Winxp or Vista ?

[dangel]

I thought you were one of the more mature members who liked discussion without the condescending attitude when posting on here )

Life's too short - and some of us have a sense of humour (however twisted). Try not to take everything quite so seriously - it's just a forum and we're (for want of a better phrase) just peeing in the wind here. And anyway, what's wrong with lollipops? Attitude indeed sir!
I fail to see the 'benefit' in rehashing polar views whilst basically agreeing in the original context - seriously (for a moment) - where's the progress here? I've clearly stated my intent in the statement you had issue with - are we just going to dance around debating semantics ad infinitum? Not to mention the irrelevance of the past in this context anyway - they've fixed (hopefully) the bugs you're fixated on, the drivers have (vastly) improved - and we both agree he should get Vista. Heck, I even threw in the balance of how I didn't think Vista was perfect, nor applicable to all situations. Madness? This is ..

And thank you - I shall

[Agent]

The Internet - Where what's been wrote can be interpreted anyway what-so-ever
Wasn't intending to take it seriously, just misread the context in which it was said that's all

Anyway, maybe we should suggest that the OP installs Linux?

[peterb]

Anyway, maybe we should suggest that the OP installs Linux?

Tomahawk certainly should! (See his post on page 3!)

[dangel]

The Internet - Where what's been wrote can be interpreted anyway what-so-ever
Wasn't intending to take it seriously, just misread the context in which it was said that's all

Fairy nuff matey

[2Cold Scorpio]

On my new system, I'll be dual-booting XP and Vista. Gradually, I'll completely phase out XP like I did 98/2000 5 years ago. The only reason I'm keeping XP around is for legacy app support (I'm not sure if my older ersions of Paint Shop Pro, namely 7 & 8) and for some games that may not like Vista (same thing happened when I got XP...a couple of games refused to run. It was driver issues that were never resolved).

I say go with Vista on a new PC. If you have the know-how and the harddrive space, I suggest formatting, installing XP, then installing Vista in a dual-boot enviroment. Then you have the best of both worlds. Be warned though: Microsoft plans to stop supporting XP y the end of the year, from what I understand.

[dangel]

Dual boot is sensible indeed. XP will be supported for a long time yet (2013? Longer if SP3 for XP appears..) - it's just that MS will phase out letting you buy it (as they always do when they launch a new OS - you get a year's grace).

[bydandie]

The fact is that Vista on new hardware is very good. It allows you to properly use minimal privleges until you need admin rights (ie Being a normal user and be prompted for the loacl admin password when admin rights are needed). This resolves some of the issues out there at present. XP is faster in most cases, but remember the complaints when XP Sp2 came out. It's also more secure IMHO (Don't be put off by the spoutings of some of my fellow security pros), there will always be issues found in *** apps and open source is now different.

For Vista to be comfortable and a decent experience you need resources, although those resources are getting cheaper with a C2D laptop for £440 with 1Gb RAM and a 160Gb HDD. Desktops are the same. *** have to solve some of the issues, but isn't that part of the fun?

So, in short if you have new kit or a new laptop with 1-2Gb RAM and a recent processor then go for Vista, otherwise I'd be more cautious and wait if you are not sure if there are Vista drivers for your hardware.

[jimbob666]

Think of it this way, XP is 6 years old and software technology moves on a lot in this time.

Remember when XP was released? The same thing happened - it was buggy but then settled down. Personally I think Vista will soon be getting to it's 'settling down' stage..

[Clunk]

Think of it this way, XP is 6 years old and software technology moves on a lot in this time.

Remember when XP was released? The same thing happened - it was buggy but then settled down. Personally I think Vista will soon be getting to it's 'settling down' stage..

The thing there though, was that XP, even in it's earlier incarnations, was comparatively more stable than the other microsoft O/Ses that people were upgrading from...remember Windows ME, or 95 and 98/se? the one possible exception would be 2000.

I have to say that I used XP from day one, including the beta version, and the only real problems I had, were usb and RAID, and that was on the beta version. Oh and sound card drivers

[iranu]

The thing there though, was that XP, even in it's earlier incarnations, was comparatively more stable than the other microsoft O/Ses that people were upgrading from...remember Windows ME, or 95 and 98/se? the one possible exception would be 2000.

I have to say that I used XP from day one, including the beta version, and the only real problems I had, were usb and RAID, and that was on the beta version. Oh and sound card drivers

I have to agree with this. As soon as a couple of people had xp at lan parties we soon realised that hassle free, virtually instant gaming, was to be had once everyone had upgraded from win 98 to xp (none had bothered with ME or 2000). It made a huge difference. Raid? I thought that was a fly spray in early 2002.

