Hello!
So you’ve made it over to Intel IT Galaxy to find out more information about why windows 7 would be useful to you. Well, I hope you have, because that’s what we’re going to be looking at.
First off, I’ll give you some background information on myself (and why I can advise you). I’m currently an IT Specialist at Intel in Swindon, studying a degree in computer science at the University of Kent. I’ve been involved in Quality Assurance and Testing on our Windows 7 pilot, and am involved in training other members of staff in how to use this new product, and will be deploying this product in the not too distant future..
So, back on topic, why should your business care about Windows 7? Surely XP, a tried and tested system, is still good enough? Well, yes and no.
One of the major upgrades in the world of computing recently has been the upgrade to ‘dual-core’ or even ‘quad-core’ processors. These provide better performance, allow for better applications to run, and generally just make everything that bit better. If you want to find out more technical information, a decent online search is your friend. Until recently, applications have not been capable of taking control of all the power these cores provide.
Since Windows NT (before XP and Vista), there has been support for ‘Symmetrical Multiprocessing (SMP)’. This provided the basic support for multi-cored computers. As technology changes though, old technologies need to be renewed, and this began with Windows Vista. Software written today contains optimisations that allow them to perform at their best in multi-cored computers (for the technical minded they take advantage of the low-latency and shared-cache that multi-core provide). However, since Vista launched at the start of multi-core’s take over, the support was minimal.
With Windows 7 however, there has been time to take this idea back to the drawing board. This has allowed Microsoft to look at the way they did support in the past, and improve immensely on it. There are a number of benchmarks that show how well this ability has been improved; a quick search on the internet shows this.
So, back to the original question (in perspective of multi-core)... If your business is still running computers built at the dawn of the 21st century (Pentium 3 or 4), then yes, Windows XP may good enough. However, as soon as a hardware upgrade takes place, the advantages Windows 7 provides will become evident.
So, there is one reason that deployment of Windows 7 in your business is worth looking at. Join us at IT galaxy over the next few weeks as we look at even more reasons.