year or more for SP1 or whatever.

In our case, we are licensed under a special "Volume License Agreement" with Microsoft, called "Schools Agreement". This gives us a variety of perks i.e. "Software Assurance", "Enterprise" versions (which allows you to run 4x any product equal or lesser as a virtual machine), Mac and Windows versions of software, upgrade licensing for OSX which allows BootCamp for nothing, etc.

We also pay a minimal annual fee to get this agreement. It works out to be around A$70.00 per workstation for the latest Windows, Office, CALs (inc SharePoint, Exchange, etc). Which when you're looking at just CALs alone, is a huge saving.

So, as we are already paying the money to Microsoft, and had the build process to do anyway - we may as well deploy the new OS. It's worked well for us. It may not for others - but we're happy.

Where I live, there are many governmental departments still using WinXP, Win2000, Outlook 2003, Word 2003 and even IE6. It isn't lack of faith in Win07, IE8 and the rest, it is inertia, lack of money and a great relutance to change anything that works, however barely.
I suppose they *do* update their antimalware detection libraries, but that is about all they change.
They wouldn't do even this much if they thought they could risk it.
It's not that Win07 is novel and risky, it is just that changing *anything* takes enormous time, effort, planning and money. None of which are currently available. Or likely to be for some years.
I can see some places using WinXP long after Microsoft stop supporting it.
Because it works, and keeping it going will cost less than changing.
Microsoft probably won't be happy with that thought.

hard to vote for something on your list when there is no entry for "we have already converted to Windows 7, older machines on 32 bit, newer machines on 64 bit."

Never mind my first job, where I have some decision making influence and the concerns are different. My second job, though, is with a state bureau where there are about 300 computers in the building. There (where I have no IT say) we just received an announcement that in a few weeks the state will be deploying ... wait for it ... VISTA.

Yes. Really. Never mind what I and anyone who works around me started ranting about long-term costs, lost productivity when we bog down a network that would run just fine if we went straight to year-old 7, inelegant pre-releases with different names and more cumbersome code, etc. It doesn't matter. The state hath spoken.

Argh.

Migrating development machines would screw up DLL and OCX references. And you can only upgrade those, not downgrade. So our Dev machines must be the oldest, most out of date machines possible.

As for the analysts, document writers, etc. we are uncertain, some are running Word 2007 now. However I am still working on getting our software to work under Windows 7. I have had good success so far, but Win7 seems crazy unstable in our software. I do not know why.
I am currently building a new Animation control as our old vendor provided one doesn't work on Win7, new date/time picker as the MS one does not work in WIn7, new progress bar for same reason, new listbox, list view, and flexgrid for the same reasons.

but will soon. Fortunately I have only to worry about three machines in my location. Our group is going Win7. I'm on a Vista machine, which sux. Go figure!

Will configure dual boot with VPN to the cloud.

So far, I should only have to reinstall three drivers, to migrate from Vista.

We really can't do it here either. Some of our "medical software" hasn't been certified to work with Windows 7 and probably never will be. Even the software that does run has some issues most notably being our digital X-Ray viewer... it's buggy on IE 7 and IE 8 and the vendor has stopped development. It means we have a lot of software to replace before we can transition to Windows 7.