With Windows Vista having been already released for business customers and on the way to consumers in a little over a month, the PC industry is hoping the operating system will reinvigorate interest in technology. Consumers have become content with the massive amounts of processing power, huge amounts of memory, capacious hard drives and very little to take advantage of that power on a daily basis besides gaming.

According to the Washington Post, the prediction was the PC industry would grow by as much as 10% for 2006. Instead, we saw the two top players in the market, HP and Dell, stumble during the third quarter -- so much in fact that Q3 was the first time since 2002 that PC sales in the United States actually dropped. This is despite aggressive pricing on desktop and notebooks from all major players in the industry.

So with the industry dragging its feet through 2006, many are looking to Vista as the cure-all. The operating system, which will be released to consumers on January 30 will add to the bottom line of companies across the country. The Washington Post reports that "According to a Microsoft-commissioned study by the IDC market research firm, every dollar of Windows revenue translates into $18 in sales for someone else in the U.S. alone."IDC also forecasts that worldwide shipments of Windows Vista are expected to top 90 million units by the end of 2007.

Despite the rosy predictions on Vista shipments for 2007, according to Softchoice Corp., half of North American PCs aren't even up to the task of running Vista. On top of that, many companies often wait a year or so (or at least until the first service pack) before they start employing new versions of Windows from Microsoft to work out issues with software incompatibilities and hardware issues.

So while many companies may benefit from the release of a new Windows operating system, that benefit may be delayed as everyone catches up.