Vista Business or XP pro

Bongedone

We are running Office 2007 already. I changed the policy so that it always saves in the old file format unless specifically requested to do otherwise.

Interesting that you say Vista allows downgrade. Is that all Vista machines ? I have seen it mentioned for a few machines.

o_t_e

Hi Bongedone - the downgrade path is from Vista Business or Ultimate only unfortunately; my brother specified Business for his work laptop for that reason but hasn't had need to downgrade. In contrast I bought essentially the same machine with Vista Home and found three not inexpensive software packages that wouldn't work with Vista - I've also found myself surfing the net to find out how to turn off unnecessary and irritating Vista features to make it more xp-like. If I'd had prior experience of Vista I would have specified Vista Business and acquired some xp-pro disks straight away.

[Deleted User]

I'm interested what programs didn't work and what features you were turning off?

o_t_e

The two that I could really do without stumping up cash for are SPSS and NVIVO; Roxio creator suite I guess can be had for about £50 but it's still a bit galling.

The things I've turned off - well the indexed searching for one - I found certain actions as simple as opening a jpeg were taking an inordinate time to execute while the hard disk was busy doing something else; turning this off cleared up that problem-I know where I save files and virtually never have to search for things so having something that serves no purpose except to slow down your pc (in this case 2.2ghz M1330) seems daft to me.

I also turned off the user account control thing that kept popping up to double check if I really wanted to do this or that - incidentally the BBC iplayer started working properly once this was turned off.

For the moment windows defender is still on but given the latest update c*ck-up that stopped usb devices from being recognised I'm not allowing that to auto update.

I turned off the see-through 'glass' appearence of windows as well as other bits an pieces of the Aero interphase; the 3d view of open windows seemed pointless but I just got rid of the icon for that ... there were other bits and pieces like the sidebar but can't recall all of them - it's an ongoing thing.