Windows 7 Saves 43 Hours, or $1,400 Per PC
A good case for business to jump to the newest Windows.
We know from personal experience that Windows 7 is a faster, smoother, smarter and more capable operating system than it predecessors. But now businesses are finding that there may be a worthwhile investment in stepping up to a more modern operating system.
Microsoft blogged about findings published in an IDC whitepaper (sponsored by Microsoft, mind you) that showed that for businesses that use Windows 7, each user saves an average of about 43 hours, or $1,400 total benefit per PC, annually.
Furthermore, researchers at IDC found the payback to companies started just after seven months and a return on investment of 375 percent.
While such lovely and optimistic numbers were well accepted by Microsoft, the main savings thanks to Windows 7 are due to features that we've experienced as well in our enthusiast purposes. Such features include faster reboots, shorter start-up times and other under-the-hood performance upgrades. IT managers also cited fewer software failures as another time and money-saving feature.

Now I'm on an XP station, and I see the difference in my daily job, its slower, longer to find applications & documents.
7 is definitely a winner OS.
Now I'm on an XP station, and I see the difference in my daily job, its slower, longer to find applications & documents.
7 is definitely a winner OS.
I love Windows 7 and try often to convince the boss that we should go to it, but I usually don't like fuzzy statistics either.
My guess is it's simply that you're running the 64bit version with 32bit apps/games. Something still not recommended.
I agree. It's a company study, so best take it with a pinch of salt.
But I must admit, 7 is way better than old XP.....I've never run XP on my current rig, but a friend with an AMD triple can barely run two apps simultaneously on XP but on 7 plays CoD, encodes audio and makes a DVD image at the same time- with out even any frame rate drops.
My organization is currently undergoing a transition from XP to Win7. Initial participants in the transition are "power users" like IT folks and other volunteers (screened for tech competency---geekage req'd). It has not been a smooth transition for users or agency applications and a lot of workarounds have had to be developed.
I can hardly wait (note sarcasm) until we roll out to the rest of the organization. I expect to spend a lot of time helping my seasoned workforce adapt to Win7 and it won't be pretty.
Let the games begin!!!
when was his xp installed? you do know that xp gets slower with time...
+10000000000000000000000
My school of thought is that if I upgraded all the computers in my office to windows 7, it would be a disaster. It may be a big time saver w\ younger computer literate folks... but in my office for example where most of the ladies are in their 40's or past that, it would be a support nightmare.
I'd be stuck wasting half my time trying to train people, and they in turn would lose time because of their computer illiteracy and inability to see how similar windows 7 is to 2000 or xp.
I'm in the same boat. The jump from Office 2003 to 2007 was bad enough. Also - Win 7 deployment BLOWS. There is absolutely no good/supported way to set a default profile on the machine. Everyone gets the same (lame) "oobe" when they log in for the first time. About the only thing you can set to default is the theme. Taskbar/Start menu icons are not retained during the sysprep copy profile stage.
I have never had issues with 32-bit apps/games under Win7 64-bit. Even Vista 64 was fine in that respect.
With 8 gigs of memory on my Vista system and 12 on my Win7 system, 32 bit was not an option.
I to this day have had no issues with Win7(other then one system I built that had a bad stick of ram.) or even vista, but I only got that after the first SP was released.