XP or Vista

bikerman_2

I'm looking to buy a laptop to use when away from home, mainly for surfing and listening to music through i-Tunes; may also stream TV from 4oD or ITV websites. The ones I've looked at for about £399 all run Windows Vista and tend to have a processor of around 1.4 to 1.5 ghz speed.

I'm under the impression that such a slow processor will struggle to run Vista and keep three or four tabs open for browsing plus play music plus maybe play freecell all at rhe same time so I figured an XP based machine would handle this better.

Given my budget of around £400 am I better off buying an XP based machine or a Vista based one? Thanks.

BillScarab

To the best of my knowledge the key factor with Vista is RAM. 1Gb is the minimum and most people recommend 2Gb. Personally I like Vista and run it on my desktop at home.

You need to be careful comparing CPU speed as different architectures make a big difference. You can really only uset he speed to compare CPu's from the same family. Have a look at the charts at https://www.tomshardware.co.uk for performance comparisons.

motorguy

Check out this Dell - drop the warranty to one year - then when you 'add to basket' you get it for £374.

This machine easily has the RAM and the processor you need, and you can chose Vista OR XP.

http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukdhs1&l=en&oc=n1264054&dgc=AF&cid=5212&lid=122756

isofa

There are quite a few similar threads on this forum, do a search and you'll get some other discussion points, a few to start with:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=627303

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=557135

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=583867

You'll get better performance out of a lower spec'd machine with XP in my opinion.

masterthief

agreed with isofa - vista will hog your RAM so you'll experiences more hangs

fletcher1985

i personally think vista is rubbish i have it and im gonna change it back to xp

loudcox

Go with XP for any lower spec machine. This is a very amusing read of one man's experience with Vista vs. XP

[FONT=&quot]http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/archive/2007/12/14/review-windows-xp.aspx[/FONT]

colin79666

I was in PC World today - had a small Advent laptop 12" screen I think with 2GB ram and Vista Home Premium for around £400.

Probably best to stick with XP though on a machine in the sub £500 price range at the moment though.

fletcher1985

i bought my laptop at tescos few months ago for £299 its a great laptop, but they not got them anymore

imagia

Go with XP.

Or better still, install Ubuntu and you'll be flying.

wolfman

Bought my Acer 5050 for £280 3 or 4 months back. It runs Vista fine.

In fact I now actually run Ubuntu on it, and run Vista within a virtual machine, allocating it around 900mb. It runs fine, and that's doing programming/debugging via Visual Studio.

Vista isn't as bad as some say. If the laptop comes bundled with Vista, I'd probably stick with it. Just make sure you have a minimum of 1gb of RAM.

There's plenty you can do to reduce the load. The reason Vista uses so much RAM is due to its aggressive caching and prefetching. This can add performance in one sense, but reduce it in another. You can turn of such functionality though.