XP vs Vista

KingL

Could those in the know comment on the (realistic) min hardware specs required for XP/Vista/Windows 7 ?

Mobeer

I have quite happily used for many years a PC with Windows XP, Pentium IV 2.53 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM for general office work. This was upgraded to 1 GB of RAM for using larger SQL Server databases.
For Windows Vista I would recommend an increase on that to 1 GB RAM.
Windows 7 is not properly released until later this year but should have requirements similar to Windows Vista.

BUT what is right for you depends upon what you want to do with your PC.

custardy

personally i would say 2gb for vista
im running a core 2 duo machine on vista and im about to up that to 4gb of ram from 2gb

spud17

Windows 7 is not properly released until later this year but should have requirements similar to Windows Vista

Windows 7 requires a minimum of 1gHz processor and 1gb RAM and a 16gb hard drive.

I have installed it with 1.6 Ghz AMD Duron and 768mb RAM as a trial and it's fine for everyday surfing.

I'm pretty sure Vista would be virtually un-usable with that spec.

Incidentally IE8 appears to work better than on my XP machine with a slightly higher spec.

custardy

windows 7 is definitly lighter on resources
i put it on my old xp machine running a sempron CPU (cant recall specs) and it ran very well

Quasar

I used to love Windows 98. My oldest lappy still has that one. I bought it in 2000 and it was then state of the art LOL. My two other lappies have XP, the latest having been bought four years ago. I think I'll never use Vista because all three machines are in perfect working order still, and as my work requires me to have a viable computer at all times, I think I'm well backed up for possibly a few years to come.

That said, I find it very annoying that a new OS is trundled out every few years, because when updates are no longer available on an older version one will have to get a new one sooner rather than later.

I have used Vista on hotel computers only in passing, so I can't really have an opinion, but I'm quite happy with XP.

moonrakerz

anewhope wrote: »

No, I just have a very sound understanding of the Windows architecture and how the changes that were made from XP to Vista contributed to Vista being far more secure than XP.

Thomas Andrews thought he had a very sound understanding of Naval Architecture.

I wouldn't argue about it being more secure - it seems to spend most of its time either "crashed and down" or unable to talk to anything outside of itself - that would make it pretty secure, I suppose.

robt_2

moonrakerz wrote: »

Thomas Andrews thought he had a very sound understanding of Naval Architecture.

I wouldn't argue about it being more secure - it seems to spend most of its time either "crashed and down" or unable to talk to anything outside of itself - that would make it pretty secure, I suppose.

Nonsense. Sounds like you are Vista bashing for the hell of it without knowing what you are taking about.

RobTang

Quasar wrote: »

That said, I find it very annoying that a new OS is trundled out every few years, because when updates are no longer available on an older version one will have to get a new one sooner rather than later.

Its not exactly every few years, there was 5 years in between 2k and xp, and 3 inbetween vista and win 7.

Security and critical updates end for xp in 2014, now personally I think that 5 years is more then enough time to considering updating.
Vista not so good only have 3 years to consider upgrading (unless you're a business customer then you have 8 years to upgrade)

How much later do you really want ?

prowla

I like the style of the bar along the bottom of the screen in Vista better than the one in XP, and the translucent window borders are nice. Apart from that, I would be hard-pressed to tell you the difference between XP and Vista.

I've just upgraded from Office 2003 to 2007, and the user interface is very different, but I am getting used to it. Apart from everything having shifted around (Microsoft always move things around anyway), the text & background highlighting colours have changed. As mentioned above, the default is to save in the new ".docx" format, but there is an option to save as the 2003 ".doc" format.