buying new machines...

[taxpayer]

Just curious if I could get a few opinions on which O/S I should get for some new business office machines I plan to buy. These machines will be for a CPA office, so primarily Office applications, tax prep software, etc - no gaming, photo/movie editing, etc. XP has worked fine for our older machines, but I don't want to get behind the curve if we need to move to Vista.

Thanks in advance.

 

[mechBgon]

Run the Vista Upgrade Advisor and see if the intended software is OK on Vista. If so, I'd get Vista Business for OS-security reasons. The image-based backup capability could be useful too.

Tangentially... non-Admin user accounts are more practical on Vista thanks to UAC. Software Restriction Policy is worth checking out, too. If the office ends up getting poor-quality employees who want to surf YouTube and MySpace all day, you can also use Anytime Upgrade to move up from Business to Ultimate, which gives you the parental-controls option so you can stipulate precisely what websites they may go to.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
Run the Vista Upgrade Advisor and see if the intended software is OK on Vista. If so, I'd get Vista Business for OS-security reasons. The image-based backup capability could be useful too.

Tangentially... non-Admin user accounts are more practical on Vista thanks to UAC. Software Restriction Policy is worth checking out, too. If the office ends up getting poor-quality employees who want to surf YouTube and MySpace all day, you can also use Anytime Upgrade to move up from Business to Ultimate, which gives you the parental-controls option so you can stipulate precisely what websites they may go to.

Indeed. For office applications, Vista will be just fine.

However, I *highly* recommend that you outfit the systems with no less than 1GB of RAM. Anything more may be superfluous, but running Vista on 512mb is not optimal.

 

[Brazen]

Personally, I would order them with Vista and reinstall them XP. If you are comfortable with XP, then stick with it until you are comfortable with Vista. Get yourself a test machine you can put Vista on and use it yourself. We won't move our users to Vista until a few of us in IT have used it on our workstations for a while, just like we did with XP.