[aidanjt]

The thing there though, was that XP, even in it's earlier incarnations, was comparatively more stable than the other microsoft O/Ses that people were upgrading from...remember Windows ME, or 95 and 98/se? the one possible exception would be 2000.

I have to say that I used XP from day one, including the beta version, and the only real problems I had, were usb and RAID, and that was on the beta version. Oh and sound card drivers

Yeah, Windows 2000 was Microsoft's only real 'gem'. XP was good, and it made perfect sense to dump that pile of junk that was the DOS/9x kernel.

[this_is_gav]

XP had more problems than Vista did with drivers, in most people's opinions both OS's only real issue. 2000 never really made it to the home market, as ME, little more of a stop-gap in the market before XP, took rather more than expected. 2000 ended up being seen as a workstation-only product, and as such drivers, particularly gaming graphics drivers, suffered as there was no real mainstream market to aim them at.

The problems with Vista are now quite rare, and still mainly attributed to 3rd-party products. They shouldn't have surfaced in the first place of course, but it's still a cracking operating system (when you understand what's going on with indexing and the awesome memory management), and SP1 will be out soon, after which it should be a really good, solid platform.

[peterb]

Yeah, Windows 2000 was Microsoft's only real 'gem'. XP was good, and it made perfect sense to dump that pile of junk that was the DOS/9x kernel.

Win2K was (and is) a very good OS and one I still use on my legacy windows computer. It meets pretty much all the requirements for legacy windows only applications. Window ME on the other hand was a truly awful OS, far far worse than Win 98. (And yes, I do appreciate that the two products are miles apart in design befoe anyone suggests that I am comparing chalk and cheese!)

[dangel]

The thing there though, was that XP, even in it's earlier incarnations, was comparatively more stable than the other microsoft O/Ses that people were upgrading from...remember Windows ME, or 95 and 98/se? the one possible exception would be 2000.

I have to say that I used XP from day one, including the beta version, and the only real problems I had, were usb and RAID, and that was on the beta version. Oh and sound card drivers

The thing to bear in mind (not that it matters to the end user in many ways) is that XP was basically a minor update on Windows 2000 - in fact, you could say it's what Windows 2000 was intended to be. It wasn't (isn't) a major OS version (it's internally 5.1 versus 5.0 for Win2k) like Win2k or Vista (6.0) so really they're weren't making such a major code shift. Of course it's a different World now - when 2k was released people overlooked driver issues just because it was so amazingly stable compared to the utter crap that came before it (the 9x series was pretty terrible and NT 4.00 pathalogically hated hardware). Compare that to now where 2k/XP are pretty darn stable, pretty darn mature - stability just isn't the selling point it once was: we just expect it. In that sense Vista is alright by me - it's very stable IMHO - but inevitably suffers from slow third party takeup with the new driver architecture which reflects badly on MS. Not entirely fair, but as I said up front - it generally doesn't matter to the end user, they just want it to work.

You comments on the XP beta pretty much reflect my own experience of the Vista betas paradoxically!
Of course, sound card drivers still suck lol!

In some ways i feel sorry for MS - if they hadn't rewritten the OS they'd of been just as dammed. Would you really have wanted another version of XP? The codebase was reputed to be near unmaintainable and the architecture had some major flaws. In time Vista will mature, just like Win2k. I'm sure when Windows Seven comes along we'll be repeating the same debate and telling people they'd be better off sticking with Vista. Oh the Irony.

For those that can't remember - here's a refresher about Windows 2000 at launch: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1...2076967,00.htm

[[GSV]Trig]

XP all the way..

Had Vista 64 U on my machine for about 2 weeks, everything ran fine, the machine was given a rating of 5.9 for everything bar gaming gfx which it got a 5.8 but it was noticably slower than XP in gaming and was still suffering with random crap network performance and general slowdowns...

[spade99]

I am dual booting XP and Vista on a brand new system. This is my first experience with vista and I had a great deal of reservations about using Vista as my primary operating system. After 3 weeks of running both xp and vista on the same machine, I am finding myself using the vista environment more and more.

So far all my games/apps work in both and I have yet to encounter any issues in Vista. My machine is beefy enough to overcome any minor performance drops that might come with Vista.

My recommendation is if you have a brand new system with decent specs, go with vista, you can also set up a dual boot environment if you have reservations. Most of the people who have complained about Vista were using pre-release builds, inferior systems, or the 64bit version. New system, 32bit vista, and do all the recommended updates from Microsoft and you will be pleasantly surprised.