Just got myself a new laptop that has XP Home Edition SP2. The laptop comes with a discounted option to upgrade to Vista (basic edition). With all the hype surrounding Vista - is it 'a good move' compared to XP, for those of you that have upgraded?
Your laptop will run much faster running XP than it will running Vista, leave it as long as possible before you are forced to upgrade to Vista! (DirectX 10 etc). [OT] I think i should inform you have a strong hate of M$ and windows [/OT]
It depends on which version of Vista. I've got the Ultimate edition and I wouldn't go back to XP. Despite what it seems like most reviews are saying I've noticed no real drop in performance and actually quite a few things load faster in Vista. I'm not really a PC gamer so things might change in that respect but with instant search and pre-fetch I notice basic tasks I'm able to accomplish quite a bit quicker.
This is it: Acer Aspire 3692WLMi LX.AFL05.041 from microwarehouse.co.uk Well, the cost seems a bit of a sheist once you add it all up. It starts off sounding good when they tell you that it is only £26.00, but they then slap on an administration fee of some kind, then there's the shipping fees, which nicely pump things up to around £45.00 This is just the most basic version of Vista by the way
I would stick with XP, Vista may look nice but has allot of problems, Plus that laptop only has 512 mb ram. Vista would run real slow with that much ram.
I've received a free upgrade version of Vista Home Premium for my laptop. I sold it to someone for a bit less than the price in the store. I'm planning to buy me a Mac instead, and leave XP on my laptop.
A small majority of people who have tried Vista think that its great and that its faster than Windows XP, and i am one of those people, it runs awsome on my pc, faster than XP, and also less crashes, infact i have not had one crash yet. Look at my specs too, not exatly a high end computer and its running good, cant wait for SP1, hopefully some of the few bugs will be fixed though. As long as your PC has 1GB of ram, it will run faster than XP with 1GB of ram, Vista with 512mb ram is a no go, total standstill, anyone who has 512mb of ram and is not thinking of upgrading, then deffenitly stay far far far far far VERY far away from Vista
Features of XP: Run the latest software, great multimedia experience and very stable. Features of Vista: Run the latest software, great multimedia experience and very (un)stable. This is the difference between xp and vista in short. But you'll have to pay a gigantic amount of money. So is it worth it? No.
Actually even the 512MB requirement suprised me last night. I decided to try installing Ultimate on one of systems I've just got sitting here that reports 398MB of RAM and so far for surfing and playing the games that come with Vista it hasn't gone over 71% memory usage. I was originally figuring try it out and it's going to slow to a crawl or not start up period but is actually running fairly well. System won't enable AERO which could be a major part of it but apart from that I'd say it's running just as well as XP did on the system.
So, with the 512 MB of RAM that the laptop has, I might be okay running Vista (which, in my case will be the most basic version of it) and perhaps not notice any downgrading of performance compared to running XP Home Edition SP2 (which runs fine on the said laptop)? As people have said, Vista appears to be quit demanding, so I'm left wondering what to do re: upgrading. Well, thanks for the advice everyone. I might just leave things as they are for now and upgrade later.
You CAN use windows with less ram that the minimum. I've ran XP Professional with 64 mb of RAM in the past (was an experiment).
You say its unstable, yet its like alot more stable than windows XP for me, and i dont think i will be the only one, it obviously dont like some peoples hardware. i think the advantages of Vista over XP are for me at least, Faster, more stable, better look (ya ya whatever i know not everyone is bothered about looks) Yea Vista is quite demanding, i thought when i first installed vista i only had 28mb of ram left, the Task Manager is all different now and i think its silly they re arranged it.., but i was actually very pleased when i found it was only using 35-45 % ram on boot, windows used around 150-200mb of ram on boot, Vista uses around300-350mb on boot i think. Right now i am running AOL 9, Opera, azuerus, msn, daemon tools, Desktop Sidebar and logitech software and my memory usage is 51%, when i exit things like aol and opera the memory usage goes to around 40 %, games like Oblivion seem to work really well on maximum and my memory usage at around 71-90%. The fancy Aero effects are also been ran using the GPU so that must slightly give a performance boost, there is also this kool feature called Readyboost, you just insery your memory stick, then if its over 256mb, right click on it, and set it to be used for readyboost, i think its used as some sort of super fast pagefile, inbetween ram and pagefile and apparently increases response time even further but just generally increases the overall performance of the system. Really, at first i was with everyone else and kind of thinking Vista was going to be really crappy, now i have been using it for 2 or 3 weeks, i can see that really it aint, really good, faster than windows XP, better peformance in some games, defenitly worth it for me anyway, i know most of what i say goes against the reviews that have been published by some of the big sites like toms hardware and gamespot, but it works, it does everything i need it to do, no more messing with windowblinds and other programs on startup because the theme is how i like it, allthough in a couple of months i might see if windows blinds is compatible with Vista because i am starting to get abit sick of the orb and the chubby looking taskbar, but its a better enviroment and experience than XP has ever been. From what i can see, you either love it or hate it, possibly about 90% of the population hates it? I should write a thread on my experiences in the war zone Yea maybe you can run with less than the minimum, but i doubt it was a very pleasent experience, when i got my first computer, running windows XP, it had 128mb ram, 1.2ghz Celeron S cpu, and it deffenitly wasent a very good experience at all, i now know why i felt the need to re install windows every couple of weeks, i cramed it full of of things that even now in XP gived me 40% memory usage on boot, and thats out of 1gb, and back then i had 128mb.
65 meg of ram on windows in know using 128 is crappy cant imagne anything below , guess thats was happens when pepole get board
