xp or vista?

I had to instal Word 2007 on the upstairs new PC created by the local PC guru. I hate it! I am so used to 2003, but on the other two PCs I downloaded the software patch to enable 2007 to run in 2003. I deliberatele opted out of installing Vista, and chose XP which is a known quantity however I suspect that Word 2007 is designed to run with Vista and it seems out of place in XP. I use Word all the time and know where everything is...the latest version requires you to seek and find and it seems to have so much you don't necessarily need.

Ooh, now there's a question. I think it depends on what you're doing with your computer.

As a IT Consultant, I despise Vista. I see so many problems that my clients have with it, I really don't like User Access Control (the annoying window that pops up and asks you if you're sure you want to do this and you will need to authenticate yourself to continue). I hate how Vista handles networking - XP's way is so much more straightforward.

And as has already been stated, there (still) are all sorts of compatibility issues with it, and there are devices that will never work with Vista because the manufacturers don't want to develop the drivers.

I don't like the hardware requirements to get Vista to run smoothly, either.

However, it does have some good points, although some of these are down to personal opinion. Some aspects of the interface make it easier to use, and there are some nice features, like large thumbnails when browsing photos in Windows Explorer.

I think for your average Joe who browses the internet, does a bit of word processing, emails, photos and downloads MP3s from iTunes (or wherever!), there's not much in it.

I have found, through my clients, that they get very disappointed with the performance they've found from cheaper PCs. I do have clients who will go to PC World and buy a cheap PC that's not up to the task of running Vista at an acceptable speed, and when combined with the amount of junk that new PCs come with, really makes the whole experience somewhat unsatistfactory.

For techies, one PC I saw was a Pentium Dual Core 1.7, 512Mb RAM, 80Gb HDD, onboard graphics. With Vista Home Premium installed, along with Norton Anti-Virus and a ton of other shareware and trialware programs added in for good measure. It was quite painful.

I bought a new laptop for my father recently - a decent spec HP with a touchscreen. AMD Turion X2 CPU, 2Gb RAM and a 120Gb Hard Drive. It came with Vista and was SLOW. I put XP on there and I have to say that I was honestly VERY surprised by how fast it was! (I've had a few requests for migrating new Vista machines back to XP - it is something I do a fair amount in my line of work.)

On the flipside, if you have a reasonable spec PC, then there's a good chance that Vista will run quite happily on it. At least 2Gb RAM minimum and add a decent graphics card to make the interface look good.

I only know one person who likes Vista, and she really, really likes it.

Personally, I run XP on all my PCs, and when I'm on the road I have a MacBook Pro. I have no plans to touch Vista. It looked SO good on paper, but Microsoft botched the implementation (in my opinion) and released it long before it was due with less than half the features it was supposed to have. In my opinion, this is Windows ME all over again, and I'm waiting with not so baited breath for Windows 7.

On Office, I REALLY like Office 2007. It has one hell of a learning curve coming up from Office 2003, but if you take the time to get used to it and customize it to your requirements, it can be much faster. Tip: make sure your screen resolution is at least 1024x768 otherwise you don't see all of the ribbon (toolbar). If you really can't stand it, then take a look here, but it'll cost you $30 if you like it!

I remember when waiting for the next version of Windows was somewhat exciting... these days I hold my breath and wait for the support calls to come in...

Here's an interesting fact. If your new machine comes with Vista Business or Ultimate, then you have "downgrade rights", which allow you to LEGALLY downgrade to Windows XP without having to purchase an additional license... So once XP disappears from the shelves, it's not the end of the world. And Microsoft will continue to support XP - "mainstream" support will be withdrawn 14-Apr-09, and "extended" support will be withdrawn 8-Apr-14, so there will continue to be security patches (etc) released for a good while yet.

Hehe. '98 first edition was a load of rubbish. '98 second edition was really good when it was set up correctly. Stable, (relatively) fast and a lot of manufacturers continued to sell 98SE once it became apparent just how rubbish ME was.

Likewise!

I know several other people who say the same thing, but for me it's Linux almost all the way (Kubuntu is my current distribution of choice). The one thing I maintain my XP computer for is photo merging as I have two very good windows tools that I have unfortunately yet to see bettered linux (particularly in terms of ease of use and system requirements).

Chris

Well, yes you can turn User Access Control off, but then the Windows Security Center starts complaining instead. And ok, you can turn that off entirely, but then you lose a (debatably) useful tool. Or you can patch it with a registry hack so it doesn't alert you to any UAC problems, but that's not a "five mouse clicks" job...

I hope you're not relying on Microsoft for all your drivers...!

I've been using Vista for a while now and generally thing it's not as bad as some people make it out to be. In my personal experience I've not suffered any major problems with either the desktop or the laptop (both of which were installed with Vista when new) and they are both mid-range machines.

Yes, Vista is probably hampering the performance of them but as I'd not known anything different and they're not slow it doesn't bother me. Had I originally had one running XP and then upgraded it then I daresay the drop in performance would have been noticable. People who buy really cheap new machines and expect top performance are probably always going to be disappointed.

So XP or Vista? Well, I don't think Vista offers all that much over XP aside from the interface for the average user and based on personal experience XP doesn't have any significant benefits over Vista either. For me, given the choice, I would proabably take Vista.

I've never tried a Mac or Linux although I would be interested in doing so. I don't want to commit a whole heap of cash to something I might not like though so the only way it's going to happen is if I can find someone willing to let me play with theirs.

I thought threads on religion were banned ;D

In the average day I'll get to use XP, Vista, various versions of Windows Server, Sun Solaris and maybe some IBM AIX on an especially bad day. I don't consider it to be especially bad, and I think it has come in for a lot of unfair critisism. All operating systems have their problems, just in different ways!

