"We could have waited until our lease expired and just ordered new notebooks with Windows 2000 preinstalled," says Mike Enfield, lead analyst for desktop architecture in the desktop solutions group at Motorola Inc. "But for notebooks, there are huge benefits in migrating away from NT, so we decided to jump right in."

It makes sense to do the upgrade as soon as possible, if you believe it will add to your staff's productivity, says Joe Clabby, VP of platforms and services at Aberdeen Group. "People ignore things like this that are unquantifiable and tend to look at the bottom line," he says. "But, in many cases, that's short-sighted." A notebook upgraded to Windows 2000, he says, may be better prepared to handle new E-business and customer-relationship management software that place heavier loads on systems, loads that could cause a less stable operating system such as Windows NT to buckle.

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