Vista?

[diversion74]

I know I'm gonna get lots of 'don't do it' replys but here goes anyway.

I recently bought a HP desktop with XP installed.
Was told to go to the HP website as I was entitled to a free upgrade.
When I went on it said I could have an upgrade to Vista home premium for around £12 to cover postage and admin.

I have ordered it as I thought it too good an opertunity to miss.

PC has a 160 gig hard drive, 1 gig of ram and is running windows media centre.

When Vista arrives through my letterbox should I install it?

I have a HP printer and run various software on the pc.
Will vista stuff this up?

Thanks in advance for the abuse.

Andy

 

[DavidHale]

I know I'm gonna get lots of 'don't do it' replys but here goes anyway.

Ok then "don't do it!"

I've bought a couple of computers recently for work and ticked the XP option rather than Vista.

Why?

1. I know all my software will work (these are work computers)
2. There WILL be bugs and faults - it's a complex peice of software so it's inevitable. Let someone else find them!
3. It may or may not work seamlessly on my network.
4. I can't be arsed with learning a new system.

I will use it, but not until next year.

 

[Sergeant Pluck]

XP gets 'discontinued' at the end of this year - M$ will do their best to end support for it as soon as they can, and all new Microsoft and 3rd-party software, drivers and scarily even hardware will be Vista-specific from now on - so unless you're into Linux, you're probably going to end up Vista'd at some point anyway, whether you like it or not!!

I'm dual-booting XP and Linux at the moment, weening myself away from Windows if you like - if you have 160 gig hard drive, why not dual-boot XP and Vista and run both?

Pluck

 

[terayon]

I got one of the free upgrade copies with the new laptop.

99% of my software works the ones that don't are old anyway. The only problem I had was with HP printer. Hp don't want to make drivers for old (1 year)printers. They have just release a basic driver, for my then top of the range printer

 

[turbine_2]

Depends on what you're using your desktop for. I recently bought a new PC and vista, mostly for playing games on (Test Drive unlimited, FSX, C&C3). Latest drivers installed for everything, except my (fairly) new soundcard which won't have drivers until 'late April' and my all in one printer which was 'Late March'
TDU was slow, jerky and unplayable, FSX had image problems and was jerky (bits that should have been image were blacked out), couldn't scan or print.
Ended up sticking XP on the machine and all worked well after that.
Overall, until Vista has been out and running for a years or so I'd stick with XP.
On the other hand, if my PC was only really about surfing, MS Office and general office type work I'd be using vista.

 

[nick]

Vista is just gimmicks. Haven't found anything really useful yet.

Flashy see through graphics and sidebar gadgets are not that exciting.

Memory usage doing nothing is almost double what XP uses !!! so unless you have at least 2Gb RAM don't bother.

I am still running 2 PC's (one XP, one Vista 64) as I cannot get all applications and device drivers to work on the new PC.

Don't do it !

 

[cookie]

On the other hand, if my PC was only really about surfing, MS Office and general office type work I'd be using vista.

if that's all i wanted to do, i'd use linux. i'd have to use open office though.

 

[turbine_2]

if that's all i wanted to do, i'd use linux. i'd have to use open office though.

Well, sadly I don't know linux well enough to reccomend it or to support it, but it's a valid option to be sure.

 

[cookie]

Well, sadly I don't know linux well enough to reccomend it or to support it, but it's a valid option to be sure.

TBH in my little dabblings with it, i found more complex stuff rather challenging. but for what was wanted, it all worked straight away for me as a windows user.

 

[turbine_2]

Yeah, I can understand that. It was part of the issue I had with vista as nothing was where I expected it to be so a lot of time was spent hunting, or I'd find something interesting / useful on the way to finding something else and not remember where it was.
I'll give vista another go in about 6 months I think.