Minimum acceptable Windows Experience Index for Office PC

[samdaly]

We are about to start upgrading our 3000 Windows XP PCs to Windows 7. I am concerned that some PCs may not have adequate hardware specifications to run Windows 7 satisfactorily.

If we were to pull in some example PCs from the field and put our Windows 7 build on them, what do you think is the minimum Windows Experience Index score we should accept?

Or is there an alternative benchmark we should look to use?

Many thanks in advance for your advice!

 

[ZionZA]

Windows 7 has better performance than XP

 

[das_stig]

If in your opinion, XP runs ok, then Windows 7 will be fine and you will get a small performance boost from better drivers.

I would upgrade all machines to 4GB of ram and standardise on Windows 7 x64 Pro and create a deployment image, especially if they are all the same model.

Do you know what models you have within the PC estate?

 

[samdaly]

Thanks for your replies. I would think we will use 32bit Win 7 but I will check in to that.

We had also discussed 2GB as a minimum RAM spec. We have 250 PCs with less than 2GB RAM but 2709 with less than 4GB so it would be a huge cost to us to upgrade.

We have 60 models of PC running XP but the majority are varieties of Dell, HP and Fujitsu.

 

[das_stig]

Company I do support for has 5000+ HP's with E7500 cpus and will be going to 4GB and have tested W7x64 Pro and found to run very smoothly and far superior to XP.

It may cost for the memory now, but a good investment for user productivity.

 

[samdaly]

I can only dream of that kind of spec across our estate! I get what you a saying about productivity but a lot of the machines are a few years old already and we would probably be looking forward to when we replace them with thin clients rather than get another few years or so out of them.

 

[das_stig]

Who ever your IT manager is, slap him stupid.

He should be going to the company boss and demand an IT budget to overhaul your systems.

Tell him, you can't be responsible if it all goes tits-up or you have data breach after XP goes EOL and he has to pay the fine and then is forced to do a mass update in a short amount of time and then things go wrong even more.

Sheesh, some companies just deserve to have an IT meltdown.