If you were using an old PC maybe as 2000 is leaner, otherwise XP is better, as in 2000 they dealt with stability, and in XP they dealt with usability e.g. you get a chance to save your work before XP crashes. I am not aware of any reason to use Vista as TCP/IP stack improvements are incorporated into XP SP3 and you actually need a special USD1000 thumb drive to use a thumb drive as an alternative to swapping to HDD and Vista uses 2GB rAM anyway.
mak, I think XP struck a great balance between speed and stability, which, let's face it, is the holy grail. We hate it when we have BSOD or other system failures more than all else. Vista is an attempted solution to a problem that never existed. It's slower than XP, has redundant wireless security built in that could be micro-managed effectively in XP - and it's so much eye candy that really does hog reams of memory. You literally need twice as much memory to notice clean performance of Vista (as far as Vista goes) versus XP. I don't see added stability with Vista. In fact, they still haven't worked out driver incompatibility.
First of all nothing will run on Win 3.1 anymore and very little will still run on Win95/98. Second while it is true that every OS that has ever come out did indeed have a larger memory footprint than it's predecessor none had the giant leap in memory consumption that Vista has over XP. Like the previous poster mentioned you need double the ram to run Vista over XP and what do you gain? Inferior driver support, less stability and useless eye candy.
vista with sp1 is a lot more unstable on my computer than with regular vista. programs just randomly crash. before sp1, vista ran smoothly with no major problems. i'm running a core 2 duo e6600 with 4 gb of ram.
Actually the last part of this quote contradicts the beginning part - if hardware manufacturers are not designing machines to accommodate XP but Vista then by attrition you ARE being forced to upgrade your software. If new hardware will not support a legacy OS or you don't have the option to choose what OS comes with the machine (not everyone is doing what Dell does) then yes you are being forced to use this new OS. Support for XP was originally supposed to expire in a few years, but with the less than stellar results of Vista production, MS was forced to extend support for the old platform into 2014. MS themselves were forcing their largest revenue source (businesses) to switch to an OS they did not want but they themselves were forced to concede defeat on this front as businesses stopped buying/upgrading and using some of the older software they already had, such as Office XP and 2003. At least until MS fixed the broken software that Vista currently is.
Only just above MS min spec probably as excruciating as running NT4 with the min spec 16MB RAM was. Vista is really designed for the 16 core 64 GB RAM systems of the future
minimum requirements for win98/ME was 16MB with 24 Recommended. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/182751 Most will agree that back then, 64MB was "smooth sailing" and 128 was only for "power users". With XP, the minimum requirements were 64MB with 128 Recommended http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/evaluation/sysreqs.mspx ... although most everyone would agree that running on less than 1GB was shaky.... Jumping to Vista, now minimumis 512 and 1GB recomended... http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx ...2GB is recommended by almost all hardware vendors... While according to microsoft's numbers: Win98-WinXP - 4x at minimum specs, 5x with recommended WinXP - Vista - 8x at minimum specs, 8x recomended but if you look at what hardware vendors have been saying all along, what you should have been runnin on the old OS is now minimum for the new OS in both cases Lets not forget the cost of RAM. Today, 1GB of RAM is about 1/3rd the cost that 32MB was when Win98 was released. IMO, with the cost of RAM so rediculously cheap these days, there is no reason whatsoever that someone shouldn't be running a minimum of 4GB no matter what OS they are running (or at least the max your Mobo will support if it doesn't support 4GB)....which makes this a mute argument....RAM should NEVER be a decision when buying a new PC....always max it out. And just for comparison.... MacOS9 - 32MB of ram (I couldn't find anything earlier than OS9) MacOSX - 512MB of ram Holy jump in system requirements batman... Now, if we look at stability.... Win95 blew donkey nuts for stability when it was first released. It took 4 releases before microsoft finally "got it right". Win98 blew donkey nuts for stability when it was first released. It took a Second release before it was "stable". XP (guess what it did?....yep) blew donkey nuts for stability when it was released. in fact, it sucked so bad, MANY people didn't make the switch from 98 until after sp2....not 1 but 2 service packs it took before people would accept that the new features were worth the upgrade... And lastly, lets look at compatability... Win95-Win98 - very few hardware compatability problems. This of course was simply because it is the exact same OS, just repackaged. Win98-WinXP - Tons of hardware AND software compatability problems. This was because it was actually a new OS. WinXP-Vista - Hardware problems experienced once again...once again, this is a new OS... And just for comparison...MacOS9 - MacOSX...so completely incompatable that Apple bundled them together to get people to switch under the guise of being able to switch back and forth... Basicly....People have become spoiled....quit complaining and suck it up....this is the way of computers...nothing has changed....nothing will change....sure Vista isn't the answers to all your prayers...and SP1 is equivilant to the SP1 of XP (it just fixed the bugs that should hve been fixed at launch)... Vista IS the future of Home/Office computing OS at this point. The only real question at this point is if Vista will become the new ME (where MS scraps it's progress and rebuilds from the core) or if it will become the new XP where 2 years from now everyone will forget that Vista, pre-spX, even exists.
Actually, I don't remember there being the kind of reaction to XP that there has been to Vista. Not sure who's getting emotional. I just thought your post was interesting given that problems with Vista are so bad that even MSFT execs are on record acknowledging them, and major hardware makers have been forced to completely change their deployment plans in response to the uproar over Vista. Did that happen with XP? FWIW, I never had a problem using WIN 2K Pro. After switching to XP, I saw programs crashing a lot more. This is the point. It seems to be a revenue grab as opposed to a timely rollout of an OS that's ready for prime time.
Me like eye candy. What's wrong w/eye candy? Isn't any GUI eye candy to some extent? Vista looks cool, sue me. Been using Vista for a year. I will be holding off on the SP1 until they work out any bugs though. Since I'm not having any probs, it's the old "why fix it if it ain't broke?". Harold
If Win 3.1 were a stable, secure system and if I were able to follow the market, I'd probably install it. It could run on a ramdrive and be fast as hell...why can't MSFT come up with something like this?