Is Vista sufficiently bug free yet? There is a nice looking laptop going on offer at Aldi on Thursday but its running Vista and I still seem to be reading less than good reviews of it. Any advice please? The spec is exactly what I need and it is under £500 all in.
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Only time will tell.. but it works, just make sure any hardware you intend to plug in (printers etc..) has vista drivers available.
You can get laptops at just over £320 from here if you want to save some money
AMD® Turion 64 X2 Mobile TL52 Vista™ Business 15.4" WXGA 1024MB 120GB 256MB ATI Radeon® Xpress 1150 8x DVD Writer £387 N05153
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i've been using vista for about 2 months now and it seems fine.. there's a couple of little bugs that pop up now and then but nothing thats gonna kill the laptop off or anything.. i'd go for it...
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I'd definitely go for it. We bought the last Aldi laptop the other month. They flew off the shelves like hotcakes and were sold out within 10 minutes of the store opening. All my local stores sold out within the hour and I had to drive 40 miles to pick one up from another store (they don't usually reserve so I was very thankful they made the exception)!
If you are seriously considering buying it then get there early - i.e. if the store opens at 9am on Thurs get there no later than 7.30 and join the queue! I'm not kidding, these things GO!
As for Vista, I've had no probs with it. Took a few days to familiarise myself but i'm now switching between XP on the PC and Vista on the laptop with great ease. I've not noticed any bugs at all but do be sure you download Vista drivers for your existing hardware (printer, etc) as the XP ones on your CDs prob won't work.
For the specs it's an absolute bargain. Hesitate and you'll kick yourself for missing out as these offers prove very popular.
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Ive been running Vista Ultimate since the day it came out on my laptop and it works absolutly fantastic. No bugs that i have seen, though, i have had a few updates in the past couple of weeks
make sure the laptop has atleast 1gb ram cos it needs that to run smooth. Prefferably, get 1.5gb + (i run at 1.5GB and its smooth as anything and tv on it works fantasitc)
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If Vista does not offer anything you actually need, I wouldn't suggest an update. And yes, I'd at least wait for the first service pack. WinXP has only been rock stable since SP2 for me (it was already quite ok at SP1 though). Besides, Vista is not actually cheap, and no, not all drivers/software are compatible yet.
Personally, I could get a legal Vista licence for free via Academic Alliance, and I have a 3.5GHz CPU, 2GB RAM and 320GB hard drive. But WinXP is rock stable, uses little resources, and offers everything I need. Therefore, I will not update in a while.
At the end of the day, it's your call! If you want to have the useless eye candy which sucks up your resources so that you can brag about how you have the latest Windows which looks better, then by all means go for it right now.
Some people will say "oh, but it's not all eye candy". True, but whatever it can do that could be appealing to me, there are some freeware working for WinXP which do it for me.
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I've also been running Vista since the first pre-release candidate. I bought Ultimate when it was released and haven't turned back. There are however, some things i'd do to Vista as soon as its installed.
- Turn off UAC
- Turn off indexing
- Take an image backup using the tool provided
The UAC is probably the most annoying 'feature' of Vista. It's a protection system which just gets in the way (it asks you to confirm everything, and sometimes prevents software from installing correctly).
Like a guy earlier said, make sure you have drivers for all your devices. Also remember that some of them may be supported natively within Vista. And one more thing - don't expect all of your software to work after the upgrade! There is a , which will help you decide whether it's worthwhile. You can install and run this on your existing setup and it will indicate possible bottlenecks and incompatabilities.
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I've also been running Vista since the first pre-release candidate. I bought Ultimate when it was released and haven't turned back. There are however, some things i'd do to Vista as soon as its installed.
- Turn off UAC
- Turn off indexing
- Take an image backup using the tool provided
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Remove the locations it has listed in "indexing options" (control panel). Also look at the other options which can be disabled for better performance in the link I posted earlier.
I agree with Albertross.... nowadays, a router will provide most of the security a home user would need. Software firewalls do little more than make you more paranoid than you already are. The Windows firewall in combination with a hardware firewall is plenty for the average Joe.
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The point I'm making is what percentage of joe public bothers to analyse every prompt for access to the internet by an application or component, and what percentage ticks allow to every prompt. I reckon 99% of people tick allow when given a prompt, which makes the outbound protection redundant. Everything and it's dog is internet aware nowadays, you can't even run Windows help without it trying to talk to the outside world, the inevitable consequence is that most people tick allow. Yeah I saw the point you were making after writing the post, and I do know what you mean.
Still though, that's a user problem, and doesn't mean it shouldn't be installed, but rather that users should be educated. Also for a lot of firewalls, there's a "simple" mode. Kerio for example, which is pre-set with many typical values so there are less prompts.
