Vista or XP

What Software do you use for word processing and your photowork? and is it Vista compatible, do check on this, as well as check on any of your other favoured software, BUT there are many alternatives for the above that work great in Vista.


I would choose either, but its what you feel happy with, if your used to XP, then go with that, but if you like to try something new and the PC is fully Vista compatible hardware wise and your favoured software will work with it then Vista is worth a go......... many have had mixed fortunes with it but same happened when XP was the update from WinME/Win98SE.

 

Have to laugh at that one, in that I have an ACER laptop with Vista and it runs perfectly, so why if the Pres of ACER attacks Vista does his company sell laptops that run with Vista to the public? if the spec of the laptop is not high enough to run Vista then they need to up that spec and not build them with hardware that will only likely have Vista drivers if the model is a low end laptop ( they wont do this as the laptop market has overtaken the desktop in sales, due to cheap laptops ) ... seen alot of this of late in users wanting to go from Vista to XP and cannot find Lan, Audio or WiFi drivers from the makers!

ACER as an OEM then if they are having a go at Vista have a duty to customers to make sure their PCs have hardware that is XP compatible and has drivers?

But I know he's more talking of corporate use and this is a different ballgame to home users, too many variables with networks, proprietory corporate software etc and I know who I work for while testing Vista, will not be running it in the near future, although many large corps generally have MSDN accounts and can get XP Pro Vol Licence off there if they wish.

Do you not have personal experience of Vista as these soundbites and snippets of news are not really good advise, at best its a news story in which should really be in interesting news?

Sadly the stories of Vista that came out in large ram use and bugs while it was in beta, flooded the web, and had the knock on effect of planting a seed in many peoples heads of Vista doesnt work, lots of these stories and blog/forum posts came from users trying the public beta of Vista and not really understanding how a beta works ( or doesnt in many cases ), they loaded it on their oldish and one and only PC, which when crashed or didnt work due to no drivers, they didnt know how to troubleshoot a pre-release piece of software, which led to frustration bad feeling growing against Microsoft again, yes its not perfect but no software is and I agree testing betas can be damm frustrating at times, though you have to take into account you decided to run it past the warnings that were on the beta page to not run these betas on your main production PC, but its not as bad as many make out in its final release guise, yes you may have to upgrade your PC, but dont we always, its called progress... you cannot expect even in the days of win98 to goto XP without issues.

Funny thing that came to me just now is I dont hear many folk moan when a new fantastically graphical game comes out that they will need a new GFX card to run it, they just buy it.

Really Microsoft should not release betas to the general public, they should have it by survey and invite if you hit the criteria points your invited.


We always have choice as Coleman says, but my view is if you have an oldish PC at say 2yrs old then if XP works stick with it, if your buying/building new then go Vista, I have had Vista on my main PC now for 9 months with no BSODs or any issues, I could not say same of XP when I used that right from the release date, in its first 9 months on any of my PCs.

 

Yes Bill, if you have issues with dos games in XP then they will be much worse in Vista as Vista has moved further away from dos than XP has, with a view to removing dos altogether from future OSes.

Which is why many folk I know keep their old PC to run older software, when upgrading to a new PC to run newer software.