Reinstall Vista or upgrade to 7?

jitters

Hi all.

My laptop has reached the inevitable point in which it feels slow, cluttered and its 'quirks' are p*****g me off...

I've not been following reports on W7 so would like to ask if it would be wise to stick with vista or upgrade to 7? Either way I'm formatting the laptop and installing a fresh copy of the OS.

I'm told W7 has better memory management which is appealing as despite having 3Gb of RAM i've always found vista clunky when editing photos in PS CS2. Have people seen better performance when switching to 7?

thanks for looking.

foogirl1983

7 is so much better than Vista!! I use XP at work still but our main desktop at home is running Vista and I've never got on with it! It's so slow to load EVERYTHING!

We've recently bought a new laptop and installed W7 on it and I love it - it's so much more intuitive than Vista and I can actually find things on it!

If you can, try and do a clean install (you can do this if you're a bit tech savvy with an upgrade disk).

JasX

foogirl1983 wrote: »

If you can, try and do a clean install (you can do this if you're a bit tech savvy with an upgrade disk).

Not really that savvy, you need to type 2 lines of text in during the install process. Here's a step by step guide:

http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/clean_install_upgrade_media.asp

totalsolutions

There is a free trial of Win 7 running at the moment, expiring around May. Taking just 20 mins to install. Worth a punt then you can decide?

Win 7 is fine, so is Vista on the right hardware.

[Deleted User]

jitters wrote: »

I'm told W7 has better memory management which is appealing as despite having 3Gb of RAM i've always found vista clunky when editing photos in PS CS2. Have people seen better performance when switching to 7?

What you're probably experiencing in Photoshop is the limitation of your CPU since the processing of any effects in CS2 are all handled by that.

In a lot of cases where people attributed system slowdown to Vista, it was actually their poor choice in software specifically what security software they chose to use and how many applications they decided to run resident in the system tray that were unnecessary. What are you using?

mluton

As long as there are compatible win7 drivers available for your laptop, Why not and as above give it a try first.

jitters

Thanks for the quick and useful replies.

totalsolutions wrote: »

There is a free trial of Win 7 running at the moment, expiring around May. Taking just 20 mins to install. Worth a punt then you can decide?.

Thats a good idea, i'll take a look. Cheers.

JasX wrote: »

Not really that savvy, you need to type 2 lines of text in during the install process. Here's a step by step guide:

http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/clean_install_upgrade_media.asp

Thanks. I had wondered if it was possible for a 'proper' clean install with an upgrade version of the OS.

anewhope wrote: »

What are you using?

Intel C2Duo T8100, 3GB RAM,
Avira AV (recent change from AVG) and windows native firewall.

elvch01

I have read somewhere that there is a "trick" to fool an upgrade disk into doing a full clean install and I would recommend that approach if possible. I will see if I can find out where I read about the trick.

But definitely go to 7 regardless

mluton

elvch01 wrote: »

I have read somewhere that there is a "trick" to fool an upgrade disk into doing a full clean install and I would recommend that approach if possible. I will see if I can find out where I read about the trick.

But definitely go to 7 regardless

Was posted above.

elvch01

http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/clean_install_upgrade_media.asp

JasX

elvch01 wrote: »

I have read somewhere that there is a "trick" to fool an upgrade disk into doing a full clean install and I would recommend that approach if possible. I will see if I can find out where I read about the trick.

But definitely go to 7 regardless

you might have read about it further up the thread

EDIT: yes, you've now posted the same link mentioned earlier :rotfl: