Another Vista question

2

20ducks

Elite
I have the opportunity to upgrade to Vista Ultimate on my lap top computer (my desktop will remain XP). I run only a few MS Office (2007) apps, mostly spreadsheets off of Excel. The bulk of my work/hobby is processing personal photos via Photoshop on CS3, music and most importantly staying abreast with mod purchases on eBay and advice from this board. Question is this the way to go now the Vista SP1 has been released? I like having new gadgets etc., and with the price being very advantageous to me, I don't want to pass on a good opportunity. Is this something I should consider or wait?

Cheers,
Greg
 
I've got Vista Home Premium and Office 2007 and TBH I prefer XP and Office 2003 which I use at work, I can't get used to the toolbars on Office 2007 and I find Vista clunky to use, even with 4Gb RAM. I wish I had specced XP when I bought my laptop.

Also, check your hardware manufacturers websites before you install SP1, as I have seen a few tales of devices stopping working unless you can download updated drivers.
 
While I will not allow Vista to be installed on any of our corporate computers, I did by a laptop for my daughter with Vista last fall. Despite all of the negative hype, it has worked flawlessly and I have no complaints. That said, it really does not offer much in the way of advantages either. I would not upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. Also, Vista is even more of a resource hog than XP, so unless you have lots of RAM, a fast hard drive, and a reasonably fast CPU, you will end up disapointed.
 
I made the move to Linux a few months ago on my home computer and so far am loving it... :thumbsup:
tuxwinxp2.jpg
 
It came with my Sony laptop and took a lot of getting used to. Lot of frustration that software I loved would not run on it and need to update so many other programmes and devices to get everything working.

Can't see that SP1 has done anything but then again I'm no techie.

Would have stayed with XP had I known all its issues I'd have
 
20ducks said:
2G Ram
WUXGA screen
1.7GHz processor
Click to expand...

I would not recommend upgrading to Vista with that CPU speed. My experience with Vista at work is that it works well if you have a beast and I found myself turning off a lot of settings so that it looks and feels like XP. We have not upgraded yet to SP1 but I don't see that as making much of a difference. Microsoft went the very strict way for the drivers in Vista causing numerous problems with upgrades. I guess Microsoft got tired of being blamed for their OS doing a BSOD and realizing that the crash occured in a third-party driver. So for Vista only the drivers (theirs and third-party) that they have certified to be correct will upgrade well. :x

IMO, their best OS ever if you are not a heavy multi-media user is still Windows 2000 SP4. :thumbsup:

Good luck.
 
SP1 for me broke Outlook 2003 - now that made me laugh :D Now uninstalled it and working again :)

Next PC will probably be a Mac of some description...

+1 wouldnt use it with a slower processor... It seems to do alot of stuff in the background which is hard to turn off and slows everything up :(
 
Well, if you allow me to give my opinion:

Most of what is said above is true and Vista without SP1 sux big time. It is slow, clunky and many operations that are bread and butter of an operating system (file copy, for example) are terribly slow to the point of being unusable.

SP1 brings a new kernel and lots of changes to the operating system. If you used Vista before SP1 you will notice the speed improvements in certain areas. It also reduces the number of security confirmations for some operations (some operations required you to confirm 4 dialog boxes!!! and now require 1). If you want my honest opinion, XP is a more rewarding operating system as it will let you do what you want and not try to be as "nanny" as Vista.

Albeit using Microsoft technologies for work and being seen by many people as a die-hard Microsoft fan I got fed up with Vista and bought myself a MacBook Pro which I just love. After that my Vista laptop gets booted less than once every 2 months.

I still use Windows XP/Office 2007/Visual Studio 2008 on my work desktop though.

If you want my advice, Microsoft just released Office 2008 for Mac that comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage (half-arsed Outlook replacement). It uses the same file formats as Office 2007 and depending on your needs will do just fine. The Mac needs several less reboots, updates, security patches and security confirmations (none) than Windows and just works quite nicely.

Also, you can install Windows XP or Vista in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine in the Mac for when you need Windows. I have created a XP VM on mine on day 1 and I use it only when I really need to do some work in Visual Studio from home, otherwise I never turn it on.

I also have been using Linux since 1999 and although I like it very much I wouldn't advice it to someone that doesn't want to spend some time fiddling with it. If you don't have 100% supported hardware it may simply not work or you will have to spend a lot of time getting it to do what you want. An example is that the Dell laptop where I ran Fedora 8 (RedHat's open source Linux) uses a Dell wireless card with a Broadcom chipset that is not supported, so you install Linux and don't get wireless network. Because there's no device driver you can just download from somewhere and install you have to fiddle with the Windows drivers and a program called NDisWrapper and try to get it going.
 
20ducks said:
2G Ram
WUXGA screen
1.7GHz processor
Click to expand...
I'm in industrial software systems integration...
we don't see much in our area until it's long in the tooth, tried & true.

We play a lot though....
With your specs, Vista is a definite no go.
 
I use Vista and have no problems with it at all after other software and hardware suppliers got their act together and developed the drivers they were supposed to do already. :headbang: Microsoft got tired of being the driver developer for the world. They did that in XP…Never again. :headbang: :headbang: Yes they took the heat because it looked like the clunkieness and hangs were caused by the OS, but once new drivers came on board, you guessed it, magic. :D

Been to Apple and back. NO thanks :P
 
I use pretty much any operating system I can get my hands on, but most of them are single purpose installs. I really love going through library hell with Linux installs. I've decided that Vista cannot beat me and aside from the occassional IE7 crash, mine is solid. My all time favorite is FreeBSD.
 
People still use Vista? Wow!

Hehe, i've never used it long term, having been convinced to go with a MAC right when Vista was coming out. The MAC is great can do almost everything the PC can (inluding MS Office) and rarely needs a reboot. I still use my XP system for gaming. There just isn't a whole lot of games availiable for MAC.
 
Been using Vista home premium x64 now for 6 months, with no problems :D

Just did SP1 upgrade the other day too and things are still all good.
 
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