6 Major Factors to Consider Before Upgrading to Vista

Vista is already here and some of us have even started planning an upgrade to Vista. Below is a list of 6 factors that you must consider before you decide to upgrade from your existing operating system to Vista, either for your personal system or your organization.

I don’t intend to draw upon any conclusions in support or against Microsoft Vista. My sole intention of writing this article is to highlight some factors that most of us ignore or overlook when making decisions to upgrade our systems and later regret the decision.

1. Hardware Requirements – Every organization has systems with different hardware configurations depending on who in the office is using it. Developers have different hardware configuration and people in Accounts department have different hardware in their systems. Our home PCs too are either geared for gaming or feature low profile hardware meant for only surfing the web and composing few emails in MS Word. An upgrade to Vista could require significant hardware changes and could prove costlier than buying the license of Vista itself. The minimum hardware requirement for running vista is on a higher side and for organizations with hundreds of computers will require lot of money. Your home PC may also need major hardware upgrade and you might want to first think of your budget before considering an upgrade to Vista.

2. Applications Compatibility – It is highly recommended that you prepare a list of all the applications that people in your organization use for doing their job and it applies to your home PCs as well. These applications could be related to graphics, billing, media publishing, AutoCAD or anything else. You must ensure that your existing applications will work on Vista and upgrading your applications does not require extra investment to upgrade them to Vista compatible releases.

3. Data Backup – If you plan for mass deployment or an upgrade to Vista, I recommend that you also create a plan to backup the data that’s already on those systems before even you roll out Vista. In an event of the upgrade not being successful, you may end up losing data on the systems. It may then require significant amount of time and money to recover data from the failed installations and might end up annoying your users and the management. Consider a pilot deployment on few systems and then deploy batch wise for minimal risk of something like this happening. Prepare a communication plan to let users know about a potential upgrade and ask them to notify the IT department of any situation where legacy applications are still running on one of their systems. For home PCs, backup your data before you consider an upgrade as most of the home users never backup their data.

4. User Acceptance – Are you a non-IT company with lots of users using computers for sales and accounting or something similar? If that’s the case, you will have to think about the time and training costs you might incur to train your employees on Vista. Not everyone has a good learning curve and for people in Sales and Accounting departments, upgrade may not be necessary. You may roll out a survey for non-IT departments with advantages and disadvantages of using Vista and ask for their feedback. How do you use the feedback will depend on what questions you are asking your users but will help you in making a decision on an upgrade.

5. IT Support – Every large organization with several thousands of users, an IT support department or presence of an IT helpdesk is a must. Planning has to be done to train all support personnel who will support Vista related issues and they should ideally be the first batch of people with Vista on their systems. Only after you are confident that IT support personnel can at least handle the basic end user issues related to email, printers, files and folders, mapping network drives, application and driver installation, you should think of rolling out Vista.

6. What is the total Cost? – Calculate the total cost you might incur in buying licenses, upgrading the hardware, training your employees and IT support personnel to see what you will end up paying. Planning an upgrade without considering the cost involved in any one of these could be fatal at a later stage.

I hope this articles helps you in making a right decision. Please share your points that must be considered before upgrading which are not already covered here.