The XP Transition – Feel the Pain

Final Words

The XP transition is going to be a painful one. In fact, the double-whammy of OS and application code bloat could prove to be one of those unplanned “budget busters” that diverts funds away from critical projects and constricts IT spending months into the future. And since the performance loss we observed could not be linked to any specific configuration or tuning error (we used identical hardware and, whenever possible, the same device driver revisions), we must conclude that the phenomena are intrinsic to the OS and that the only viable solution is to upgrade the hardware.

If there’s a moral to the story it’s this: No matter how much vendors try to disguise their real-world system requirements, you never get “something for nothing.” In this case, the price of business productivity “bliss” is an increased appetite for CPU cycles. Veteran IT professionals should already know this (again, it’s an old story), so shame on anyone caught off-guard by a vendor’s misleading and/or unrealistic “system requirements.”

Bottom Line: If you plan to upgrade to Windows XP/Office XP, and if you’ve already qualified new PC platforms based on your experience with Windows 2000/Office 2000, you’ll need to revise your minimum system performance levels upwards by 25-30%. That should give you enough headroom to compensate for the more “portly” XP combination.