Vista home premium.

[drunken monkey]

Originally Posted by doberman_52

Yes, I'm crazy.

you're not crazy, you're 17 with no real income.

[ericn1300]

Originally Posted by 03cavPA

The option to burn restore CDs was one time only, then it wouldn't do it again. It took 6 CDs, which was a lot of junk to load.

and worst is you end up reloading all the trial software and crap that the manufacturer actualy gets paid to pass on to you. restore disks should only contain the O/S and specific drivers you need, with additional software included on a seperate disk with an expert install option so you can skip the crapola. on the household laptop i just removed all the junk through the control panel and burned a ghost cd when i was done. on mine i reformatted and loaded win2k, loaded it up the way i like it and made a ghost disk.

[doberman_52]

Originally Posted by drunken monkey

you're not crazy, you're 17 with no real income.

I've had plenty of chances to upgrad in the last 2 years, and never took them. The only reason I'm now upgrading is because my mobo is starting to have big problems indicating its soon to go, and the hard drive is clicking. Otherwise, I would still be using this computer for the next year or so. I play some decent games with it, Halo, NFS series, things that require more processing speed. I think I just blew a celron this morning because of how much I overlocked it by almost 50%. All my friends call me crazy, I have done a lot of things.

[03cavPA]

It's nice to see a common sense thread on computing and software for a change. There are too many places where some ubergeeks jump in and stomp on everybody for not doing things the way *they* think they should be done.

I'm looking around for new computers for my kids for school, and I'm thinking I'll go the mainstream manuf. route for a change, just so I don't have to hassle with it. I usually build my own. All my boxes at home are built from scratch, and they only have the software on them that is necessary to run smoothly. It sure makes a difference when you can pick and choose which apps to put on the box.

One thing I do notice, in my searches: boxes with Vista preloaded are generally cheaper than boxes that still come with XP. A lot of manuf. don't offer the choice for XP any more. I might just get boxes with Vista and wipe the drives to do clean installs with XP. It would be worth it to me to spend the 89 bucks for the upgrade disk for XP, just to have a clean running box.

Any thoughts, guys? I think we'll all be running Vista once they get the service packs out for general use.
And, if Micro$oft can cut the manuf. a break on Vista just to get it on the machine, why don't they just go ahead and cut the price for the software to the end user? It doesn't cost all that much to make a physical disk.

IMO, they'd make up the difference in volume. I would be willing to pay 50 bucks a pop for the OS and make the jump sooner.

[l_eclipse_l]

Microsoft knows that eventually you will cave in and either A. buy their expensive software or a machine from a manufacturer with it installed already or B. find a way to get a copy of it some other way. They are not worried at all, and as long as they keep the majority of marketshare, they really don't care how you obtain their software as long as your using it.

They may put out a rant or two about piracy, but the fact is they profit from it in other ways so they don't mind it as much as you may think. Not saying go and pirate Vista, but I just wanted to make a note on your comment about everyone running Vista. I don't care to upgrade until I build an overly powerful desktop, my 2 year old HP laptop dosn't have the video juice to run smooth enough for my liking, let alone the fact that they changed a lot of things that didn't need to be changed IMO.

[Toksin]

My Acer Travelmate thankfully came with a minimal amount of preloaded shit on it. Made a backup/restore disc with the included program. Still had shitty partitions on it which caused things to get fucked up royally when I installed Linux. Couldn't install it and it broke Windows, couldn't restore from the backup cos of the cocked up partitions. Formatted and installed Ubuntu Linux, now just running that. Faster, and I got the Beryl add-on which kicks the crap out of Vista's Aero. And it runs mint on my little Celeron with onboard graphics.

MS can lick my sweaty.

[03cavPA]

For an update: I bit the bullet and bought a Dell machine. It was a reasonable price for an acceptable hardware config. I am NOT singing Dell's praises, just reporting an experience so far.

