vista or xp????? help me choose

asininity

isofa wrote: »

Which is why I still think Vista is a mess, allow users to disable this and they will install anything often malware with no idea at all. This coupled with a lack of secure driver signing are two examples of a poor operating system in the 21st century.

With the freedom of choice comes some risk. If someone was going to install something that wouldn't stop them just slow them down, its the fact that windows users by default use the root account thats the problem. Doesn't matter what you put in place, if youre root you are god.

Sorry root=administrator.

ts_aly2000

I'm running Debian Etch. Why would I want Vista?

Marty_J

ts_aly2000 wrote: »

I'm running Debian Etch. Why would I want Vista?

No one said you did.

Lum

You are buying a laptop with 4GB of RAM, this for me means you want to go for Vista.

Why? 32bit operating systems such as Windows XP will never be able to see the full 4GB of RAM. There is a 64bit version of XP but it's generally regarded to be not very good and plagued with compatability issues with various software.

A 64bit OS (Vista is available in both 32 and 64 bit versions, so you'll need to check what version your laptop comes with) is able to access several terabytes of RAM (in theory) and thus it will see and be able to use the full 4gb. This offsets the increased memory requirements of Vista nicely.

Yes you can turn down the bling in Vista and make it look like classic Windows (ie Win95-2000 look) though personally I wouldn't recommend it. One often overlooked thing is that Vista's blingy interface is handled largely by the graphics card wheras XP (or Vista set to classic mode) does it in software and thus offers a small increase in performance. Personally I just turn the Border Padding setting down to zero and then Vista windows take up no more space than XP ones.

I'd say try Vista for a bit, give it a fair chance at least as it's really not as bad as some techies make out, and if you really don't like it or you have software that doesn't work, then downgrade.

Sirbendy

I disagree. XP will see 3.5gb+ if not all 4gb, as will Vista 32 bit. It's only on the migration to 64bit that you break that architectural barrier. Vista's dead anyway now...looks like 7 will be with us pre-december. 7 is frankly impressive!

Vista...I've never liked. I've found it bloated and over-panicky/overbloated. Yes, XP is old..but it's not bad for all that. We're going to Vista in our new building, purely as a stepping stone to 7 as it's less of a jump from our tech side of things. I can see Vista going the way of Windows ME...under the corporate rug, out of sight and deny all existence. Ballmer said as much.

Both of my quadcore virtualisation servers in this office are running 4gb RAM, under server2003..which is pretty much XP codebase..no issues there at all with ram not being seen.

Lum

Sirbendy wrote: »

I disagree. XP will see 3.5gb+ if not all 4gb, as will Vista 32 bit. It's only on the migration to 64bit that you break that architectural barrier. Vista's dead anyway now...looks like 7 will be with us pre-december. 7 is frankly impressive!

Wrong. Vists 32 bit (as of SP1) will report that you have 4gb of RAM but it is not actually able to use it. As far as I can tell MS just got sick of people complaining that their new 4GB Vista PC can't see all their RAM.

As for 7. The op has already bought their PC and it comes with a choice of Vista or XP, so telling them to upgrade to 7 isn't really useful.

Vista...I've never liked. I've found it bloated and over-panicky/overbloated. Yes, XP is old..but it's not bad for all that. We're going to Vista in our new building, purely as a stepping stone to 7 as it's less of a jump from our tech side of things. I can see Vista going the way of Windows ME...under the corporate rug, out of sight and deny all existence. Ballmer said as much.

Probably, though Vista is no-where near as bad as ME and a lot of it's problems aren't actually due to failings in the OS at all

Both of my quadcore virtualisation servers in this office are running 4gb RAM, under server2003..which is pretty much XP codebase..no issues there at all with ram not being seen.

You'll be using Physical Address Extension then. It works but it's a bit slower than just running a 64bit OS.

Marty_J

Sirbendy wrote: »

I disagree. XP will see 3.5gb+ if not all 4gb, as will Vista 32 bit.

They might be able to see it, but they won't be able to use it.

Have a read:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/03/road_to_mac_os_x_snow_leopard_64_bits_santa_rosa_and_the_great_pc_swindle.html

Percy1983

The point is if you want to use all 4Gb ram (or more) you need a 64bit OS. When it comes to 64bit Vista is massively better than XP.

As said the 32bit vista now reports what is installed rather than what it can use as 4GB ram isn't uncommen now so people started noticing, in the XP days 2Gb was a lot of RAM.

As for windows 7, it should ahve really been a Vista service pack. Its very similar with a 'better skin'. Buy all means i will get on it one day (probably if they push DX11) but I don't see it as an upgrade on vista.

Lum

Percy1983 wrote: »

As for windows 7, it should ahve really been a Vista service pack. Its very similar with a 'better skin'. Buy all means i will get on it one day (probably if they push DX11) but I don't see it as an upgrade on vista.

Problem is Vista was a failure and mainly due to reasons beyond MS's control

1) The most obvious was terrible hardware support because many vendors were slow to get new drivers ready and there is still plenty of hardware out now that doesn't work under Vista. 7 uses the exact same drivers as Vista and Vista's hardware support isn't too bad now, therefore 7 has very good hardware support for a "brand new" OS.

2) Even when there was drivers available, the quality of them was somewhat debatable. The worse offenders here were nVidia and ATI who both had terrible Vista drivers for a long long time after release. Since these two companies make the graphics cards that power the vast majority of "enthusiast" PCs, all the early adopters reported frequent crashes and blamed it on Vista. The vast majority of BSODs reported to Microsoft on Vista are down to shoddy graphics drivers

3) Memory use part 1. Vista will use all your "spare" memory as disk cache to improve performance and application load times (ie it will pre-load the files your application is about to ask for). If an application needs this memory the disk cache will be discarded immediately to free up space for the application. This behaviour conflicts with the traditional view that lots of free memory is good for performance

4) Memory use part 2. If someone has 1 stick of ram that's a little bit dodgy, and that fault is in an area of RAM that would typically be free on an XP machine, the user will never notice their RAM is faulty because it will cause a crash so rarely that the response will typically be "LOL Micro$oft". Again in enthusiast PCs, particularly ones that are or have been heavily overclocked, this is more common than you'd think. Now Vista comes along and it's preloading your important application or data into that faulty RAM, corrupting the program code and causing a crash as soon as you actually time to run it, the response is now "F**king Micro$oft, this never happened on XP"

These problems have mostly gone away now. nVidia and ATI have got their act together for the most part and so have most of the other hardware vendors, and the OS is now on a lot of mainstream new machines which were supplied with working RAM, unfortunately the name "Vista" is tarnished so MS have to release a new OS to improve consumer confidence. It's a bit like how the new Vauxhall Vectra has been named the Insignia because everyone associates the Vectra with horrible handling and questionable reliability.

Hmm, Vista does sound a bit like Vectra, doesn't it? or maybe Victor

Percy1983

Hit the nail on the head. I had Vista early and did suffer with a few problems with drivers. It was soon sorted and is a spot on OS now. People forget XP had more trouble at first but the defend if like anything now.

Its a shame they have to retire Vista, as said its great now but the damage is done.