Government PCs set for upgrade... to Windows Vista

[broc]

Government PCs set for upgrade... to Windows Vista

 

An exchange in the House of Commons last week revealed that the Parliamentary Information and Communications Technology department (PICT) is set to upgrade on-premise computers from Windows XP to Windows Vista, rather than bringing the systems fully up to date with Windows 7.

 

Nice to see the 'corridors of power' are being conservative with their approach to IT

[gibbo_ap]

haha muppets

[sparkeh]

Hmm there is some sense in that though, Vista has obviously been out a lot longer, tested, patched, fixed etc. Its a safer option.

The other side of the coin is that they upgraded to Win7 and had major problems we would all be saying why did they move such an important infrastructure to a platform that hasn't been around that long.

[torledo]

Hmm there is some sense in that though, Vista has obviously been out a lot longer, tested, patched, fixed etc. Its a safer option.

The other side of the coin is that they upgraded to Win7 and had major problems we would all be saying why did they move such an important infrastructure to a platform that hasn't been around that long.

 

i'd still reckon it makes more sense to wait until after the election.

[somabc]

Gosh and I nearly applied to work there too, PS they are actually upgrading from 2000 to Vista.

[pete]

*wonders how many ludicrously expensive legacy apps get broken in the upgrade*

 

*wonders how much .gov.uk will blow on making said apps work with Vista*

[AXE]

Gosh and I nearly applied to work there too

I did, their online application system was terrible.

[richardp]

I have to agree, for important systems you should always go for the tried and tested option. I used to work with Digital VAX systems running VMS (still available from HP as OpenVMS) in a cluster with a shared storage array, while Microsoft and Novell fought over the workgroup server market. I have to say in the 8 years I worked with VMS it barely had any problems at all and only went down when I shut it down. I believe at the time the Tornado Jet Fighter used a vax/vms system for its weapons or navigation systems (I forget which) and most Nuclear Power Stations used the same. I certainly would feel a damn site more nervous if I found out my local power station was running Microsoft 2008 server and 7 workstations now !!!

 

Although I agree windows 7 is an improvement over vista it is still only newly released and therefore going by past experience more vulnerable and prone to problems. Its very similar to the situation with windows 2000 and windows xp a few years ago.

[powdarrmonkey]

An exchange in the House of Commons last week revealed that the Parliamentary Information and Communications Technology department (PICT) is set to upgrade on-premise computers from Windows XP to Windows Vista, rather than bringing the systems fully up to date with Windows 7.

 

 

As dad just put it: "What, the Vista that even Microsoft themselves are trying their hardest to pretend never happened?"

[AngryTechnician]

When I was working on an MoD-controlled site in 2004, they were in the middle of planning their upgrade from NT4 to Windows 2000. Sounds like they might be on the same sort of schedule here, and have been running 2000 ever since.