I'm just curious what the pro's and con's are of going with either OS. I'm getting my new system here in a few weeks. I see a lot of people with newer systems running vista ultimate in their signatures. I had always thought Vista was junk until I started seeing all the people with it. Is there really any pro in going with Vista Ultimate? or is it just for the "looks"
I think with the whole XP vs. Vista thing it's horses for courses. If your system is mid-top end go with Vista for better hardware support and future proofing, with SP1 on the way things also get a little better (at least beta SP1 seems to have a remarkable improvement on file copy speeds and over all OS performance). Also if you ever plan on having 4GB of ram or more, get 64-bit Vista. DX10 is also Vista only, if you are getting DX10 hardware and want to play with DX10 games, Vista is also the way to go. Bare in mind it IS resource hungry and may appear slower than XP, but patch up fully and you should be ok, also if you are a gamer I'm not sure if it still stands but turning off the sidebar used to improve performance no end. If however you are running on old hardware or exotic/old software that you MUST run, for compatibility go with XP. The same can be said for older hardware, if you are running anything less than 2GB of ram or anything older than a couple of years for the sake of performance use XP. Both however are good and bad in their own ways. XP is good because its familiar and easy to use. Vista not so much because you have to re-learn how to use the OS as they moved things around, but like anything, once you get used to it, it's actually alright. If you can give it a go and see how you get on, it's not for everyone
i still have xp because there is no immediate need for me to upgrade. I will eventually get vista, there will come a time when most newer games need dx10 to run and I dont see dx10 getting ported to xp anytime soon. or ever. So if you are going to buy an operation system and you dont know which one, get vista. no point in spending money on xp now and then on vista later. I already had xp so I wasn't going to spend money on vista when i didn't have to.
XP have better support at the moment. (Pretty natural since it have been around for a looong time) Vista is better for future proofing. Ifo you go for vista, go for 64bi. If you go for XP, go for 32bit. It seems like 64 bit support on XP is a bit poor (and I doubt that many will write new drivers for a dieing OS). 32 and 64 bit support seems to be equally good, and with 64bit you will be better prepared for the future. Also, if you are going for about 3,5GB+ RAM you need 64 bit. Most newer systems should be able to handle vista just fine. Of course it's heavier than XP (Which were made to run on P2/3 computers)
I said I'd get Vista (Home Premium) when I next upgraded, but now it's upgrade time I'm having second thoughts. It just doesn't seem enough of an improvement over XP to justify the slight extra cost and the risk that some "exotic/old software that you MUST run" won't work. Main pro seems to be a fast boot time.
I'm happy with XP. Used Vista on other people computers and hated it. With XP or Vista? I go from start button to fully working XP inside of 20s.
what hardware are you running? mine takes 45 seconds but i think its mainly because i have an ide hard drive thats a few years old. other than that im running with 2gb of 8500 ram and a q6600 at 3.0ghz.
Vista pros: Superfetch!, Dx10 (yes, it performs better than Vista's Dx9), Aero interface, better searching, stable Vista cons: not as good Dx9 support (although don't see why you need 10% better Dx9 support with most games), erm...... not as good compatibility with older hardware? XP pros: very good support for everything XP cons: no Dx10, bad searching (stupid dog) im sticking with Vista and its superior memory system.
I kinda like extra eye candy - I use OS X and love the dashboard/exposé functions, also Beryl on Linux looks great too, although I've never used it. But when I used Vista I found the extra stuff really annoying, like it's just a copy of OS X but not done quite as nicely. And whereas Expose has a real functional value (I use it all the time for switching windows), Aero on Vista just seems superfluous and tacky (Alt+Tab works fine). I'll be sticking with XP until I have to upgrade. Having said that, there are some things I do really like - such as the media centre which is really good (on all home versions I believe). Look at the screenshots and feature lists and take your pick
I sill go with XP Pro as have heard so many bad things about vista, and when vienna comes out vista wont be sold and people will be highly recomended not to use it.
I had a terrible time with Vista. My system is completely rock solid in XP, but Vista gave me enough problems to dump it. I lost a lot of files doing a drag and drop of a folder. The system hung and said "explorer has encountered a problem and must shut down". It wasn't the first time it had happened, but this time when doing a drag and drop, the folder disappeared from it's original location and did not appear on my back up drive.....gone forever. I got BSOD's a few times, never had a one in XP since I put this system together. One of my LAN stopped working and I thought it had gone bad, so I switched to my other LAN port, it worked for a while, then stopped. I rebooted to my Ubuntu partition and they both worked fine. My audio had random problems. It would simply stop working and I would have to reboot. This was all with Vista Ultimate 32-bit. I am going to order Home Premium 64-bit within the next week or so and see if I have any better luck.
Xp is the way to go right now because they have pretty much worked all the bugs out of the program. Vista reminds me of Windows ME and it being a transitional OS until they could get a better OS out there. Vista has to many problems right now. If its the vista eye candy you want, there are programs the emulate Vista using XP and don't seem to use the resources that Vista does. At least not from my experience.
I'd say the exact opposite myself... i've been unable to use my copy of 64bit vista because it's so unstable, whilst 64bit XP has the exact same driver stability that 32bit XP does... it has yet to crash even once on 64bit XP since i built it, vista lasts about 10minutes before doing a hard lockup on the exact same hardware
Vista till haven't crashed here. The only thing that haven't worked properly is the drivers for my mouse (it doesn't exist Vista drivers for MX510). Setpoint works good, though. (All though it's a bit buggy at times. Works as long as the computer doesn't go into hibernation) Anyway, rotten drivers will most likely be fixed as time goes by.
I'm sticking with XP Pro and XP X64 for a while; I don't like the feel of vista, all the settings have been hidden in the strangest places below x layers of sub windows and I can't find a darned thing XP X64 is quite good and on my rig runs faster than the 32-bit; only thing to be careful about is some vendors won't release XP X64 compatible drivers for certain peripherals.
i had vista on my machine for a while, then switched back to xp. vista was actually really nice to use, the interface improvements seemed very functional. things can be a bit confusing if you are used to xp, but most of the changes seemed logical. the new explorer is really nice to use, i love the breadcrumb bar. search in the start menu is nice, but launchy is even better so that is kind of moot. i switched back to xp because vista would crash on resume from standby, and couldn't run 1680x1050 in some games. when i switched back, everything in xp felt really snappy. it felt like a significant performance upgrade, but i still miss the vista UI. i am considering giving vista another try with my latest upgrades (2gb->4gb ram, 7600gt->8800gts)
Im looking at it like this, vista isn't ready, they rushed it out and ruined a os, but ms dose that with all there operationg systems. xp was terible at first also. give it a few months - year and it'll be great. for now im sticking to xp.
I'm still using XP Pro on my main system. With all the anti-virus and firewall stuff it takes up to 10 minutes before I can actually open Thunderbird or Firefox. Haven't nailed down the problem yet, because Fedora starts quickly (I can be logged in within a minute of turning on the pc). I suspect Zone Alarm (why does it take so long to initialize?) or the webcam may be the problem, but I'm too lazy to sort it out. I am actually going to get Vista 64 for my new build, but tri boot it between XP and various flavours of Linux. I just need to start buying things now... Andy
