Im getting a dell latitude soon for college this fall and i have the option of xp or vista. I was just wondering what benefits one would have over the other. mostly im concerned to which one will use the least memory and run the fastest. What extras does vista have that make it more worthwhile than xp? also, will all programs run on vista? Im also obviously more familiar with xp. thanks. any help would be greatly appreciated!
XP will be a better choice by far. Even if you turn off all the eye-candy in Vista, it still uses more memory than XP. It’s also less stable, more annoying, and less compatible with software and hardware.
Right now Vista’s requirements to run well are pretty high for todays computer hardware. Over time and as Vista gets service packs I expect the requirements to be beyond the ability of todays computers to run at a good speed. Unless I really had to I would not buy a Vista computer till computer speeds and memory really can carry Vista well.
OTHO XP is at the end of it’s life, IIRC it’s been out since the days before the 1 GHz cpu, perhaps when, so even with the service packs slowing the computer down any computer bought today should be able to run XP very fast for years. The question is how long M$ will support it and when they will pull the plug.
Well, for speed and memory usage, I’d go with XP.
However, Vista is supposed to be the “way of the future”, so it may be wise to get a machine that can run it adequately.
Welcome to the boards, unbrok3npp. I have two recommendations for the Straight Dope Board, however.
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Put threads asking for opinions in IMHO, the humble opinion board.
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Try to generally avoid the “IMing” style of predominantly lower case, teenage writing.
Again, welcome!
I don’t have a lot of Vista experience, but based on what I’ve experienced, I agree with asterion 100%.
Vista still has a lot of undiscovered security holes (as does any new OS), these will take time to be found and plugged. XP’s been out in the wild for almost a decade now, and has had people hammering away at it for that entire time trying to find security holes. So long as you’ve kept XP updated with patches, you’re probably going to be safer running it than you are Vista. Not to mention that Vista’s probably becoming a favored target of hackers, so the chances of someone finding an previously unknown security exploit in XP are dropping as fewer hackers target it in the coming months.
Of course, if you’re planning on running Direct X 10 based games, then you have to switch to Vista, as XP doesn’t support it and never will.
MS has pledged to support XP until 2014. This is actually fairly common, as Microsoft didn’t EOL Win98 until a couple years ago, so it had nearly 10 years of support. By then, there’s a decent chance a new OS to replace Vista will have come out. I presume when they finally EOL it, they’ll also somehow remove the activation and WGA schemes.
thanks for all the help!
Wow, really? It’s been that long?
I’m no fan of Vista, as you’ll discover if you browse for my postings on it. Nevertheless, there are some cases where you might want it.
If you’re getting a tablet PC (or convertable notebook), the tablet software is much better integrated in Vista than in the XP Tablet Edition.
If the system has a 64-bit CPU in it, you’re wasting some of the capabilities of the CPU unless you run a 64-bit OS: and Vista 64 probably already has more drivers for it than XP-64 (which never really caught on).
If you’re considering using the system for a lot of multimedia stuff (TV, watching/burning DVDs, that sort of thing), the Vista versions that support it seem to work better for me than the media center editions of XP.
If you’re going to want to put more than 2GB of memory in the system, XP systems get flakey (some can go to 3GB, a very few to 4, most are limited to 2GB - Depending on peculiarities of the memory and which XP you’ve got). Vista supports much more (in the 64-bit version only, the 32-bit version’s pretty much the same as XP).
No, not really. It was released in late October of 2001, so not even six years.
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Off to IMHO.
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Beta versions were out before that (though I don’t remember the dates).
But certainly not that long before.
:rolleyes:
That seems strange. My I politely ask for a reference of some sort?
…and were there threads on DOS vs. Windows for Workgroups, Windows 3.1 vs Win 95 and Win 95 vs Win 98?
Sure. This article is about 32-bit Vista, but it’s the same issue (or rather set of issues). Microsoft’s Support Site
You can also google “XP 4GB Memory” to find tons of folks struggling with various of these issues. There are basically 3: BIOS support (less of a problem in 2006+ machines), PCI card memory handling, and a couple of boot flags. These interact in fascinating and unexpected ways.
Thanks, TimeWinder.
Get XP Professional. You’ll be much, much happier. I worked for Dell. Once Vista started it’s pre-launch campaign, I wasn’t allowed to make this recommendation unless it would sell the computer right then and there.
Your main advantages are these: Vista, because it’s brand new, is going to have more bugs than XP. XP’s been around for about five or six years, so Microsoft has worked out many of its kinks. XP Pro is a very stable and reliable OS if you keep the machine virus free. It’ll take up less memory and you don’t have to upgrade components like the video card just to keep mundane tasks from slowing down.
If I understand all the chatter correctly, if the goal were that virtually any program or peripheral* already on the street this last spring* be able to run on, or be plugged into, the computer w/o major hassles, XP at first makes life much easier (and uses less resources). Lots of stuff found itself w/o the right drivers when Vista came out… but it’s not like there’s nothing that works with it, either.
However there are also lifespan issues even if there is longevous support for XP (and it seems there may even be a SP3 in the near future)… specifically, we’re talking requirements creep: upward pressure on system requirements created by [del]MS’s addiction to bloat[/del] Vista’s and Office 2007’s new features, may lead some developers to say “hey, I guess now EVERYONE will have at least 2G RAM and a 256M video card” and at some point you begin encountering new apps and peripherals or upgrades thereto that “expect” your system to be at those specs to really run well.
*If it were me, * were I able to afford it both in terms of money and potential downtime, I’d gert a system that hardwarewise should be comfortably capable of running Vista Home Premium or Business (double whatever they tell you the minimum RAM and video memory should be, or at least expandable to that), buy it with XP MC or XP Pro on it, and upgrade to Vista after the first Service Pack shows up. But that’s just my distrust of first-year-model products in general, speaking.
I should add: If you’re planning on running a lot of multimedia like watching movies, high-octane video games and such like, Vista may give you a better experience.
If you go with Vista, make absolutely sure that the video card, RAM and processor are all well above the minimum requirements. It’s expensive to do so but your overall experience with the system will be better.