HANDS ON: Rolling out Windows 7
Windows Vista got such bad press (mostly justified) that small businesses stayed away in droves. Add in the effects of the Global Financial Crisis and many SMBs didn’t just avoid Vista – they delayed upgrading their ageing PC fleets. But with the financial freeze melting and the release of Windows 7, things are starting to move again in the desktop PC small office market.
We recently completed a rollout of 20 new desktops for a client, and the whole process went unbelievably smoothly – compared with previous Windows rollouts we’ve had to endure. For starters, the toolkit of add-on software bits and bobs required to install Windows 7 onto 20 new PCs, then extract the data from the users’ old PCs and migrate them to the new models and integrate them into the domain has shrunk considerably.
In fact, it’s shrunk to zero. You don’t need anything other than what’s on the Windows 7 install DVD supplied by Microsoft. This didn’t elicit gasps of awe and wonder from the install time – instead all we heard were howls of “about frikkin’ time!” But the good news is that the tools are there at last, and you don’t need to hunt down anything extra from the Internet. All you need is a spare USB hard drive, and surely every tech has a few of those in their backpacks?
