Help - Which Version of Vista

[Pete H]

I'm about to buy a new PC and need advice on which version of Windows I should go for. Sales people have offered Home Premium as the one to go for but now I discover that theres 2 versions of that 32bit and 64bit.
PC is for home use. Does anyone know the difference? will it make any difference to me for home use? Or is it best to stick to XP Pro?

Finally, what processor ie Dual2Core or should I go for Quad Core?

I'm sinking fast in a sea of information.

Help


Rgds

Pete

[StephM]

Personally I hate Vista. The coding has been done by a group of clowns. Alot of folk I know that have bought machines with it preinstalled are removing it and installing XP. Many in the IT world are calling for it to be binned, but that won't happen. Although a couple of folk I know don't have any issues and seem to like it, only a couple mind. The Ultimate edition has all the whistles and bells but may just be overkill for what you need. If your going to be using it purely for web browsing and a couple of apps then Home Basic should be fine, again premium would be better. The 32 bit version will be fine but 64 bit is now the way forward. If you can afford it go for the fastest Quad Core processor you can get and you'll need more RAM than a field of sheep have had. Vista has inherent speed issues due to poor coding, the most important issue for you is to get the fastest processor and as much RAM as will fit in it. We have rolled out a few Vista Business systems at work with 3GB RAM and Dual Core CPU's and they run far slower than XP systems with a quarter of their spec.

Interestingly, whilst on a Vista course last year I was told of a way of upgrading any Vista version to Ultimate, something about not accepting the agreement during install, run install 3 times, refuse each time then on the 4th accept and it'll install ultimate for you. I'll need to double check this because during the course nothing worked on Vista and I had started to fall asleep by this point. Doing a search on Google might reveal something.

Or you could just forget all that nonsense and get a MAC.

[Marky Mark]

Sounds like the best version of Vista is XP

Someone recently described it as the Marmite of operating systems.

Unfortunately Vista is the way forward if you intend to stick with Micro$oft, it has been out for a while now and has a few updates already.

Good luck

MM

ps, I'm still on XP pro.

[intothebigblue]

Personally, I would ask the place you're buying it from if they offer an option to install XP instead. If they're worth their salt, they should do.

Vista, whether you like it as an OS or not, is a HUGE system hog and requires a fast CPU and loads of RAM. XP on the other hand, will work quite happily with anything that's half decent.

As for dual and quad core, here's the skinny. CPUs have arguably reached their speed peak for the time being (at least without overclocking and custom cooling solutions-way outside normal home users needs). So, what the chip manufacturers have done is fit more processors on one chip. Now it depends on the software you're running and whether or not it can utilise one, two or four of these processors. If you run a benchmark on a program that can do four, on a single core cpu, say a 2Ghz and then again on a 2ghz quad core, it'll run it four times as fast. Run a program that can utilise only one processor on a single core and a quad core and they'll be roughly the same (quad maybe a bit faster due to having a bigger on board cache).

So, it depends what you're going to use the machine for. Bang for buck at the moment are dual cores. Get the best you can afford.

And avoid Vista!

[BigHairyAl]

xp! xp! xp! xp !xp!

[nigelH]

I got Vista business on a laptop and upgraded the desk top to the same after a couple of months. OK it needs a bit of setting up and it does want a lot of RAM because it is very disk intensive but the cache works.

I had some compatability issues at first, like Proplanner, but nothing that there wasn't a known work around for.