Definitely go with XP Professional - Vista is just not ready for primetime - there are countless non-supported things, driver issues, needless slowdown of your machine CPU for useless "checking" for illegal stuff, incredible resource waste of memory and CPU cycles compared to XP Pro for no real benefit. Vista is kind of like the old "Millenium" version - it is worthless in its current state and you will be counting the days until the next real upgrade so you can ditch it. Much better to stay with XP Pro and just wait until Microsoft gets the job done correctly on a future Windows release. My wife got a new laptop from Dell earlier this year. We ordered it under "Small Business" since it was for her business and there was a good special discount then. I noticed that under Small Business they allowed us to pick "XP Professional" instead of Vista, and they included the actual "XP Professional" full CD when we received the laptop. Do not be fooled by the $10 "disk" option - if you select that under personal as I did with a previous system from Dell, they will send you nothing but a "restore disk" which is not the same as the original XP disk. If you order the machine under Small Business, there will also not be the sh*tload of bloatware auto-installed on the machine that fills your desktop with useless icons, 6-month trials for AOL and other useless stuff and then you have to waste time deinstalling and decontaminating your system to get back to vanilla again.
1. In some circles Vista is known as "aka Me II" 2. May be a matter of semantics, but my disks say "Reinstallation", not "Restore", and they are a full copy of XP only.
I got Windows Vista on a dell vostro 1500 laptop. I like the Dell and I like Vista. I have had no problems with it. I am glad I got it. People were saying not to get it, they say that about xp, 2000, 98 etc when they come out but they will have to get it sooner or later. Might as well Get it now and save on having to pay for it later. I was also told not to get an N router because they are new also. I went ahead and ordered the Intel N wireless card and I got a Linksys WRT150N,.... it works flawlessly.
I have Vista and use Firefox. I have never had a problem with this site or any other. I have the cheapest slowest sbc connection for $14.99. I connect wirelessly through an N router and it is fast(blink of the eye to surf) and has been flawless.
Been using it for several months now. Not one problem w/it. Not one. Firefox runs fine, Metastock runs fine, everything I've tried runs fine. No crashes, nothing. Runs great. Harold
I really like windows vista ultimate, i have had 3 problems in the past 4 months, where I had to restart the machine because I got the infamous Blue screen error. Not terrible, but not tolerable either. I have gone back to XP Pro on my trading machine. I would go with XP pro, at least until Vista gets a few of the kinks worked out and put out one of there major service pack upgrades, once that happens. Vista is the way to go, and I will go back to it because I really like Vista. JMHO!
For trading, why take the chance with Vista? There are obviously some concerns. You should only switch if Vista offers you something XP doesn't. For trading, I haven't found any advantages so I'm sticking with XP for now. XP is supported everywhere. You can always upgrade to Vista later on.
It seems that the questions you must answer are: - how important are trading interuptions to you? - are you tolerant of fixing things when problems occur? - does vista offer anything you need? - do you just love to have the latest and greatest. If you answer no to the second to last then unless you are just playing with trading you would be better off staying with XP Pro until at least SP1 of Vista.