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Its time to start changing from Win XP to Windows7

Businesses are finally prying their hands from Microsoft s Windows XP as they warm to Windows 7 .

"Over the years, IT has had a real love affair with XP," said Diane Hagglund, an analyst at Dimensional Research, which surveyed 923 IT professionals about their Windows operating system adoption plans in January. "It was just a great OS. It just worked for them. But that feeling is going away."

In the new study, 40% of the respondents said that theyre worried about the hassles of maintaining the nearly nine-year-old Windows XP as it gets increasingly outdated -- up from 28% in an April 2009 Dimensional survey.

Meanwhile, 60% of the respondents said theyre worried about the cost and overhead of migrating to Windows 7, but that figure is down from 72% last year.

Confidence in Windows 7 has climbed since it shipped. Last April, 67% of those polled said they had concerns about Windows 7, which had not yet been released; this year, only 56% said they did.

"The difference was the release of the operating system, the biggest part of that from hands-on experience," Hagglund said, explaining why some in IT have changed their minds about Windows 7. "Theyre trying it at home, many of them, long before it comes to them professionally, so they know what its like."

This story was originally published in Computerworld.com.

Businesses and individual users should start changing before time catches up with them and support for Windows XP is no longer available.