How quickly will businesses adopt Vista?

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University of Wisconsin-River Falls IT worker Gary Knigge said that he is in the process of coming up with a rollout strategy for the PCs his department manages. There are a number of considerations on his list, ranging from security to how buggy the operating system proves to be, to when there are people using Vista at home demanding they get to use it at work, too.

"Eventually, there will certainly be key business applications that require Vista," said Knigge, who serves as the college's main software consultant. "These will force the most conservative of IT managers to move to the new operating system."

Knigge said he would expect to start the first Vista installations in May or July of next year, but said that any "technical problems could delay this significantly."

Within a year from the first deployments, Knigge said he would hope to have all Vista-capable machines running the operating system. Completely moving off XP will require as much as three years as the school buys new machines to replace older machines that can't run the new Windows.

Microsoft points to its own experience in adopting Vista as an example of how it can be done. The software maker has about 60,000 machines currently running Vista and expects a total of 90,000 to be up and running within 60 days, Chief Information Officer Ron Markezich told CNET News.com this week.

"My help desk calls are nominal from Vista," Markezich said. "It's totally ready to go."

Microsoft has a total of about 150,000 desktops and laptops in its offices. Many of those machines will move to Vista, but not all. In part, that's because of folks who are working on sustained engineering for Windows XP. But also, Microsoft doesn't plan to upgrade some of its older machines that aren't capable of running Vista.

Markezich said that Microsoft hasn't accelerated its hardware purchase cycle, which typically sees machines replaced every three years. As a result, there are some machines that either wouldn't run Vista or would see performance below that of Windows XP, he said. Those machines will likely stay on the older operating system until they are retired.

In general, Microsoft said that its testing shows that machines with 512MB of memory get somewhat less performance on Vista than on XP, while machines with more than 1GB will get better performance on Vista. Markezich said Microsoft is letting people with 512MB of memory move to Vista.

"They will get slightly worse performance than XP," he said. "Most of our machines internally are a gig or more (of memory)."

CNET News.com's Joris Evers contributed to this report.