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First the poster above was most likely talking about his/her personal PC which cost nowhere near $2000 to migrate to Windows 7. The average cost of a upgrade to Windows 7 for home users will be the cost of a OEM copy of Home Premium since Win 7 uses less resources than Vista and does not require significant upgrades.

Next the second link is the Inquirer and they are hardly a reliable source of information on anything related to technology. The Inquirer is nothing more than a technology gossip rag.

First the poster above was most likely talking about his/her personal PC which cost nowhere near $2000 to migrate to Windows 7. The average cost of a upgrade to Windows 7 for home users will be the cost of a OEM copy of Home Premium since Win 7 uses less resources than Vista and does not require significant upgrades.

Next the second link is the Inquirer and they are hardly a reliable source of information on anything related to technology. The Inquirer is nothing more than a technology gossip rag. "

Why did you snip the links?

Is it because you didn't want people to find out that this estimate of the per-user cost to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 came from Gartner?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner


So this is anything but "technology gossip".

Gartner's estimate:


My bold.

Note also the context: "Gartner urged companies to budget carefully". They are talking about the per-user costs for businesses to upgrade to Windows 7.

Edited 2009-10-23 07:47 UTC

Since fewer than 1% of people (eg. geeks, enthusiasts) actually do upgrades from one OS to another -- and instead get their OS preinstalled when they buy a new machine -- this is a non-issue for the vast majority of people.



First, that estimate is based on a projected cost for businesses, not consumers. Second, businesses can't run XP indefinitely. XP is reaching its end-of-life support timeline and, so, businesses are going to ultimately have to incur some kind of migration cost, regardless of which OS they migrate to. Like everybody else, most businesses get their OSes preinstalled on new machines, and then depreciate those assets over some fixed time period. It's not a question of IF but WHEN they will migrate. Third, future OSes aren't going to make migration costs magically disappear. Fourth, these costs don't factor in the use of virtual machine technology for keeping older applications running.

Edited 2009-10-23 18:59 UTC

My upgrade from Vista to W7 was very smooth. Almost everything worked, and the few things I had to fix were minor. It saved a great amount of time vs. reinstalling from scratch.



This seems improbably high for a home user, as the upgrade cost would be much higher than the cost of replacing their entire computer, printer, and peripherals. If they _did_ replace all their gear to get W7, the benefits are unlikely to be limited to the improvements in W7 itself. That is, because of progress in the industry they will be getting a much faster machine, more capable accessories, etc.

That isn't always necessary though. As an example of low upgrade costs, my own machine is a couple of years old and started life running XP (though admittedly at the very tail end of XP). My printers are about 5y and 7y old and both work fine. My mice are 3-6y old, monitors are 1-4y old, external sound card is 2y old, USB video camera is 3y old, and my joystick is about 5y old. All of that gear, as well as all the internal hardware, work just fine, so there was no additional hardware cost to the upgrade.

Oh... You are a lucky person to think that businesses buy new hardware when the old is "too old".
A lot of businesses buy new hardware if:
the old one is broken
the support costs are too high
Most businesses will go with: "If it works, it works".
The third category is only for IT related businesses, that are the only ones that actually renew their hardware on a regular basis. I work for such a company, our laptops are renewed every 4 years. They will even fix my old computer, if the spare parts have higher cost than a new laptop!

Really? Gartner's broken out the crack pipe again, then, especially in IT environments.

Microsoft provides some nice tools:

1) User State Migration, to backup the profile(s) to a server.
2) Microsoft Deployment Toolkit to customize, image, and deploy sysprep-style images.
3) GPO or SCCM based application deployment.

So, backup the user profiles, wipe and re-image the machine, reinstall the applications automagically, and restore the user profile.

That covers 95% of my user base right there, at about 45 minutes to an hour per machine.

As for home users, I wouldn't recommend upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 anyway. Vista to 7 shouldn't be too bad, but XP is just too wild and unmanaged to make a direct upgrade safe.