Just wanted to see what the current sentiment is now that Vista has been out on the market for about a year now. If you were getting a new laptop today, would you have Vista or XP on it? Have they worked out most of the bugs on Vista yet?
Maverick, Vista is a very nice interface. While many of the problems have been worked out, make sure that if you get Vista, that it comes pre-installed on your laptop. Otherwise you may find that getting drivers is a nightmare. I strongly recommend that you do this one test. Hard boot (from power off) a vista laptop, then do the same with an XP laptop on similar hardware. If it fails that test you will answer your own question. Make sure that the laptop you get has a very potent graphics card, and a very potent CPU and generous amounts of RAM, probably 2GB+. Basically, to get the gorgeous interface of Vista, you will need a substantially more powerful computer than had you gone with XP, e.g., http://www.dell.com/content/product...b_m1730?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~tab=bundlestab nitro
For trading.... XP Pro hands down. The extra functionality and facelift that Vista got doesn't do anything for your trading.
I run a 2 year old Laptop with XP home 2 GB Ram Centrino M740 1.73 mhz. If you go Vista you will probably need 4gb Ram to equal the performance of my 2gb, and get no advantage whatsoever in stability.
Only advantage I can see in Vista 32 is the ability to use a thumb drive in a USB port as a substitute for the PC using hard drive when RAM is exceeded, but then again Vista isusing 2GB of RAM just to run itself. Only advantage I can see of Vista 64 is the ability to up RAM above 4GB without the driver and maybe dll issues of XP64. The improvements to the internet socket of XP will it seems be incorporated in XP SP3
Spoke to Lenovo last night about a new notebook and asked the guy the same question. He said they were still using XP at the worksite and he was still using XP at home, even though he could have upgraded for free. XP Pro supported out to 2014 (per gnome). Went to a couple of notebook specialty shops to browse, asked the guys there the same question. Uniform response was - if you intend to run anything other than the plainest vanilla apps or Office suite, get XP. Older apps, or anything not totally mainstream, and you're asking for trouble with Vista. Question is this - what is the compelling reason to switch (one reason given by mokwit directly above, but as he points out, it is Vista's large RAM requirements that would create a problem in the first place, for most users). Surely it's not the pretty graphics, for most of us here.
Recently bought a Lenovo w/ Vista and can tell you from my experience, I've found no good reason to buy Vista. Still have half a mind to take this back to the dealer and get XP installed.
No, it's not the pretty graphics for me. I keep pretending that one day MSFT will release an operating system that does not have 10k drivers that hold it together and does not get ruthlessly attacked by every spyware known to man. It's so f*cking annoying. Yes, I know, typical response will be to get a Mac. But the Mac is still not that trader application friendly yet. Seriously, do you guys think it's even possible for Windows to be driverless at some point in the future?
Install TinyXP without ms internet tools or drivers to see how fast and small windows is without. If you do that then you still need to load the drivers for your specific hardware.