Well vista has been talk of techies for a while now. Some bad some good. It caused more problem to the tech people then general uses. However if you are scared of trying vista, you can actually try it keeping your XP intact. You can do that using Virtual PC by MS. Here is the link to download and read more. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx
I have a PC that is running Vista. So far, I have not had any problems with it. I am pleased with it.
You can create a seperate partition of your current hard drive and install Vista on that without losing any of your current data or your XP OS. Search "Vista on seperate partition" on google and you should find some step-by-step tutorials on it.
Not sure what is so wrong with Vista, I have it on my laptop and after a few days of use - I like it more than XP.
Vista eats a lot of resources. It's like a proxy. If you put it on a shared hosting account, it will eat up the resources in minutes, and then people will get slow loading times on all otehr sites. If you put a proxy on your own, dedicated box with 1gb ram, unmetered bandwidth, dual core processor, you will get a much better turnout from your proxy. Same with the VISTA OS. put it on a junk computer, it won't function well. (where XP would function perfectly) put it on an over priced computer, i.e. Dell XPS laptop, and you got your self one monster of a dedicated box. I hope that helps.
Vista is better.. I am on 512mb ram and I am runing vista FINE! I have had no program problems, It is FINE! nothing is wrong with it.
That is a misconception. Only people who can not afford Vista or are bound by office rules to use some other OS or for any other reason can't get Vista spread these rumours. I am on Vista home premium & it's perfect!
What's better about it? The fact that it runs doesn't make it a better OS. That's untrue. I can afford Vista, and both my laptops can run it. However I choose not to upgrade my laptop. I run it on my notebook, and it's bloated with no noticeable useful features. It does use up more resources, that is a fact. Why would I want to upgrade to something that adds nothing but inconvenience and more resource usage?
The fact is; when I was on XP I always used to get Blue screens after boot up or somthing stupid like that. On this, it automaticly fixes it so you can do your work ect.
I have never got that, so it's not an inherent bug with XP. I would expect that a clean install of XP would have worked just as well to fix it as upgrading to Vista. Any other advantages? I'm hoping i've been missing some incredible feature that makes Vista worthwhile.
User friendly is subjective. I don't believe transparent windows makes an OS user-friendly. It's newbie friendly, sure, but it's no more efficient at getting stuff done productively than XP. I've got Vista Business, so I don't have the media centre .
The General makes some strong points here. Vista does appear to be just a prettier GUI that eats up more resources. A "better OS" to me would be something that runs more reliably and efficiently than it's predesessor. There are no new "wow factor" features that relate to these two aspects. It seems only a new shiny and sparkly way of displaying the same data.
I have run premium on a laptop before. It sucks. It was a 512mb, 3400 amd athlon (or something in that region, i dont remember now) and it wasn't worth it,
I got vista had a few problems setting up my sound card and wireless but once that got done, everything is running smoothly "for a microsoft product".
Best part of vista are 1. more stable 2. Looks very nice. Worst part is not supporting lot of softwares. For example I am a web developer developed quite a few websites on visual studio 2002. After I install vista I figured vista doesn't support that. I had no other option but using a virtual machine meaning two operating system on same machine. I didn't have to partition or anything. It worked, but ate 2 days of my time installing same software separately in two different OS.
I bought an HP Laptop with Vista Home Premium. Fot the first two weeks I complained about every part of Vista. After a couple months, I stopped complaining and everything is still working fine. I'm sure there are people who are having problems with bugs but I do a lot of graphics work and a lot of self produced video and it is great.