In the biggest non-surprise of the decade Intel has announced that it will be installing Windows 7 on its employee's computers. Intel wisely skipped Vista but it could have hardly skipped W7 and been part of the Wintel group. Intel may even jump in before the first service pack is released, surprising for any business with a new Microsoft release.

There is a little bit of irony in this decision. One Intel spokesperson pointed to the virtual XP compatibility mode as a backstop. First of all the CPU needs to support Intel's Virtualisation Technology which many Intel multi-core CPUs don't. Then you have to manually turn it on in the BIOS, not a problem for Intel I suspect but still required. Then there are the older PCs that don't support it simply because Intel VT was introduced in 2005.

For the wider business community, it will come down to lifetime expectations from PCs, the last time they bought some and if the improvement gains touted by MS outweigh the upgrade costs. They can also factor in things like security concerns with older machines, power costs, virus issues and so on. In the end it will be a cost benefit exercise. read more

Writer : James Hein on bangkok pos.com

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