What version of Vista should I get

**colt1911** · #1 (**permalink**) 12-31-2006, 06:28 PM

I currently am using XP PRO Sp2 and would like some advice on which version of Vista should I get when it come available.:

guyladouche · #2 (**permalink**) 12-31-2006, 07:02 PM

Hello. My recommendation would be none of them. Just a bit of a rant follows. It made complete sense for Windows to develop a better, more secure OS after 98. They did well with 2000, but screwed up big time with ME. XP, in my opinion, was right on target.

From what I've seen, and I haven't researched Vista all that much, but it seems that Vista is geared more towards eye-candy and not so much toward functionality. I mean, who the hell wants an OS that requires at least 128 MB accelerated graphics card just to run the OS? It's unimaginable what would need that. Sure some things that look nice would use it, but why would it be necessary? And a minimum of 1 GB ram? Holy crap. Okay, I know that XP "required" what, 256, and people with 128 could run it, but why would I want an OS to possibly take up half of my RAM? I think Vista seems like an inefficient, unnecessary operating system. For now, XP seems to be just fine for anything any regular user needs.

I don't plan on "upgrading" any time soon. Perhaps when games and applications start requiring Vista I'll upgrade, or perhaps if I try a demo version and it has some redeeming factors over XP I'll consider it, but I wouldn't upgrade cold without trying it first, especially if the OS is going to rob me of my system resources. So my recommendation would be to get ahold of a demo of Vista from Windows--perhaps it's available still now in beta form, though I don't know if it is. Try it yourself. If it were me, I'd choose Home Basic because it seems the least intrusive as far as useless components. However, some components standard in Windows XP Pro like certain networking options and remote desktop are only available in the Ultimate edition. Check the windows website for the features of each and choose the one that's the best bang for your buck.

**Speedboxer** · #3 (**permalink**) 02-08-2007, 06:17 AM

I'd recommend Home Premium or Business. Both are good, just depends on what features you want. I wouldn't recommend getting Home Basic, since it has very little of all the cool features in Vista.

**Ash** · #4 (**permalink**) 02-08-2007, 07:50 AM

I agree with guyladouche - none.

Get it with a new PC in the future with it preinstalled. It's a resource hog.

Don't let Microsoft's marketing fool you - Vista offers no real benefits over XP.

**Speedboxer** · #5 (**permalink**) 02-09-2007, 05:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ash

I agree with guyladouche - none.

Get it with a new PC in the future with it preinstalled. It's a resource hog.

Don't let Microsoft's marketing fool you - Vista offers no real benefits over XP.

No offense, but Vista does offer real benefits over XP. It's hard to explain all the benefits, but, once you've used Vista for awhile, you'll understand. :p

Although, that's just my opinion, so, you may see Vista as no more then XP with a new theme, but, I see it differently from that, because it is more than that.

guyladouche · #6 (**permalink**) 02-09-2007, 07:03 AM

There's no reason anyone should be offended--it's good to discuss things.

But (and don't be offended...), if you can't really explain what the added benefits are of Vista over XP, then are there even any? I mean, for example, let's compare, say, XP to 98. Of course XP was an upgrade--98 was riddled with problems, unstable, lacked some features that we see as standard, and ran on DOS. XP improved on it immensely and added tons more functionality. MS completely re-wrote the code for XP and took the OS off of DOS and made it more stable and added a lot more functionality--networking, tasks, enhanced USB device support, generally made it more user-friendly and very functional. With Vista, MS didn't even bother re-coding the OS--I mean, multiple-core computers are more and more ubiquitous, yet they didn't integrate any multi-threading in the code, and it basically runs on the XP code--which is pretty much rock-stable in my opinion (especially when compared to 98). Secondly (not sure if there was a firstly), the only "feature" really different in Vista from XP is the "advanced user account control" or whatever it's called--asking you each time a change is made to your computer. In principle it's not a bad idea because it gives you a sense of security, but in practice it's very aggravating and entirely unnecessary provided that users are careful--which they should be. Other than that, and the new Aero graphics engine that renders the desktop and menus/windows instead of utilizing bitmaps like XP (and eats away at system resources while it does that), nothing is really different. Nothing is really easier to use than in XP (like networking, etc.), and Vista is so much more obtrusive than XP with regards to system resources.

