I’ve upgraded old XP PCs to Windows 7 and I’ve bought new PCs equipped with Windows 7. Either way I’ve found that it’s not cheap. Now, Gartner, the research company, has worked out just how expensive upgrading to Windows 7 can be for enterprises. In one word, moving to Windows 7 can be described in one word: “Ow!”

Charles Smulders, Gartner’s managing VP believes that “Corporate IT departments typically prefer to migrate PC operating systems (OSs) via hardware attrition, which means bringing in the new OS as they replace hardware through a normal refresh cycle. Microsoft will support Windows XP for four more years. With most migrations not starting until the fourth quarter of 2010 at the earliest, and PC hardware replacement cycles typically running at four to five years, most organizations will not be able to migrate to Windows 7 through usual planned hardware refresh before support for Windows XP ends.”

In other words, Smulders claims you’re going to update faster than you had budgeted for. That presumes, of course, that you’ve budgeted at all for upgrading your desktops. Times are hard and I know many companies where the ‘upgrade’ plan is to run PCs until they break.

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