[citation][nom]freggo[/nom]Actually a rather new built and I fail to see the point of having 80+ 'tabs' open.I don't even have that many sites on my regular 'check 'list.We do not buy off the shelf PCs bur do custom builds in house.No overclocking either. If we need that 'extra speed' we get a bigger processor or Graphics card.Win 2k for 32bit and Win XP for 64Bit does just fine I just don't see the point for Vista and glossy interfaces. All company desktops sport the standard dark 'blue' windows desktop.No screen savers (savong what ?) or background images.We have a few XP Boxes mostly for Adobe CS5 (Premiere HD video editing).I don't know -nor care- if any of our systems can play games and most of my employees value their jobs too much to try finding out
Our Servers are running on Win Server 2003 with some rather busy websites. Despite what M$ tries to tell everyone there is nothing in Win Vista or Win 7 that you 'must have'.It's M$ that needs sales to come up with 90,000 paychecks !I understand that some folks love to jazz up their machines and cases; and that's cool.I just look at it from a business aspect.Upgrading 50+ systems is expensive. No, not the OS or even the hardware. But the retraining of the employees and the resulting down times![/citation]
You really shouldn't hold business machines to the same bar as home machines that see more general and entertainment uses. Besides, there are great uses for many tabs being opened. For example, I sometimes have more than 30 tabs with Tom's forum posts that I'm helping out in and when I'm on Newegg designing a system or two, well I can have dozens more from that. Then I can also have a few dozen wiki tabs open on stuff I'm reading on (wiki might not be the best, but it can provide a starting point if you look through the references). That's just scratching the surface. I use all of them, just not always at the exact same time. I shift through the forum tabs several times a day and I go back to the Newegg and Wiki tabs whenever I feel like it, but they are still there. Then there's anything else I'm doing too.
It's simply more convenient and faster than closing and reopening them every time I wan to use them. Some people use even more than I do (I was chatting with a guy that usually has more than 700 tabs open, I didn't bother to ask why). Furthermore, I have all of this whilst other programs are running (a few large archives being extracted, a download or two, etc).
Your machines may be enough for your usage of them, but probably aren't enough for what I do. My laptop is currently starting to show weakness and will need to be replaced, probably with something that has an A8 quad core with 8GB of memory and a 500GB to 750GB hard drive and other moderate parts. I'm not a heavy gamer, but I do occasionally play some Unreal Tournament games and some Command And Conquer or Warcraft 3. None of these are particularly intensive, but I'd like to play at decent settings if I'm replacing my machines.
I see no reason for you to upgrade your systems if they do their job well enough, but even my old XP laptop from 2003 or 2004 that has a P4 @2.4GHz with 256MB DDR can do regular work, especially if I give it an upgrade to 512MB. I don't use Aero or that crap, I have Server 2008r2 x64 running it's native interface. It is more intuitive than anything else Microsoft has and is about as fast as you can get without using older operating systems. Unfortunately, not all of my programs are supported by XP so it's an even easier choice. XP64 has fairly poor driver support compared to XP x32 and Vista/7 x32 so it's not even considered an option for my machines anyway. Windows 2000 isn't any better with current hardware support and it can't use enough memory.
There are nothing in Vista/7 that I must have that isn't in server 2008r2. I don't like to "jazz up" my machines, I go for performance and stability more than anything. Server 2008r2 has awesome multi-core performance compared to any other Windows OS. It is noticeably faster than XP, I tried XP on the same system. Considering that they are business machines, it's not a problem if they can run games or not, but if I want to shoot a few guys and drive off a cliff with a tank, then I want to shoot some guys and drive off a cliff with a tank and I need a decent computer to screw around on like that. Trust me on this, taking a small 6 player map and loading it up with 32 players and going for a free for all is pretty intense with the bots at the maximum difficulty in Unreal Tournament 2004. Like any home user, I like my computer to entertain me on the few occasions I'm craving some digital fun that involves explosions and the like.
For you, would I recommend upgrading? not in the least, it's unnecessary costs when your current stuff works for you. Me? Well, my machines simply aren't wuite enough for some things, so they need to get upgraded. It wouldn't matter if they were running XO, 200, or anything else, they need an upgrade. I refuse to buy/build a system that has Vista or 7 because they waste so many resources.
Even for my laptop, the only interface improvement I have running is clear type to make text more readable. Absolutely nothing else, all other settings like that are at minimums/off. I personally get my system as optimized for my work as possible and don't care for Aero or even default Vista/7 interfaces that waste performance. Server 2008r2's interface is faster than anything Vista/7 has natively and XP's seems inferior, less intuitive.
You might not need or even care for modern machines running a modern, optimized OS, but I do. Server 2008r2 x64 is simply better than XP. Sure, there are some issues, but far less than I have with XP. If only Microsoft thought to include the best of a previous OS instead of abandoning some features, it would be even better. I'll never understand why MS wants to screw some people over with every new release.