Be careful of the laptop you buy fearless... some companies that are supplying vista loaded notebooks don't produce drivers for XP, so if you don't like vista, you can't load XP onto them with all hardware working properly... HP's out here in Oz is one example.
I have heard that MSFT won't be putting out a fix for Vista until the first half of next year at the earliest. I bought a computer with Vista and took it back 2 days later. Definitely reminded me of ME for some reason. XP Pro is the way to go.
Windows Vista, yes or no... HELL NO!! Vista is slower than XP by far. You'll regret it, especially if you're a scalper. and I'm not talking boot times (although it is a slower boot as well). Just moving the mouse around on the screen and clicking on items is slower.
wiht vista remmber to run everything as administrator and put older programs in compatibility mode, i dont have any problems
Hi All, Just my opinion here so please no flames. I worked for MSFT from Win 2.0 through XP. Vista is a huge move forward, but not what most would see. If you just use it like XP it is just a bit slicker. You for sure should wait for SP1. There are a lot of bugs that will be fixed. Most a low severity and just an annoyance. Where Vista is significant is in the improved user input methods: -- Pen -- Voice Most people will not use these features because they will not buy a tablet. I got the Fujitstu T4220 and Vista is a akin to Windows 1.0. Simliar in how significant of a move forward it is. Those who compare it to ME don't understand. ME was a split team effort with the B team doing it. Vista had to ship because too much of the team was done. You can't have a bunch of people waiting around. Kinda like haveing too much cash in a bull market. I use the pen and voice together for about 1/2 of my work at my desk and about 95% when traveling. Both are primitive but very usable. Combine that with either bluetooth phone and dialup or WAN ($$$), you have a great travel machine to keep up on your work. At home I use an external monitor and run a full blown system because the CPU and memory management runs really well. So Bottom line, If you can wait for SP1, do it. If you want to really use Vista, get a tablet and use the voice. Probably 2008 or 2009 will be the year of the tablet. Vista is the continued march toward a central CPU and having a bunch of input devices you interact with wirelessly. Dean
Our team has removed Windows Vista from all of our laptops and desktops and reloaded them with Windows XP. Vista is just not ready for prime time in an investing, trading, or development environment. Our only systems with Vista are those designated for testing software in Vista environment....everywhere else the systems are running XP. This was done after a complete evaluation of the benefits and drawbacks of Vista. Most corporations, both large and small, have come to a similar decision. - Greg
I just bought a laptop that comes with MS Vista Ultimate, but I'll be installing XP Pro SP2 on a separate partition and make it dual-boot. My trading software runs well on XP, so I'm not about to move it to Vista yet.
What about linux/unix? Haven't used either personally but from what I understand it is a faster operating system.
I can't see any reason to use Vista, there is no advantage, only nuisance and a waste of precious system-resources. If you think your Vista runs ok on your brand new machine, try it with XP, it'll blaze. We migrate older versions of XP when we replace machines, sometimes a new registration is needed. This way, and by buying a few backup OEM XP's we are assured to be able to install XP for another 5 years at least. By that time M$ will have dropped Vista and gone on to their next OS, probably based on Linux. It's the only way they can solve this mess. I think Linux would be the ideal system for trading, extremely reliable and controllable. TWS can run on it, but hardly any other apps. We are investigating if those apps can run in a Wine or VMWare platform within Linux. We do use Debian Linux for mail, print and webservers and they run 24/7 with zero maintenance. This is what we want for trading. XP is ok, but Vista is a toy. Ursa..