See title. I’ve heard that there are quite a few backwards-compatibility issues with Vista; how serious is this? Will many older programs be rendered unusable? Any other issues to take into account here?
XP
Moved from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Gfactor
General Questions Moderator
Is OEM XP still available on new computers? I had heard Dell is now charging companies $150 extra to downgrade to XP.
You may also have to get new drivers for some programs and peripherals.
To answer your question, if you are conversant with XP, I would definitely advise sticking with it, rather than spending lots of time learning all the stuff that Vista has changed, for what reason I cannot fathom.
OS X
If you get XP, I’d make sure it’s XP Pro, not the home version. I have Vista on mine, and while there are some differences, not all of them are annoying. Why they changed the toolbars for MS Word is a mystery to me: it took me five minutes to figure out how to close a document without closing the program itself.
Not considering a Mac?
Vista is fine for pretty much everything these days. If you have a specific app that may have problems you can run it in a virtual machine. The “downgrade” is basically paying for an XP licence after you already paid for a licence for vista in the base price of the machine.
Check out newegg and such, lots of options.
I bought a new laptop last year and it has Vista. While I know it isn’t popular, I haven’t had any problems with it at all. I bought it right around the time XP was being phased out. I was all set to buy the XP machine and then this Vista one showed up on a great sale.
Of course, this machine is used for web surfing, email, watching dvds, watching and listening to online video and music, and basic work stuff.
This describes my experience with Vista as well.
Vista is quite the punching bag, but it’s a very good and secure operating system. I’ve got it on the laptop that I’m writing this post on.
I just got a brand new Dell Studio 17 (great box so far!) and decided to go with Vista because more and more of my customers have it, and I need to be able talk them through things.
So far no problems at all. Things are different than XP, true, but I’m actually learning that I like some of the new stuff. The start menu, for example. At first blush I didn’t care for it, but now I love it.
I haven’t found any programs that were designed for XP that don’t run on it, and even most of the ones designed for Windows 98 that I’ve tried have worked.
I’ve had no problems hooking back up to the various networks I work on, although configuring the first network access did take a little looking around (and that first network config was actually a year or so ago when I set up a system for a customer, but I do remember it took some looking to find things in the new places).
My experience has been that most of the problems are with older or non-compataible hardware or drivers. And as someone else noted there may be issues with older peripherals, although I will note that my printer at in my office is a 15 year old HP laser printer and it connected and worked the first time with no problem.
After about three weeks of using it full time, I like Vista. Time will tell, of course, but I’d say get it and don’t worry, you’ll be fine.
Disclaimer: I haven’t used Vista more than a few minutes. Personally, I’d recommend a Mac, but you didn’t mention that, so I won’t belabor it.
I think the fears about Vista are overblown. Unless you have some legacy hardware you want to connect to your laptop (old printer or scanner or some weird add-on card?), there’s no reason to suspect you’ll have driver problems with Vista.
If you buy a new laptop that’s designed to run Vista, I’d get Vista for it.
Likewise.
However, make sure you have at least a gig and a half of memory, because it won’t work well on less (I bought the cheapest laptop available at the time, and I had to upgrade it a couple of months later). As even the most basic laptops start at 2 gigs these days, you won’t have much of a problem there.
key is that the machine has ‘designed for Vista’ label. it wi;ll also be compatible with Win7 out in the fall. (do not get a laptop that says ‘compatible for Vista’ ).
Assuming you have a designed for Vista machine, you would be ill-advised to install a 6 year old OS with security designs at end of life.
I like Vista and I’m looking forward to checking out Win7 too.
Is there a specific piece of software or hardware you’re concerned about?
Thanks for the responses, everyone.
One thing that seems strange to me is that I’ve been looking at random system requirements for stuff, and the ones for Vista are so much more than for XP. For example, on a Logitech Quickcam, minimum is 128 MB RAM and 1.4 GHz CPU for XP and 512 MB and 2.4 GHz CPU for Vista. What’s up with that? Is Vista really that much more resource-inefficient?
I guess I have some hardware that I’m not sure about, like my TP-Link wireless card and a bunch of random USB devices, like multi-card reader, external DVD drive, external hard drives, etc. Some of them (like the reader and hard drives) are 3-4 years old.
As for software, Logic Pro Audio 5 (which is kinda old now) is one of the big ones. Also, just random programs (like Powertab, Wenlin, etc.) I’ve collected over the years. I guess most of them should work OK if they worked with XP, right?
EDIT: As for getting a Mac, I’m pretty locked in to PC, since I legally own a decent amount of expensive software, a lot of which is Windows-only.
I think most of the hate for Vista isn’t so much because it’s that bad of an OS, its just that XP (after the Service Packs were released) worked pretty well for most people, and most users don’t really have a burning desire to learn the ins and outs of a new OS when their old one already did everything they need.
I have a laptop with Vista, and it does everything I ask it to pretty painlessly.