Why I Hate Upgrades

Sometime during this year you'll have the opportunity to upgrade from Windows XP or Windows 2000 (hopefully your computers are not running anything else) to Windows Vista, the next incarnation of Microsoft's ubiquitous operating system. And during roughly the same period, you'll see Microsoft Office 12 come your way regardless of what operating system you're running on, including the Mac OS.

To be fair, honest, and straightforward about it, I simply hate upgrades. My advice is to find your 10-foot pole quickly and use it to fend them off, but sometimes you don't have a choice. My reasons are more numerous and complex than there is room for here, but I can summarize a few, to give you some food for thought.

Operating System Upgrades

Operating system upgrades are a particularly heinous breed, because your machines are not equipped for upgrades. When you bought your PCs they came with some version of Windows and were configured specifically for that operating system, including processor, memory size, disk size and disk types, and even peripheral configurations.

Pushing a new, more demanding operating system onto those systems will almost certainly cause heartaches. The first one will come from the empty spot in your wallet, especially if you commit to upgrading several machines at your company. But leaving that aside, you or someone who does your IT work will have to deal with the installation miseries, and they're almost always big ones.

That's because every PC in your company is different. Despite your best efforts at standardization, every employee has a slightly different software suite on his or her machine, and a slightly different hardware suite as well. They will almost never all work just right or just alike when the machines are upgraded. Well, some of them will, after a bunch of tinkering on someone's part, and sometimes without any tinkering at all. But then you're left with performance problems, because it's almost never the case that an upgraded machine has sufficient processor power, memory, or disk capacity to cope with its new operating system.

Applications Upgrades

Believe it or not, applications upgrades are often trickier than operating systems upgrades, for a couple of reasons. First, no two of your people have the same applications configurations, and they very often have different versions of the same applications. That has a couple of implications.

First, they will need different upgrades, because different versions of the same product need to be upgraded differently. Second, your employees uses may be different, and may not all work after the upgrade. Third, the new versions may have bugs that the old ones did not have. And fourth, interactions between various applications may no longer work smoothly, or work at all.