XP is dead and while I don't think Vista was the flop that people want to make it out to be, it was never able to gain any traction in the business environment. Now, the Windows 7 release is only a week away and many people and organizations are still wondering if Windows 7 is it, or if it's still better to cling to XP. From what I've seen of Windows 7 so far and from the word on the street, it's time to ditch XP and look to upgrade. Ars Technica has a report from Gartner that strongly recommends the move from XP to Windows 7.

Gartner is giving enterprises five suggestions for their Windows computers. The most important one is "don't skip Windows 7." Gartner says Windows 7 is a release that polishes the architectural changes that came with Windows Vista, and polishing releases should never be skipped. Michael Silver, Research VP of Gartner, explains that organizations which skipped Windows 2000 and waited for XP had some problems, but organizations that adopted Windows 2000 and tried to skip Windows XP in order to wait for Vista had a much harder time. Since XP was a polishing release, according to Gartner, the company believes that Microsoft's most recent polishing release should not be skipped. Gartner analysts also note that "it's nearly inevitable for enterprises to move to Windows 7"

The bad news for everyone who stuck it out with XP and avoided Vista is that the upgrade path is going to be more painful. You won't be able to perform a simple upgrade and have your data remain intact. A clean installation of Windows 7 is going to be required and that means having to reinstall applications, and migrate other files and data to the new OS via backups. Microsoft has put together a tutorial that walks through the steps to help you out. However, that doesn't change the fact that it's going to be more tedious to get Windows 7 going on an XP machine. Either way, the hassle will be worth the effort if for no other reason that to get rid of IE 6 once and for all.