stick with XP or move over to Vista.

[swmlon]

hi all,

first off, please nobody rip my head off, i know there has been loadsa discussions about this.

so anyway, my comp has now become cluttered with all manner of junk after a year of downloading, playing games and not really doing much cleaning so i am at the point where i am going to do a clean install of the OS.

now, it would have been a simple task since i would have just picked up a copy of XP (oem) for 55 pounds. however, i went into my computer shop to buy it and they were selling Vista Home Premium for 75 and Ultimate for 115 (both oem).

one of the reasons i never thought about vista was the pricetag was pretty darn steep, but now that is just not the case anymore. so is it worth spending the little bit extra to get Vista and if so which one? also, should i continue getting the OEM version or do i go whole slog for the retail (which of course is double the price of the oem version)

any balanced un-fanboy (there are diehard XP-ers and Vista-ers and i and i just want which ever is good value for money) comments and opinions would be appreciated.

 

[Horsepower]

On a system by system basis, I use the Vista upgrade advisor for that decision.

 

[Arkaign]

What are your system specs? As long as your processor isn't ancient, go for it. Ram is ridiculously cheap right now as well, so upgrade to at least 2gb. Vista on 1gb or *shudder* 512mb is at best, no real improvement on XP. To shine, it needs ram to breathe and get superfetch barreling along.

Tip : Vista will get faster in the first couple of weeks that you use it, as indexing/superfetch optimize for your system/usage.

 

[jjmIII]

If I had to "buy" one or the other, I'd go Vista.
If someone is running XP, the need to upgrade is small.
Why "buy" XP though?

 

[swmlon]

thanks all for the post.

i have a c2d e6600 and 2gb ram with 8800gts so i should be good to go.

went out and bought vista and going to install it once i back up all my files on my comp. give it a good clean on the inside and put in some mighty righteous new 1TB HD.

 

[will889]

Right now on 1 HDD I have dual boot and XP Pro as my gaming OS and Vista Ultimate OEM 64 as my tinkering OS and Ubuntu on a third HD. I like Vista but it has a ways to go before it gets any serious time usage wise. In fact I use Ubuntu more than either now.

 

[ultimatebob]

Do a search on every device that you own, and find out if it has supported Vista drivers first. Odds are that you'll own something (like a printer, digital camera, TV tuner, etc) that isn't fully supported in Vista.

Even with a fairly new hardware, I had these problems with Vista:

HP Printer: No software support, and only generic Vista driver support. I lost the ability to monitor ink levels, and the memory card slots on the printer no longer work.
PowerShot camera: No driver support at all. Especially annoying since the memory card slots on my printer no longer work as well.
ATI AllInWonder Video Card: No software support, and only generic Vista driver support. The TV tuner and video capture abilities would be useless if I wanted to use this card in Vista.
Creative Audigy Sound Card: This one really pissed me off. Even though the sticker on the box says "Works with Windows Vista!", there is NO Creative software and drivers in the box that are compatible with Vista. There is a generic driver available, but you lose the equalizer options and the driver has stability issues with DirectX games. Most of Creative's support guides have no mention of Windows Vista as well, but their Windows Vista forum is filled with angry customers with the same problems that I'm having.

 

[CrystalBay]

I would dual boot if possible, that way things could work well either way

 

[Ryland]

My scanner does not work under Vista and my wife's Palm Tungsten T3 only has partial functionality under Vista so I dualboot

 

[Mem]

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
Do a search on every device that you own, and find out if it has supported Vista drivers first. Odds are that you'll own something (like a printer, digital camera, TV tuner, etc) that isn't fully supported in Vista.

Even with a fairly new hardware, I had these problems with Vista:

HP Printer: No software support, and only generic Vista driver support. I lost the ability to monitor ink levels, and the memory card slots on the printer no longer work.
PowerShot camera: No driver support at all. Especially annoying since the memory card slots on my printer no longer work as well.
ATI AllInWonder Video Card: No software support, and only generic Vista driver support. The TV tuner and video capture abilities would be useless if I wanted to use this card in Vista.
Creative Audigy Sound Card: This one really pissed me off. Even though the sticker on the box says "Works with Windows Vista!", there is NO Creative software and drivers in the box that are compatible with Vista. There is a generic driver available, but you lose the equalizer options and the driver has stability issues with DirectX games. Most of Creative's support guides have no mention of Windows Vista as well, but their Windows Vista forum is filled with angry customers with the same problems that I'm having.

HP has the worst driver support period,Canon and Epson have better Vista driver support that's for sure,as to Cretive Audigy drivers well last time I checked they had drivers for X-FI and most of the Audigy series,personally I'm using an Audigy 4 and it works great in gaming with my Vista x64 OS ,never had any sound issues period.

Creative software is another thing ,however that's not Vista's fault or Microsoft's problem,finger points squarely at Creative Labs.


I was lucky in the fact that all my hardware(for Vista x64) had drivers out within 5 weeks of release,companies like Leadtek for my DTV tuner were fast to respond with great Vista driver support,some hardware I already had native support(ie..Canon i865 printer) even though newer drivers were released for some of my native hardware.

Bottomline it's not hard to check for driver support for Vista,also some companies are just lazy and are not offering their customers the support like other companies are doing for Vista.

PowerShot camera: No driver support at all. Especially annoying since the memory card slots on my printer no longer work as well.

My Olympus C770 digital camera has native support in Vista x64 so no drivers needed,for those with Olympus cameras you can check compatibility here ,as you can see Vista(both x68 and x64) has very good native support for Olympus cameras,for those that don't I would just get a USB memory card reader and use that(I have tried one and works great,no drivers needed)