in my house, we call this utopia Mac OS. :-)

if you choose to run windows, i suggest sticking to XP if you need to use business applications. in my opinion, Vista for business is at the 'early adopter' stage. support for 3rd party applications is a bit dicey. i have retired from full-time computer support but still do support on the side and man, g** knows what m$ did, but some commonly used packaged business applications that run fine under XP blow flaming chunks under Vista.

there are reports that non-upgrade Vista keys can be used to install XP; that is, find a full install XP CD and your full-install Vista key should work to "backgrade" your computer. i haven't had a chance to research or test this.

oh, and btw, office 2007? be Vewy, Vewy, Carefuwoo! Outlook 2007 should have been named Look Out! Your Calendar May Have Been Translated Into Klingon And Converted to Stardates!

/trill

 

Pretty much as stated, no less than 1`gig of memory ( more is better ) not to mention a good size hard drive. Trying to up date older machine is probably not going to get it. Want Vista buy a new Computer with plenty of every thing. Crazy about my XP Pro.

 

So far, the programs that wouldn't run well in Vista have worked well for me if I run them in XP compatibility mode.

I just got 2 identical Dell Vostro 1500 notebooks for my kids, both with 2 gig RAM, and 120 gig HDD. I ordered one with XP and one with Vista, since the school won't support Vista fully yet, and the other kid lives off campus.

Vista runs smoothly, maybe even a little faster with all the eye candy turned OFF, but the XP boots quicker and runs every program I need to run.

IT here at work won't support Vista. It's a mixed bag, I guess.

 

mon cher Half Breed:

You hit the nail squarely on the head. XP is (finally) a solid OS. I run it on 700 Mhz Celeron/512MB RAM/20 GB drive (and many other "sad little" platforms) with no problems and users are fine with performance of Office apps or IE.

I can't think of a good reason for someone to need 2 GB RAM, a 300GB SATA drive, Gigabit Ethernet, and a 2.4Gigahoochie processor to produce a church yard sale flyer. but we're forced to, cause M$ sez we must.

 

I've got a new computer I just had built. Couldn't afford it, but I'd go nuts without one. Got XP on it. No way in heck am I going to Vista until I am forced to. And then I should be able to upgrade this motherboard to enough RAM to make it work. But there aren't enough programs made for Vista yet and I hate having to fight any OS to make something work in "compatibility" mode. Bleh...that sux.

The wife bought a laptop that came with XP on it, but also a Vista upgrade. I've got the Vista sitting on a shelf, still in the paper wrapper MS sent it in. No plans to install it for a time to come.

My best buddy has a laptop with Vista. It's his first windows based computer since the Apple IIe. He don't know any better, but his needs are really simple, so he gets along with it just fine. He lives out in the country and has a lousy DSL connection and it's so slow that I can't tell if it's his computer or the lousy Centurytel DSL.

Stick with XP... it's the best yet.

 

As pointed out, Dell still offers new computers with WinXP where HP and many others do not anymore. They had a lot of customer requests to keep doing this and have listened.

I was recently told by my provider webtech that Microsoft will continue to support WinXP through June of next year. The majority of complaints, he has been getting, are from people using this OS. His suggestion to me was to wait a year before thinking of getting a computer with this OS.

I do get techincal help questions from VISTA users on my Runegame.com website. In other pc game forums, there have been alot of people having problems running their games with this OS. But then, in the same forums there are gamers who are not having problems. In either case, I notice new game specs are higher for those using VISTA as opposed to those for WinXP, which does lead one to see how much a resource hog VISTA can be.


Yes, WinXP has become a pretty stable OS now. Yet when WinXP first came out, there were similar complaints about it trying to be too "dummy" user friendly. (I kinda miss being able to access DOS like you could with Win98se). Older games would not work well, or not at all, without a patch. It hogged more resources than Win98se and required more RAM. There were some bugs that needed time ironing out as well. However, WinXP and Win98se had more programs in common that will still work well than VISTA has with WinXP. At least for the moment and it's getting better.

But like before, some people never have problems with VISTA right "out of the box".

 

vista is almost as good as a mac!


Ray

 

well take it from me until they get the bugs worked out i would lay off buying a new comp with vista and stick with xp

i have vista on my main comp and it crashes a lot


VISTA sucks