Microsoft’s Windows Vista has been available for volume customers since November, but it seems most firms are waiting until their next PC refresh cycle before upgrading to the new platform.

For businesses looking to take the plunge sooner rather than later, a variety of systems will be made available with Vista pre-installed, following the 30 January general release of the operating system. 

However, not all PC builders are rushing to make Vista immediately available. For this article we looked at three business desktops described as “Vista-ready” by the vendors, but none was delivered with the new operating system installed.

While Vista is more demanding in hardware requirements than Windows XP, it is still within the capabilities of most modern PCs. Organisations need not fear they will have to purchase workstation-class boxes in order for employees to run Vista. For example, we tested beta versions of Vista on a Fujitsu-Siemens Esprimo, a 3GHz Pentium 4 desktop with 512MB memory.

Vista’s functionality scales with the capabilities of the hardware. For basic functionality, a PC needs at least an 800MHz processor, 512MB of memory, and graphics compatible with Microsoft’s Direct X 9 API. Most business PCs purchased within the past three years should already exceed this.

For Vista’s advanced features such as the Aero user interface with its translucency, systems must exceed the Vista Premium Ready PC specifications of a 1GHz processor, 1GB memory, and graphics compatible with the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) capable of displaying 32bit colour.

Vista features a built-in assessment tool that returns a Windows Experience Index (WEI) for each system. PCs need an overall WEI score of at least 3.0 to enable premium features such as Aero, and this is determined by the lowest subsystem score. In tests, only the HP system achieved this, because it had sufficient memory available.

Overall, we found little other than this to choose between the three systems. Acer’s Veriton 1000 is the most compact, Lenovo’s ThinkCentre A60 has the best expansion potential, while the HP Compaq dc5700 showed the best performance. System prices do not include a monitor.

> Read on for the first review