The problems of running different operating systems within an organisation?

jb7 · 11 Nov 2010 at 18:08

A friend recently asked me about this however I was unable to give a decent answer. Half the company uses XP laptops and the other half uses Vista laptops, do you think that this could cause serious problems? I said it could do but then couldn't think of any actual problems apart from the fact that some programs might not work on XP :confused:

any ideas?

or is it fine to run the two opertating systems?

thanks in advance

Burnsy2023 · 11 Nov 2010 at 18:38

As long as there is application support I don't see many issues arising. Many organisations run a mix of OSs, some good ones may even run multiple platforms such as *nix and Windows in the same environment.

reilly · 11 Nov 2010 at 20:18

As above said, support for older and newer programs is a must if they are also different. Apart from that I cannot think of anyother problems that may arise to the end user.

mod1fied · 11 Nov 2010 at 20:30

We don't have any big issues with compatibility with a mix of XP and Windows 7 machines. Although IMO to keep things simple having all OS's the same makes it easier to maintain.

theheyes · 11 Nov 2010 at 20:36

A mix isn't half as bad as made out in most instances. In theory you should avoid complexity and the added overhead in supporting multiple Windows operating systems, but in reality it's not too much additional trouble as a lot of the management tools support them all.

If you rolled out half Windows and half Linux with a few Macs in for good measure then you'd be creating a problem. (but not insurmountable)

SiriusB · 11 Nov 2010 at 20:49

One of my clients runs a mixture of XP, 7 and OS X. On the whole it is not as complicated as you would expect. The Macs are all confined to the graphics department, so there isn't much crossover in terms of software.

Unfortunately Group Policy doesn't work for them.

Speaking of which, some Group Policy stuff doesn't work on older versions of Windows, but all the most commonly used settings will work. The only inconvenience I have is XP not supporting Powershell for logon scripts

Unless a company has the money to upgrade all their machines at once, you will nearly always have a mix of OS's at some point.

In short, it's not a huge issue as long as you can run all the software you need to do business.