Hope somebody can weigh in on this one. I use Windows XP at work and have for years. My wife has a laptop that is 2 years old, running Vista Home Premium...that OS and associated applications seem to have run like absolute shit since day one - but alot of it might have to do with my non-technical wife. I'm looking at getting her a new laptop and thinking about ordering XP with it instead of Vista (or eventually Windows 7). Any guidance? Also, I'm not blowing 2K on a MAC. Thanks!
Windows 7
The beta users loved it. Supposed to have fixed many Vista issues.
I skipped XP and went from Win2k right to Vista. Vista sucks.
Go for Vista, apparently you can upgrade to Windows 7 for free in October... I run Windows 7 beta now and it works really well.
I'm running the final version of Windows 7 and it KILLS XP.
I left XP on a separate partition and I occasionally boot that since I had MS Office installed there -- I HATE using it. Switching between tasks feels slow and cumbersome on XP; while on Windows 7 everything is easier and more pleasing to do.
Definitely get a Vista computer that offers a free upgrade to 7. Even then, Vista with SP2 and current hardware is still better than XP.
Please don't get drawn into all of the Justin Long propaganda commercials! The vast majority of the "problems" with Vista are simply urban legends and/or caused by third-party vendors.
Regardless, Vista is definitely superior to WinXP. Don't spend the extra money to have the vendor "downgrade" it to XP. That's one of the most blatant pure profit-making offers that the OEMs have ever devised. As others have already said, virtually every new Vista machine comes with a free upgrade to Win7 as soon as it's available.
Use Ubuntu. Ubunti is like the cell phone, Tivo, microwave, i.e. Ubuntu does not have to be constantly rebooted like Win 7/Vista. Just my 2 cents.
Acer EE with Ubuntu wrote:
Ubuntu does not have to be constantly rebooted like Win 7/Vista.
Neither does Windows, unless you would label once or twice per month "constantly." If that's the case, guilty as charged!
Regardless, since the topic creator is looking at laptops, it's probably safe to assume that they already plan upon powering it off on a semi-regular basis.
Win normally has to be rebooted 5 times a day on average for most people. If you aren't online them you might get by with one reboot every day or so.
once or twice per month "constantly."That's the biggest lie ever told on LR. No wonder Adobe is porting all of their software to Ubuntu now and will ship only totally virtualized products running Ubuntu in 2011 to avoid the wierdnesses of the Win and Mac OS.
Virtualization 2011 wrote:
That's the biggest lie ever told on LR.
Because you have some type of unique, in-depth insight into both my IT background and my character?
Logic would tell you that I essentially have no reason at all to lie about this. No offense, but you may want to concentrate on the facts a bit more and try to avoid drowning in your own hyperbole.
Acer EE with Ubuntu wrote:
Win normally has to be rebooted 5 times a day on average for most people.
No, that's not even remotely close to being true.
Computer Guru wrote:
Acer EE with Ubuntu wrote:Win normally has to be rebooted 5 times a day on average for most people.
No, that's not even remotely close to being true.
If you are connected 24/7 Microsoft actually remotely reboots your computer nearly every week with 'updates'.
Very shrewd move by MS .... preventing the inevitable freezups and blue screens.
I used to lose all my open Firefox tabs till Firefix wised up to this Microsoft BS with ver.3.5.2 and lets me now restart where I left off.
here by inteligent design wrote:
If you are connected 24/7 Microsoft actually remotely reboots your computer nearly every week with 'updates'.
Weekly? No, not quite. If you are connected to the Internet 24/7, Microsoft pushes out their cumulative set of Windows & Office updates monthly on the second Tuesday of each month. Occasionally they will issue an out-of-cycle update if they feel that it's urgent enough that it can't wait until "patch Tuesday," but that's uncommon.
Not to mention the daily Windows: Freezes, Mouse Lockups, BSODs, No NTLDR, lost files, lost programs.
Computer Guru wrote:
Don't spend the extra money to have the vendor "downgrade" it to XP. That's one of the most blatant pure profit-making offers that the OEMs have ever devised.
Not true when you factor in that the vast majority of business users are still on XP years after Vista's debut and even with MS withdrawing support for XP platform. Even today the bulk of commercial PC purchases are XP Pro downgrades.
GM cars suck so bad it keeps car mechanics in business. Vista & 7 & XP suck so bad it keeps IT dweebs in business. Good for them. But Win sucks for the rest of us victims ;-(
Not to worry, kiddies. We'll stop by Baskin 'n Robbins for Ice Cream on the way home ;-)
Next year the combination of Virtualization platforms and multi-core Virtualized 32nm/22nm CPUs from AMD and Intel will render single-OS PCs a thing of the past.
Application vendors will be able to run their magic natively under Redhat/Ubuntu/OpenSolaris/SUSE, etc. with Windows as the Screen Manager / display head.
You will see entire suites from Google, Firefox, Thunderbird, Adobe, Apple, etc. running under these Linux/Unix variants with nary a crash.
Of course if you run the Windows screen manager then the probability of it crashing is still the same ;-(
I know next to nothing about computers. I'm typing this message on a 3 year old dell laptop with windows XP. I last rebooted about a week ago. I know plenty of other people with no complaints about XP, it's just that we only hear about the people with problems.
Just wait until Windows 7 comes preinstalled. Windows 7 competes as well as any Microsoft product with Apple's OS X.
You can get a MacBook for less than $1,000, which may be worth it.
That sucks. A week ago ? What was it, A BSOD, crash, unknown ? The last time I rebooted my Sun Solaris server was two years ago. Why else do you think UNIX runs the internet, telecomm network, cell phone network, TV program distribution network, NASA/FAA/DOE/FCC/DOD/Universities etc. Plus UNIX is on your Cable Modem, ADSL switch, automobile, Direct TV/Dish box, Tivo, most Cell Phones, most PDAs, GPS tracker, stopwatch, etc. ?