My first impression of Vista was confusion. Imagine coming home one day and someone had changed the location of every single room on your house. So everything kind of looks familier, but wasn't where you expected it to be. To get to your living room you now had to go via the bathroom, that sort of thing. So you will take some time to get used to it after the initial surprise. The same goes for Office 2007, took me long enough to work out the office logo is actually a menu button!

On compatibility: The only issue I've had is that the SD slot is not supported on my Tablet PC. The improvements in the tablet user interface over XP Tablet Edition more than outweigh the minor inconvenience and the longer boot up time though. All the other PC hardware I have are various vintages of hp/Compaq business PCs. No major issues here, but I suspect if you do have a PC made of components from one of the less mainstream OEMs then you probably will want to think twice about upgradeing an old box. There is no excuse for new hardware not to be compatible now though.

The slowest PC I've tried running it on is a PIII 866 with 512MB Compaq AP250 workstation - and it gets a Windows Experience rating of 1.7. Perfectly adequate for web/email/office/ssh/terminal services use. No Aero interface, but that isn't really an issue for me. You only need loads of RAM and a mega fast CPU if you are playing games on your PC, as for XP.

Given identical hardware, Vista will always run slower than XP. The degree depends a lot on the component parts and the driver support. I'm happy to accept a slight reduction in performance on my various PC based machines in return for the better features. Others may not.

I have tried this, as the Gimp is what I use for all the quiz photos. However unless the photos line up very well you have to do all the perspective changes yourself - which for the cityscapes and buildings that make up a large part of what my merges consist of this makes it vastly more time consuming.


Apple shops regularly have training courses on how to use Macs and they're totally free (at least I think they are!) - might be worth having a look at your local Apple shop's (www.apple.com/uk/retail/) website and take a look at the calendar for events.[/quote]

The easiest way to try linux is to order or download a live DVD - just put this in your drive and restart your computer. It will take a short while to boot up (as it has to do everything from the dvd) but once loaded you can do almost everything you can do on an installed system (although some things will be slightly slower). This makes no changes to your system at all, so if you don't like it you haven't lost anything. If you do like it, most live discs are also install discs that will set up a dual boot system. All of this is completely free.

I have 6 PCs in the family. two with Vista and 4 with XP. XP is fine - i can do what i need to, to keep them running happily. The first Vista machine can be a bit slow - could usefully have more memory - it only has 1GB, but the 2nd has 3GB and I've really had to do nothing to it except get rid of all the trial stuff (if that's the word!) that came with it

Vista does look pretty, granted. But given the choice between an OS that looks pretty and one that does what I want it to do with the minimum of fuss (XP or Mac!), I'll go with the latter.

I know that reasoning was used by a lot of Windows 2000 users (myself included) when XP came out. But thankfully XP improved enough, with adequate driver support and some initial stability patches that greatly improved things, so migrating from 2000 became a viable option. And to be honest, once set up with all the programs and games and utilities I install, there wasn't much of a speed difference between them anyway!

I'm holding out for Windows 7. For all its faults, I'm very used to having Windows on my main computer. I do have a MacBook Pro which I absolutely love, and I'm more than familiar with Linux, but my work involves 98% Windows machines... plus, I have a whole bunch of Windows programs that I haven't found Mac or Linux equivalents for, so I'm somewhat tied to Windows, at least for now.

Unfortunately I can't say the same for Vista. Picking up on what adspackman said;



That's a little like being offered a choice of two cars - the same model, except one has a cloth interior, the other has a leather interior, wood trim and a half tonne weight in the boot, and the dealer didn't tell you about the extra weight when you bought it. Wouldn't you be a bit annoyed that you'd bought something that looked pretty but was actually slower? ie, so you're not getting the best out of the PC's hardware?



When I downgraded my hp tablet laptop to XP, the tablet tools were one of the things that I started to miss. With the aid of a few freeware/shareware utilities, it was pretty much there, but Vista's tablet tools are excellent. However I wasn't willing to take the HUGE performance hit that came with having Vista on there.

@chris M - is WINE any use to you? They're up to v1.1.2 now...

One of my l'il projects at the moment is to get DOS 3 and Gem Desktop running on Virtual PC. There's a blast from the past. Is there anyone old enough to remember playing this, this, or this?

2000 to XP was a minor release though (Windows 5 to Windows 5.1), so they really were not that different. Other than the aesthetic changes, I'm having trouble coming up with any other changes in features other then making Remote Desktop available at workstation level, where previously it had been on 2000 Server.

XP to Vista is a big jump in features and functionality, I would say almost on a par from when most people jumped from Windows NT4 (or 98) to Windows 2000. If you were in the business at the time you'll remember how there really were no working drivers, and even if you were an experienced Windows and NT4 admin - everything had been changed forcing a rapid learning curve, especially server side.

At the time it was hell, but given time for the drivers to be written and a couple of service packs, 2000 reached a point where most would not want to ditch it and go back to 98SE or NT4. Vista will reach this point eventually.


I suspect your tablet is a lot faster then mine to start with. Mine was the first tablet made with a hp brand (after the Compaq series) so is never especially fast, it was the price you paid for the size and mobility. Graphics chipset isn't wonderful either, but not running Aero probably helps keep the speed up. Despite this the additional load from Vista was never significant enough to make me ever boot into the XP Tablet Edition dual boot. The worrying thing is that it sometimes appears faster then my XP based work laptop with far superior spec.

Open SUSE 11 is my weapon of choice at the moment with the lovely KDE4

I have to say i find ubuntu a bit "dull"