The Commonwealth Bank of Australia this week said it had examined Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 7 operating system but was yet to formally test the beta version.
(Credit: Renai LeMay/ZDNet.com.au)
"We have reviewed it but not formally tested it in our production environment," a spokesperson said. "As it is still in beta and has not been properly tested it is too early to provide you with our impressions."
Windows 7 is widely expected to be released in the second half of 2009, although Microsoft has not yet set a launch date for it. On 9 January this year, the first official beta of Windows 7 was released to general praise from reviewers and the public.
CommBank, along with other Australian banking giants Westpac, National Australia Bank and ANZ, sidestepped Windows Vista. CommBank currently uses Windows XP Professional for its fleet of 38,000 desktops.
The spokesperson added that CommBank did not have any plans to migrate to the new operating system.
"We continually monitor the software marketplace and make decisions that support our business goals as opposed to when new packages are released," they said.
The bank's approach appears less enthusiastic than its comparably sized public sector counterpart, welfare agency Centrelink, which yesterday revealed to ZDNet.com.au its first impressions of Windows 7 revealed "significant improvement over [the] performance and quality of Vista".
We decided to run the Windows 7 Beta on our Frankstein system which was built out of parts left over from other computers we've had over the last 10 years. The oldest part in this system is the first Cat 5 cable network card we ever had and is about 10 years old. It has a Pentium II processor, 256 MB of RAM, a Soundblaster Live! and a GeForce 2 MX400 in it. The unfortunate fact is that there are no drivers available for Windows 7 for any of that hardware. Despite all this, we are very impressed with how this OS runs the system. We also run Ubunto 8.0 on this system, and Windows 7 almost keeps pace with it.