What do you recommend - xp or vista

[dsharp9000]

i know my opinion on this --- it is xp; at least for now. But want to hear others opinions on this as I think vista sucks. am i only one who thinks this as there are lot people that are pro vista. From personal experience, I would never recommend vista to a home or business user ( and especially business use as slow file copy becomes even bigger problem; also software compatibility big problem).

 

[Guest]

At this stage, I'd recommend XP as compatability and driver maturity is still on it's side. Personally I like using Vista, but I can see it being a little quirky for lots of users. It is getting better though and by end of year my recommendation will most likely change to Vista as Service Pack 1 comes out.

 

[Zoron]

Home users... sure... as long as they're not playing a lot of old games, they won't notice any difference with Vista.

Business users... I'm still more apt to recommend XP Pro over Vista Business.

 

[dsharp9000]

I hope sp1 comes out sooner than later. I had heard a rumor that sp1 was going to be released sometime this month; but all this came to an end when I heard it was not true. I really hope sp1 fixes a lot of the problems;one major fix would be backward compatibility with existing hardware and software even if by some background emulation method. I just say this as I know a lot of people including myself who use older hardware and software (more than 5 years old). While you may think it might be easy to just retire all of this older hardware and software, much of it is what i call high end including high end ocr software as well as high speed scanners and software. My father also has a lot of older hardware and software that he uses at home; but primarily for work. I have always helped my dad with upgrading his computers; but cant recall an instance where i had to think that maybe nothing (ie:existing hardware and software) would work with the newest os. I have been around since the dos days, windows, windows for workgroups, windows nt, and so on and have never been concerned about an upgrade to a new os until now. Some people have claimed that the vista incompatibility issue with prior hardware and software is similar to that when xp was introduced. However, most people forget that the device drivers and software compatibility came from the basis of windows NT which was on the market for years (i know i was using windows nt in the mid 1990's) prior to the introduction xp in 2001. In this case, vista comes on the market with no creep factor; meaning that unlike nt there was no time to adequately develop a base of device drivers and software with regard to the market place. Also, this meant that nt had a lot of time to be tested in the field under actual market conditions. At any rate, I dont mean to turn this into a rant, but am only trying to convey a view point which I hope some will consider.

 

[softtouch]

I don't know, I use also older hardware, but I never had any problem with that. Every device was recognized by Vista, I did not even had to install any driver (but I did, for performance and feature reason).
It recognized properly my Motorola Cellphone, Epson 3in1 scanner/printer, canon printer, Kodak digital camera, flash drives, fingerprint scanner (which did not work under xp without driver) and more. No hardware issue at all.
And all my software, including development software like delphi 5 and delphi 7 (1999) are working absolutely fine. I have not ONE piece of software which does not work until now.

 

[mazuk]

From what i have seen so far from my laptop with vista home premium i have had a very stable system i have had no problems yet with the running and upkeep even when multi-tasking and playing games.

However...it is beleived that it will take 5 years or more to be on more then 75% of pc's so at the moment vista is limited to support,patches,service packs and other top ups that could fix some of the problems there are. my personal opinion would be to get vista, get it while it is early on learn about it and take a chance? you never know till you try it

 

[Scotteq]

I'm running 32 bit Vis~Duhh at home, which I side~graded from XP Pro, and my only real annoyance is that I sprang for Ultimate, like a dumba$$. Had some minor issues early on with driver (im)maturity. And it doesn't like to wake up if it's been asleep for a while - have to use the reset when that happens. But overall it's stable and works perfectly well - My old apps and the newer games run without issues. No BSOD's. Data transfer, etc, went fine, and it even auto detected my 5 year old Linksys router and networked itself. (Yes, I was both impressed and stunned...) It didn't like my off-brand sound card and 6 year old printer, but I expected that and had replacements lined up.

I'm planning on changing to 64 bit with my next rebuild, but that'll be something like 6 months out. My current rig is plenty good enough to wait and watch how the next gen Intel and AMD products go. Disinclined to make decisions based on Slide~Ware, Fanboiz, and Marketing blah blah blah....


At work? That's a completely different question. There's WAY too many interdependent systems for any sane IT organization with a mixed bag of systems to make the leap. Where I am we have MSFT and UNIX/Linux based servers, SAP R3, Citrix, and more custom apps than I can name off the top of my head. With the exception of point upgrades on software and the usual hardware bling, there are no current plans on changing anything on the back end at all through the end of 2008. And for the desktop, our IT guys burn everything with a standard XP Pro image as soon as it comes out of the box. Again - There are no plans to change that any time soon.

It'd be different if we were a MSFT only shop. But we aren't.

Scott

 

[girik7]

I think Vista is more of a nice-to-have package than a must-have upgrade from XP. If you already have powerful hardware, then upgrading to Vista would be fine. Of course, if you have a DirectX 10 capable graphics card, you should upgrade to Vista to take advantage of the DX10 effects.

If you have lower end hardware, I don't think there is a lot of point upgrading to Vista, as the OS will be slow to use. However, after installing this update:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938979

...I found Vista to be much quicker, especially when booting up.

 

[pkellmey]

The compability mode is much nicer than previous versions of Windows. There used to be software that would only work on a certain version of Windows, but that's pretty much history at this point. At work, we found this to be the most secure and stable version of Windows straight out of the box even with our very old hardware and software apps. There is very little hardware/software that won't run on this version of Windows once you figure out what you're doing. Overall, with both newer and older apps/hardware, Vista is definitely a nicer experience than XP.

 

[sactogw]

Vista is great for 'everyday' tasks (web browsing, etc.), but software compatibility is still an issue. My system has some balls to it, and, software issues aside, Vista performs much better at everyday tasks on it. MY PCMark score was almost 1000 points higher with Vista than with XP, and everything runs super fast (that is everything that actually works, hehe). 2 BSOD's so far. I don't think most average systems will see too big of a difference. The layout is basic MS stuff, so just expect some extra eye-candy. I still use XP for music editing, video editing, and most of my important stuff; so, I can't put all of my backing behind Vista yet. Nevertheless, the showing has been impressive for Vista this early in the game.