Okay, so we've heard about people saying that Vista runs much faster/smoother than XP--what exactly does that mean? Does that mean that apps load faster? Things save faster? Will my computer resume faster from hibernation (or I guess it's sleep in Vista) faster than in XP? What is it? I mean, my processor isn't going to be faster just 'cause I use a different OS based on the same code as XP--my benchmarks aren't going to be any higher. So what is it? I'm not sure what people mean when they say that--some clarification would be nice here.

**Ash** · #7 (**permalink**) 02-09-2007, 07:54 AM

Well I've tried Vista [the release candidate myself]. My PC has half decent specs: 512mb of RAM, 2.8ghz Pent4 and 128meg video card [I'm not a gamer so these specs are fine for me].
The same day I installed it, it was gone. Vista pinched some system RAM just to get the fancy graphics to work. The only real difference I saw was a fancy new skin and a security box asking for my password every time I changed a setting. I know that I won't be "upgrading".

And if I wanted the Media Center functionality, I would just get XP MCE. There are free applications that offer this anyway.

**Speedboxer** · #8 (**permalink**) 02-10-2007, 04:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by guyladouche

There's no reason anyone should be offended--it's good to discuss things.

But (and don't be offended...), if you can't really explain what the added benefits are of Vista over XP, then are there even any? I mean, for example, let's compare, say, XP to 98. Of course XP was an upgrade--98 was riddled with problems, unstable, lacked some features that we see as standard, and ran on DOS. XP improved on it immensely and added tons more functionality. MS completely re-wrote the code for XP and took the OS off of DOS and made it more stable and added a lot more functionality--networking, tasks, enhanced USB device support, generally made it more user-friendly and very functional. With Vista, MS didn't even bother re-coding the OS--I mean, multiple-core computers are more and more ubiquitous, yet they didn't integrate any multi-threading in the code, and it basically runs on the XP code--which is pretty much rock-stable in my opinion (especially when compared to 98). Secondly (not sure if there was a firstly), the only "feature" really different in Vista from XP is the "advanced user account control" or whatever it's called--asking you each time a change is made to your computer. In principle it's not a bad idea because it gives you a sense of security, but in practice it's very aggravating and entirely unnecessary provided that users are careful--which they should be. Other than that, and the new Aero graphics engine that renders the desktop and menus/windows instead of utilizing bitmaps like XP (and eats away at system resources while it does that), nothing is really different. Nothing is really easier to use than in XP (like networking, etc.), and Vista is so much more obtrusive than XP with regards to system resources.

Okay, so we've heard about people saying that Vista runs much faster/smoother than XP--what exactly does that mean? Does that mean that apps load faster? Things save faster? Will my computer resume faster from hibernation (or I guess it's sleep in Vista) faster than in XP? What is it? I mean, my processor isn't going to be faster just 'cause I use a different OS based on the same code as XP--my benchmarks aren't going to be any higher. So what is it? I'm not sure what people mean when they say that--some clarification would be nice here.

I'll explain them then. Although, some of them are more improvements, then new features. No, Microsoft didn't completely rewrite Windows from XP, because, since XP is fairly stable, why try to rewrite the whole thing when your end result might not be as stable.

First of all, all (well, most) of the previously "advanced looking windows" have been given a nice GUI (although, this is more for users with not much experience with Windows, I suppose), makes it look nicer, at least.

The hierarchy of your "User folder" has changed. No longer are folder like My Pictures and My Music stored in My Documents. They now have there own spot outside of My Documents. Plus, the "My" part of the folder names have been dropped, I mean, you can't have these folders being selfish.

The new Search in Vista is cool, no more waiting forever for the results to your searches to come up, now, it's almost instant. Sure, you can get programs that give you Live Search (even MS has one of XP), but, it's always better to have a feature built into the Core, then a program do it (usually).

The start menu is much better now. It's more compact and now the layout of it makes more sense. You no longer have pop-out menus taking up your whole screen.

You no longer have to go to a slow and laggy website to get updates through Windows Update. There's now a little built-in interface for it.

Vista comes with programs that you would normally have to install yourself to get the simplest features. Such as Windows DVD Maker, Windows Defender (I suppose...), Tablet PC (even for just regular tablets), etc.

Plus, possibly one of my favourite new additions to Windows. Speech Recognition.

