Microsoft XP Pro vs. Microsoft Vista

Scott Farris

Mrs. OwensEnglish 1105-Online

Content:

Abstract………………………

Materials………………………….

Procedures………………………...

Results…………………………….

Recommendation………………….

References\Work Cited……………

• 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?

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.

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.

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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.

Figure 1a.

Figure 1b shows what office looks like loading on XP.

Figure 1b.

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• 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

Software that was tested

The OS it was tested on

Windows XP

Success/No Success

Windows Vista

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

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.

References:

• www.novell.com• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938194• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931360• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930903• http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?

command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=windows&articleId=9133382&taxonomyId=125&intsrc=kc_top

• http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/windowsvista/torres_duel.mspx

• http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/xp-vs-vista,1531.html• http://searchenterprisedesktop.techtarget.com/tip/

0,289483,sid192_gci1310591,00.html• PC World Magazine