The deployment will cover 10,000 computers and is expected to be completed by the end of the year. The cost of the rollout is covered by an annual service agreement with IBM. Although it's unclear if Defra is the first central government department to commit to a Vista deployment, it is among the early adopters. According to Defra, Vista's power-management features will help reduce the department's carbon footprint while the BitLocker encryption system will boost security.

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