I agree with Albertross.... nowadays, a router will provide most of the security a home user would need. Software firewalls do little more than make you more paranoid than you already are. The Windows firewall in combination with a hardware firewall is plenty for the average Joe. A router does provide "most" of the protection, what it doesn't provide is:
- Outbound protection
- Port hijacking, or working on a per application basis per port
- Provide unique protection per pc
- Provide any sort of local (within your network) protection
- Any form of user interaction. Ok so a lot of prompts can be bad, but with a router you'll know nothing.
A combination of a router and software firewall sorts all of that. Some may sat it's being overly paranoid, but that's usually a good approach given today world and the lengths people will go to just to get at you.
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I already turn off file indexing and seurity centre as soon as I install XP And few other things.
You BOUGHT Vista ultimate? What are you doing on HereExpert anyway? ;p
As for the upgrade advisor, I do understand that it will point out incompatibilities, and might tell you to buy more RAM or such, but I can't imagine it saying "Hey, but your machine works mightily fine, you really don't need to buy Vista from us".
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I kinda see it differently. I mean, I understand the view that 'if it aint broke don't fix it' - but in all honesty, I went into buying vista without knowing too much about it (despite having used the beta) and was really glad I did. Because although it didn't provide too much new functionality thats of real use, it does run a hell of a lot faster for business apps than XP. So purely from a productivity point of view it was worthwhile for me. So the advisor may not say "yeah, your current OS works great - dont upgrade" but it also wont say "if you install this OS, you'll see a 33% performance increase". Swings and roundabouts really.
And yes, I did buy it! I've been a naughty boy in recent times, but everything I run is legitimate now because I have a business to think about (gone are my student days). And although I think I paid around £120 for an OEM version, I think it was worth every penny.
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And yes, I did buy it! I didn't mean "you could nick it for free", I meant I wouldn't be able to spend so much in an OS upgrade myself. So out of the two of us, you are the capitalist
Applications going faster? That's interesting, I never heard of that before. Do you mean business apps such as MS Office, or such as SAP or Oracle?
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I'm a Linux user, but still use Windows at work, and keep a dual boot install of Vista at home (for work stuff).
I like it too. As long as you've got a machine capable of handling it, and no older hardware (where by drivers might not be available). It's very slick, and works nicely. A similar experience to OS X. I've not had any problems with it yet.
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Well - various improvements i've found really. I mean, the general speed of Vista is faster IMHO. It seems to handle multi-tasking a lot more smoothly, and has better fault tolerance when things do go wrong with apps.
I run mySQL server and develop websites on my work PC. Im also a photographer, so there is a lot of photo-editing required - all of which is quicker since installing Vista.
I think a key point to remember here though, is the speed of the overall machine. ON a fast machine, vista makes the most of the hardware and the overall feel is a lot faster (certainly in comparison to XP). On a slow machine, vista may struggle or will appear average.
I'll tell you one thing I did notice - even when you've loaded on a lot of software, Vista still maintains it's speed. XP was an 'install once a quarter' type OS. it ran well, but once it started filling up it got slower. I haven't reinstalled my Vista since release day and it's still beautifully fast (despite all the stuff I use and have installed).
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Ive been running Vista since it came out as well. Had no problems with it, runs very smoothly. All my hardware and software works fine.
Like others have said, Just make sure your Hardware and software that you use is supported by checking their relevant websites. make sure you load the new vista drivers and it should all work fine.
If you try loading XP drivers you may have problems.
Anyway according to Microsoft, XP home is not going to be supported 2 years after Vista Release. So why go for a OS(XP) on a new machine that wont have support in 1 1/2years time? esp if you want it for 4-5 years.
Also can someone tell me "why to turn off file indexing?" thanks
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Well, it's preference really. But when Vista is idle, it begins indexing files and directories for quicker access later. Now, I have a few issues with this. The first one is that I don't like my harddisk chundering away while im trying to concentrate. You can hear it, and you know it's happening! The second, is that Vista is designed in such a way that indexing is pretty quick on the fly anyway - so unless you've got a million files on your HD, it really isn't worthwhile. Finally, Vista almost always starts this process when im still working on stuff, which has a significant performance hit.
Just try it and see for yourself! Once you've switched off indexing, you'll never go back!
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Well, it's preference really. But when Vista is idle, it begins indexing files and directories for quicker access later. Now, I have a few issues with this. The first one is that I don't like my harddisk chundering away while im trying to concentrate. You can hear it, and you know it's happening! The second, is that Vista is designed in such a way that indexing is pretty quick on the fly anyway - so unless you've got a million files on your HD, it really isn't worthwhile. Finally, Vista almost always starts this process when im still working on stuff, which has a significant performance hit.
Just try it and see for yourself! Once you've switched off indexing, you'll never go back! Thanks for that, i didnt know that. I'll give it a go
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Millionaire.... also . It covers all the services that run by default in Vista. You can disable many of them to squeeze out every last drop of power from your OS. Even if you dont disable anything, it's an interesting read!
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Yes go for it and buy the laptop - there should be no reason why you can't install XP on the laptop if you have any problems with Vista - you should be able revert back to Vista in the future .