Got an AMD X2 3800, with 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM. 250 gig SATA hard drive, DVD-RW. It came with "free Vista Home Premium upgrade". I figured I could throw XP on if I didn't like it and just use the restore disks to roll it back to Vista if need be.

OK, I'm not afraid to admit that my initial impressons of Vista are favorable, if somewhat lukewarm. My daughter won't be on the school network, so it won't matter if they support Vista yet or not.

Vista isn't bad, but it looks like a lot of eye candy I can do without. She likes it, and she's the one using it, so I'm OK with it. I DID turn off Aero, and it runs a bit quicker, IMO.

I found some third party stuff that's a bit dodgy on install, so I'm sure the curve will take a while to flatten out. Winamp works smoothly and easily, Quicktime is no problem. Had to go to AIM 6 to get her IM to work well with Vista. Firefox seems to co-exist with IE just fine, but Flashplayer took 2 tries to install without glitches, then it was OK. I dumped the preinstalled MacAfee and I'll try Avast next to see if it works OK. The constant Vista pop-ups asking if I'd like to allow a program to run are annoying as hell, but they don't seem to interfere once I click yes.

DVDs are smooth as silk. Data transfer from an external USB 2.0 drive is effortless, transferred 6 gigs of data in approx. 7 minutes.

Haven't tried to access the school network from outside yet, so we'll find out if there are any problems.

Personally, I think MS is trying too hard to make Windows look like Linux/Unix/MacOS, and I think that says more than they'll admit. When I first fired up the box, I though I was looking at a Linux desktop, fonts and all.

[drunken monkey]

i'm not convinced by vista and can't really see how it can really improve my computing life.

i also can't see how they can make such a fuss over the old thing about having to click start to shut down.
I mean, shouldn't they be spending more time over the quality of the product rather than inane trivial things like that?

[redbirtt]

althou i have no idea what causes the problem, but i have heard many complaints about vista, in fact it is better to switch to xp and even better to linux - my next step..

[pre98zetec]

I've been running Vista Ultimate for the past few days and I do have to say its alot smoother/faster then XP ever was. It doesn't suck as much ram as people might thing (only uses on average 80-120mb more then XP did) and I have all the eye candy on.. All in all I would say vista is a thumbs up for me, every program I've installed work flawless and most games actually run better on vista too.

[03cavPA]

Josh, I have to agree so far. It seems to be running pretty smoothly here, too, but I don't know how it would run on low end hardware, such as the minimum required per MS.

I would have to say that the system requirements for MS' new releases didn't get nearly as severe for previous upgrades as it did for Vista, but it does take a lot of horsepower to run all that eye candy.

What machine specs are you running?

[Toksin]

An O/S should only be the interface between the hardware and the software. It should NOT require high-end hardware to run, even for fancy effects.

Pfah.

[pre98zetec]

Originally Posted by 03cavPA

Josh, I have to agree so far. It seems to be running pretty smoothly here, too, but I don't know how it would run on low end hardware, such as the minimum required per MS.

I would have to say that the system requirements for MS' new releases didn't get nearly as severe for previous upgrades as it did for Vista, but it does take a lot of horsepower to run all that eye candy.

What machine specs are you running?

Asus Kv8-MX
Athlon 64 3200+ 2.2ghz Venice
768mb DDR 400
BFG 6600gt OC
2x 40gb WD
1x 160gb WD


that's about it, not really high end (about average if you ask me) but it runs it pretty good.. Ram is my lowest score on 'Windows experience" (final score is 4.1) but 768mb is really low these days.. I need to upgrade to 2gb. And that's not just because of Vista, 768mb of ram is low esepcially since I play alot of games that require 1gb minimum.

[l_eclipse_l]

Originally Posted by Toksin

An O/S should only be the interface between the hardware and the software. It should NOT require high-end hardware to run, even for fancy effects.

Pfah.

Well said. The program software should dictate how powerful of a machine you need, not an OS.