If you go vista, I would recommend a better video card and 4 g of ram...2 g is the minimum for vista to really work...
I work as a bench tech and I honestly cant stand having use a vista machine to perform backups and such. It causes problems with file ownership, doesnt recgnize some drives that an xp machine picks up right away. All you are buying is a "prettier" version of xp. Stick with XP. I took a shop computer that was running vista ( athlon 64x2 4400 3gb ram) and loaded xp up and that thing flies now =] . Good thing acers still put out mostly all xp drivers for vista machines
go for XP, Vista is crap, asks you 2-3 times before executing an application.. thinks we are laymen sitting out there
Also, XP doesn't require a minimum 40gb hdd with 15 gb free to install. Thus, it isn't bloated. You can pair XP down to somwhere around 500mb-1gb if you know what you are doing.
I would go with Vista. Its best to keep up with the newer technology, as that is what all new software will be geared for. It does seem to be slower on startup, but it seems most dont restart their computers to often. It also seems to have a lot of good features. I love XP, but will upgrade to vista when I buy my next PC!
XP without a doubt! Vista too new, too many "issues" going on with it. wait two years then MAYBE vista.
As mmastation said, Vista is just a prettier version of XP. I would recommend you go for XP with WindowBlinds to make your XP look like Vista
Hope a more stable version of vista would be around, till then i prefer XP. Just booting machine faster does not mean it is the best
I'm still undecided on if I want XP or Vista... I'll have to look around some more. To me it wouldn't make any sense going from my current XP professional down to XP home on my new PC. I'm on a limited budget, so I'm unable to purchase the more expensive xp professional for my new pc. Then again I don't want to purchase vista if I'm unable to get any of my old stuff to work. I'm in a loose loose situation I guess lol... Another question... multiple people have stated to go with 256MB graphics card instead of a 128... why is this? Would it give me better graphics or better overall performance?
The better question is why get a quadcore when there isnt much but cancer research that needs that much PC. Seriously, you're buying a computer that wont get its full use until 2012 and you're paying 2007 prices.
If you're not a gamer why use Windows at all? Go with a Mac. Or get a cheap dell w/ core 2 duo and put os x on it. 99.99999% flawless OS. PS: Vista is an embarrassment. Go with XP if anything.
If you follow lockgnome he is upgrading his Vista PC by an Fdisk process and loading XP. I don't care for Vista; but then I am not sure I would buy a Dell at this time. I'd go to Fry's and get a Compaq or HP on sale. I just got a nice AMD Compaq laptop for $449. 80 GB HD, 1 GB RAM, DVD writer.
I bought a similar spec computer a few weeks back from Dell. I could choose between XP and Vista and I chose XP as I wanted to be able to use all my old software and hardware, such as printer and scanner and a few other bits. Some people I know with vista have had problems!
It's only a difference of $50.00 which isn't much more than the 2.4Ghz core 2 duo. It it were a couple hundred bucks for the quadcore, I would leave it alone.
I know what you mean, it's just so hard to tell by all the bad stuff I'm reading online. What it is is that one person with a slow PC (barely capable of running vista) says something bad like it's to slow, it crashes, etc. Then 10-15 people read that and they go and post it on other forums saying how they had "personal" experience with vista and how horrible it is. When it all comes down to it, they just read how horrible that OS is online and have never touched vista in person. It makes me wonder if Vista really isn't a bad OS. Sure it's a new system, so it will have it's ups and down (Just like XP did).