3. • As an IT professional I see firsthand the rate at which the software
industry progresses. It is a multi-million dollar a year industry where
companies are competing to see who can produce the next best thing.
While it is interesting in the consumer arena to see new innovations, the
same cannot be said for the corporate arena.
• The purpose of this report is to educate corporate IT departments on the
benefits of maintaining a productive Windows XP environment over
upgrading to Microsoft latest version of its popular windows based
platform, Windows Vista. The idea is to put both products in a head to
head comparison with strong emphasis placed everyday business
processes and the problems that may facilitate. While Vista boost great
features and added value over its predecessor, the question is; will an
untested, unknown product be able to supports an already stable
environment?
4. Materials used:
• For this report I used a Dell Latitude E6400, with an Intel Centrino 2 vPro
processor Clock Speed is 2.4GHz, and it has 3072 of L2 Cache. There was a
total of 2048 GB of memory installed. The network card used was Intel
82567LM Gigabit Network Connection - Packet Scheduler Miniport and
also an Intel Wi-Fi Link 5100 AGN - Packet Scheduler Miniport. The remain
specification were, a Hitachi 150gb hard drive, NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M
512Mb video card and a TSSTcorp DVD+-RW TS-U633A optical drive. To
make the process run much smoother and eliminate the risk of corrupting
my current system state, I installed a piece of software manufactured by
VMware known a virtual workstation. The virtual workstation gives its user
a platform to install and test different applications in a virtual
environment, which for me eliminated 2 risk, one being money and the
other resources.
5. Procedure:
• Once I had the virtual machine installed and configured, I initiated two
individual session and proceeded to install Microsoft XP professional on
one and Microsoft Vista Business on the other. Once I had both operating
systems installed and configured according to Microsoft’s procedure
guidelines for basic installation, I then turned my focus to the configuring
both machine simultaneously for functional use. I am employed by the
Medical College of Georgia as a Client Services support technician where
my primary focus is to setup and configure personal workstations for
employees at MCG. There is a standard setup procedure we have
developed in house which gives users general functionality for all
applications offered under the MCG umbrella. This is the same setup
procedure I choose to follow here because I felt it would give the most
accurate benchmark for both operating systems and also prove my theory
that XP is the more stable of the 2 in a working class environment. Things I
will be focusing on.
6. Continue -
office tool integration and email client compatibility. MCG uses the
Microsoft office suite but does not utilize the Outlook client (email)
instead we use a client developed by Novell known as GroupWise. I will be
looking at network drive access, internet services, printing capabilities and
overall user functionality.
• The first order of business was to install Symantec Anti-Virus software.
Right away I started to see that there were going to be issues where
software was involved because the same version that works for XP does
not guarantee that it will do the same for Vista, Symantec would be the
first to experience that. I went out to Symantec’s website and easily
learned that they do offer a vista version. Next I installed Microsoft Office
2007. This was a pretty basic installation and there didn’t seem to be any
issues when it came to client compatibility, both systems were able to load
the software using the same disc. See figure 1a for a screen shot of the
office loading in Windows Vista environment.
8. Figure 1b shows what office looks like loading on XP.
Figure 1b.
9. Continue-
• So far all the applications installed seem to be working good, the real test
is still to come. I will be installing the Novell client on both machines. To
give a brief summary of what Novell client is for MCG, it is the backbone of
their whole infrastructure. It is how we access shared drives, it is how we
distribute client/software updates and control user access throughout the
entire campus.
• I was able to load Novell without a problem on the XP machine, but ran
into complications on the Vista machine. The 2 machines did not accept
the same software client but I was able to find a Vista version on Novell’s
download site. Even with the appropriate version, I was unsuccessful in
getting the Vista version joined to the domain server, which is what
controls user/computer access to the network. Because of this failure, I
was not able to access shared drives or any network device controlled by
this client such as network printing. I have created a product comparison
chart to show what was and was not compatible in the configuration
10. Software that was tested Windows XP Windows Vista
The OS it was tested on Success/No Success Success/No Success
Symantec Anti-Virus S S*
GroupWise Email S S*
Microsoft Office 2007 S S
GroupWise Messenger S S*
Novell Client S NS**
* Represent secondary install client was used
** Installed with different client but was unable to configure
11. Recommendation:
• Over all many of the applications I installed worked well between the two
with the exception of Novell Client. Although outside of the controlled
environment this would not pose and issue, but since the client is vital to
everyday activities, I would deem this a show stopper and not recommend
it for use.
