There are some things in technology that are common sense. One can appraise some situations easily without scientific studies, but surveys do help in bringing out the true numbers.
Take the Windows XP user base, as an example. Most experts have suggested that small business owners and educational institutes make up a big portion of users that are still running the old operating system, and now a new study shows that budget is the number one concern for these users.
Conducted by an IT firm that goes by the name of Spiceworks, this research shows that many users are still delaying their upgrades to newer, more secure platforms.
No less than 55 percent of the respondents mentioned that money was causing problems in their upgrade decisions, because not only are newer operating systems are fair bit expensive, in many cases they require upgraded and updated hardware.
Think of an old setup, a PC that is a few generations old — it could cause a bit of a problem finding compatible device drivers and new software for it. And that is without even talking about any additional accessories for it.
But the thing, ultimately, is that these users have to upgrade one day or another.
When it came to it, though, only 7 percent said that they were planning to move to Windows 8. The rest are perfectly fine moving to the familiar Windows 7 environment.
All Comments
If educational institutions are still using equipment that came with Windows XP that is a problem. I am not sure how students are even able to get work done or compete with other students. I can almost understand it in public school systems where a lot of systems are donations or the applications students require have really low requirements, but for the most part most places should at least be partially on newer hardware. Honestly if the hardware is not the issue, most end users don’t require older systems. For the most part what you’re doing on the end user or client end is not OS specific. Most of the time it’s the server, administrative, and back end systems that host services or store data that actually have to be on and older OS.