The story from June 2008: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/et-tu-intel/
Intel, the giant chip maker and longtime partner of Microsoft, has decided against upgrading the computers of its own 80,000 employees to Microsoft’s Vista operating system, a person with direct knowledge of the company’s plans said. The person, who has been briefed on the situation but requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of Intel’s relationship with Microsoft, said the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that requires costly hardware upgrades to run smoothly. “This isn’t a matter of dissing Microsoft, but Intel information technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista,” the person said.
Intel, the giant chip maker and longtime partner of Microsoft, has decided against upgrading the computers of its own 80,000 employees to Microsoft’s Vista operating system, a person with direct knowledge of the company’s plans said.
The person, who has been briefed on the situation but requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of Intel’s relationship with Microsoft, said the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that requires costly hardware upgrades to run smoothly.
“This isn’t a matter of dissing Microsoft, but Intel information technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista,” the person said.
The story today: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/10/97-percent-of-intel-testers-recommend-windows-7.ars
Following participation in Microsoft's Technical Adopter Program (TAP), Intel IT found that Windows 7 running on PCs with Intel vPro technology delivers the best productivity for our employees & the best managed solution for IT. After three months of trial with over 300 users, 97 percent of our test users would recommend the new OS to peers and Intel IT sees the potential to save $11M over the next three years. Because of improved employee productivity, reduced costs, ease of deployment and enhanced security, Intel IT is rolling out Windows 7 to early adopters this year and enterprise deployments starting early 2010. Authored by John Gonzalez (OS Product Line Manager, Intel IT), this paper describes these benefits and results of Intel's participation in the Windows 7 TAP. In addition to the 97 percent statistic, Intel listed four other key results: •Performance: More responsive for key tasks such as booting and launching productivity applications. •Stability: Fewer users experienced blue screens. •Application Readiness: No remediation required during evaluation; application readiness does not appear to be a roadblock to adoption. •Total Cost of Ownership: Initial estimate of potential USD 11 million net present value.
Following participation in Microsoft's Technical Adopter Program (TAP), Intel IT found that Windows 7 running on PCs with Intel vPro technology delivers the best productivity for our employees & the best managed solution for IT. After three months of trial with over 300 users, 97 percent of our test users would recommend the new OS to peers and Intel IT sees the potential to save $11M over the next three years. Because of improved employee productivity, reduced costs, ease of deployment and enhanced security, Intel IT is rolling out Windows 7 to early adopters this year and enterprise deployments starting early 2010. Authored by John Gonzalez (OS Product Line Manager, Intel IT), this paper describes these benefits and results of Intel's participation in the Windows 7 TAP.
In addition to the 97 percent statistic, Intel listed four other key results:
•Performance: More responsive for key tasks such as booting and launching productivity applications.
•Stability: Fewer users experienced blue screens.
•Application Readiness: No remediation required during evaluation; application readiness does not appear to be a roadblock to adoption.
•Total Cost of Ownership: Initial estimate of potential USD 11 million net present value.
It just does not get any easier than this. Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell (Sysinternals gurus extraordinaire) have just published another amazingly useful (and free!) tool: Disk2vhd, which uses the power of Volume Shadow Copy Service(VSS) to turn your running version of Windows into a .vhd file for use with Virtual PC or Hyper-V. Just start up the tool, tell it which drives you want to convert, give it a destination (which can even be on a network share), and hit “Create”.
Boom. You have a VHD that you can throw at Virtual PC or Hyper-V, load up the integration components, and you have a virtual machine up and running.
You can download it here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
Description of the tool from the site:
Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted). It will create one VHD for each disk on which selected volumes reside. It preserves the partitioning information of the disk, but only copies the data contents for volumes on the disk that are selected. This enables you to capture just system volumes and exclude data volumes, for example. Note: Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB. If you create a VHD from a larger disk it will not be accessible from a Virtual PC VM. To use VHDs produced by Disk2vhd, create a VM with the desired characteristics and add the VHDs to the VM’s configuration as IDE disks. On first boot, a VM booting a captured copy of Windows will detect the VM’s hardware and automatically install drivers, if present in the image. If the required drivers are not present, install them via the Virtual PC or Hyper-V integration components. You can also attach to VHDs using the Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Disk Management or Diskpart utilities. Note: do not attach to VHDs on the same system on which you created them if you plan on booting from them. If you do so, Windows will assign the VHD a new disk signature to avoid a collision with the signature of the VHD’s source disk. Windows references disks in the boot configuration database (BCD) by disk signature, so when that happens Windows booted in a VM will fail to locate the boot disk. Disk2vhd runs Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and higher, including x64 systems. Here’s a screenshot of a copy of a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V system running in a virtual machine on top of the system it was made from:
Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).
It will create one VHD for each disk on which selected volumes reside. It preserves the partitioning information of the disk, but only copies the data contents for volumes on the disk that are selected. This enables you to capture just system volumes and exclude data volumes, for example.
Note: Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB. If you create a VHD from a larger disk it will not be accessible from a Virtual PC VM.
To use VHDs produced by Disk2vhd, create a VM with the desired characteristics and add the VHDs to the VM’s configuration as IDE disks. On first boot, a VM booting a captured copy of Windows will detect the VM’s hardware and automatically install drivers, if present in the image. If the required drivers are not present, install them via the Virtual PC or Hyper-V integration components. You can also attach to VHDs using the Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Disk Management or Diskpart utilities.
Note: do not attach to VHDs on the same system on which you created them if you plan on booting from them. If you do so, Windows will assign the VHD a new disk signature to avoid a collision with the signature of the VHD’s source disk. Windows references disks in the boot configuration database (BCD) by disk signature, so when that happens Windows booted in a VM will fail to locate the boot disk.
Disk2vhd runs Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and higher, including x64 systems.
Here’s a screenshot of a copy of a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V system running in a virtual machine on top of the system it was made from: