XP to Vista

[(RIP) willstatt]

got to upgrade my old pc finally, as it's proving just toooo slow and troublesome. I like xp, but it seems most new machines come with vista now. In the past, I've always just put the hard disk as a slave into my new machine so that I can access all my old and recent files, and this worked perfectly when upgrading from Win98 to xp for example.

Will it be equally simple with vista, and what's vista like generally, as I seem to remember lots of publicity about it having problems, or will they all have been sorted by now?

Thanks

Will

 

[Steve]

Will it be equally simple with vista, and what's vista like generally, as I seem to remember lots of publicity about it having problems, or will they all have been sorted by now?

You'll probably be better off waiting till October, and get a new PC with Windows 7.

 

[patzx12]

You can buy a Dell with XP if you go on the Business customer website.

 

[Stewart H]

Vista has proved to be a damp squib, I suggest sticking with XP for the time being, let others find the bad bits in Windows 7 for a year

Stewart

 

[Dragon Master]

I was a bit wary of the swap when I bought the laptop eighteen months back. But in truth, after half an hour or so on Vista, XP Pro on the desk top was beginning to seem very '3.1-ish'.

But, I think Stewart has the right idea, if you can, stick wit XP for a while. Only problem there might be you'd have to pay full whack for W7, whereas if you bought a machine now with Vista on, I belive you get a free upgrade in October, but that offer ends in January.

Dave.

 

[Dragon Master]

got to upgrade my old pc finally, as it's proving just toooo slow and troublesome.

Just a thought on that bit of your post, and another unashamed plug...

I had the problem amonth or so back that my laptop was becoming very slow. I went as far as installing Ubuntu as a dual boot. That speeded it up.

The a mate in the US suggested I try

www.cloudantivirus.com

I got rid of Avira, and put 'Cloud' on. Within 24 hrs, Vista was running as fast as Ubuntu. Still is.

Not exactly sure why, but I think it's the way 'Cloud' works; in the 'Cloud', rather than on your machine. I had Avira set to update every day. I think that, with all those updated files it collected, having to run through them all to do its job (which it did very well, no infetions in five years) just caused it t use to much of the machines resourses.

Might be worth giving it a try.

Oh, and if you haven't done already, ditch Internet Explorer 'X', and get Firefox...

Dave.

 

[Onwalkabout]

I am currently running Vista on my work machine and Linux (Suse distr) on my home computer. Vista is fine for my day to day office type work and most of the bugs are gone following two service packs. It is nice and stable, if a little slow. Have a look out for deals at the moment offering a free Windows 7 licence - I think Dell has a few going.

As for changing over the Hard drive, or adding it as a slave, this may not be quite as straightforward. Most modern machines - certainly any you would want to buy - have Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives. Your old drive is most likely IDE. Some motherboards will still have the old connections for IDE, but not all.

My advice would be to pop down to your local Maplins and pick up a USB Hard Drive 'caddy'. This is a box for the drive that you can then plug into your new machine and access all of the data. They also make a good backup drive. They are cheap at around 20 quid.

As for the old machine, Linux can work wonders on these. My home laptop is pushing 5 years and runs a charm.

 

[EPP]

Windows 7

Just spent sometime at Microsoft looking at Windows 7, definitely wait until the October release.

If you can get a deal with a Windows 7 upgrade licence thrown in then that might be worth it, but give Vista a miss.

 

[Tim Cullis]

I've downgraded to XP on both my notebook PCs. I had a couple of applications that just wouldn't run under Vista. Also the version of Vista that is bundled with most notebook PCs doesn't support offline files and subsequent resynchronisation to my file server, and I wasn't about to pay for an upgrade.

 

[Myke Rocks]

XP/Vista

As someone who has loathed Vista, because every machine I went to with it on ran at half XP speed or considerably less, I have to say consider it.

A friend aquired an almost new desktop with Vista + service pack 1, quad processor & 2 gig ram on it last week, & asked me to set it up.

The damn thing is blindingly fast, like no other Vista machine I have ever seen.
I can only surmise that service pack 1 is actually a serious upgrade to fix all of the horrible, slow features that were wrong with every Vista michine I have used before.
Myke

 

[The Foolish Fellow]

vista

much nicer to use than xp i have it on my sony fw and it runs a dream