It's awesome... No more having to buy expensive programs to to get Voice-to-text functionality.

Aero, of course you've heard just about everything about this... But, when you have a video card that fully supports it (as I installed one today

), it's awesome. Doesn't even lag my PC down, that I can notice.

By people saying that Vista runs faster and smoother then XP, it means exactly that. Vista will start-up faster, and shut-down faster (and Restart

). Yes, applications do load faster, which is probably due to the new Prefetcher that attempts to guess when you'll open a certain application, and then Prefetch it before you do. For example, Photoshop probably loads in half the time in Vista (although, that comparison is unfair because in XP I had Photoshop CS2, and in Vista I have Photoshop CS3 Beta installed, so it's hard to tell). I'm not sure about things saving faster, that's more based on hard drive speed, than anything. As for booting out of Sleep, I don't really use it, so I can't say, but when I tried it in the Beta, it was pretty quick. Does that give you a better idea of what I mean when I say Vista runs faster then XP?

Just for a note, I suppose I could've explained it then, but, I've been really tired this last week, and wasn't at my computer with Vista on it.

Also, you might want to note, I don't do any gaming on my PC, so you might want to take that into consideration.

Maybe this post should be made into a new thread?

guyladouche · #9 (**permalink**) 02-10-2007, 08:12 AM

Well, I'm thankful that finally someone can say something about the Vista experience other than "it runs much smoother and faster." Thanks for the detail--it really shed some light on the subject.

That said, in a recent benchmark of XP vs. Vista on identical computers, XP actually allowed for better performance and benchmarks ranging from program startup to file compression to media encoding (where Vista severely lagged behind XP)--so while Vista might seem to start apps faster (which is not always the case--the review specifically discusses the start time of Photoshop CS2, so it's funny that you mentioned it in your post, and in the review, CS2 starts up much faster on XP than Vista), and the integrated OS features might be more user friendly, systems take a hit on performance of things not relating to the OS. If a benchmark didn't show the two OS's practically dead-even in performance, XP was always the winner by a good margin. Here's the review:

Windows XP vs. Vista: The Benchmark Rundown | Tom's Hardware

Okay, I know that XP is a well-established OS, and pretty much any app out there at this time is optimized to run on XP, but since the OS's are so similar in code, why are there such differences in performance? That's what I don't understand. Sure, in the future with the development of new drivers, or patches, etc. things will likely run as fast if not faster as on XP, but if the OS's are so similar, why the disparity in performance? And if people are spending quite a bit more money on computers to run Vista due to the more hefty hardware requirements, it seems to me that they might as well benefit a bit more from their investment. That's all--not that Vista is a bad OS, just unnecessary at this time, and is more of a step sideways than forwards.

**Speedboxer** · #10 (**permalink**) 02-10-2007, 07:59 PM

That review was just one review. OS's will always differ in performance from machine to machine, but, since I don't game, the comparison of my post, to their review isn't all that fair. Nope, I haven't tried Photoshop CS2 on Vista, I just went straight to download CS3, didn't bother installing CS2, since CS3 has more features and (apparently) starts up faster then CS2. But, I guess it all depends on your opinion and what programs you're running. Vista is just something you have to experience, sometimes, it's better not to go by what reviews say...

guyladouche · #11 (**permalink**) 02-10-2007, 10:32 PM

Yes, that's very true--I would use my own experience with Vista, but so far, I have not been convinced enough to go out and spend $200-400 on an operating system that doesn't really make my life a whole lot easier than the one I already have. Again, I'm not saying it's bad, just not worth it at this point.

But I'm sure that Vista will be more refined as time goes on, and software will be optimized for it, at which point I'll likely have no problem moving towards Vista (assuming that hardware decreases in price and a 4GB RAM, 512 mb video card system is pretty much standard...). But for now, I'd wait.

rawdawg · #12 (**permalink**) 02-14-2007, 10:10 PM

NONE!!!! dont even think about installing vista. i have had about 15 different customers that have come in the last 2 weeks saying that there computer was #$@$ed basicly what it did to them was delete the MBR ( master boot record) if you dont know what your doing your gonna be screwed. they wanted vista but then they tried it didnt like it and tried to install XP and couldnt because it deleted the thing that you need to use any sort of operating system. if you have any more questions about it just ask me.

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