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October 20, 2009Consider Adding Windows 7
Church offices should benefit from Microsoft’s new operating system.
Ministry Business Services Inc., the church consulting firm I started in the 1980s, began testing Microsoft Corporation’s Windows 7 Professional in January. On Tuesday, MBS announced it adopted Windows 7 Professional as its preferred operating system, and it recommends churches to do the same.
This may surprise some, since the challenges with Microsoft’s Windows Vista, the preceding operating system, have been many. Clarence White, the chief information officer for the Salvation Army’s western territory, even asked me on a recent podcast if MBS really believed in Windows 7 Professional. The answer is yes. I told him it’s almost like Vista was a beta for Windows 7, or that Windows 7 is the first service pack for Vista that really fixes it.
Corporate customers have embraced Windows 7’s release as well. The Gartner Group recently said the operating system is ready (Gartner also recommends a 12- to 18-month integration process, saying earlier this month that organizations should start now), and a recent Softchoice study with ComputerWorld found that 88 percent of corporate PCs are capable of running Windows 7. That means many churches and ministries likely are in a position to upgrade to it as well.
The minimum hardware requirements to run Windows 7 include a 1-gigahertz (1 GHz) or faster processor and 1 gigabyte (1 GB) of RAM. A church that upgrades to Windows 7 Professional will pay about $70 for the charity licensing that Microsoft charges.
MBS also announced it prefers the 64-bit version on all PCs that can run it because it doubles the processing speed of the computer. Think of a school bus. The number of seats determines how many people can be carried in each load. Most of us are running 32-bit software, but 64-bit moves twice as much in each data packet (or load). That means an immediate potential doubling of processing speed.
Nick Nicholaou is president of MBS Inc., a consulting firm focused on church finances, best practices, and computer networks. He also is a consulting editor for Your Church magazine. He blogs at http://ministry-it.blogspot.com.
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