I have a laptop that is Windows Vista capable from Dell. I want to upgrade to Vista from XP, at least eventually, but I have some questions about doing this. 1. Should I send it to Dell to do this update or can I do it myself? 2. Should I even consider this upgrade or wait for a while until the Vista is out and some of the bugs and breaches of new software are gone? 3. Would an update even be worth it, does Vista offer that much more than XP? 4. What is the cost of Vista going to be?
I would wait for Vista to go live before making a decision. I'm reasonably sure Vista will have a plethora of bugs which will take at least half a year of updates to resolve.
If the laptop initially did not come with it, I would NOT recommend it. Did you have a choice to do that when you bought it? I bet that if you did, you would have done it "just to see." I don't think I have ever sent anything back to Dell to install anything. Did you buy the warranty that includes doing this? If you did, I don't see why not. If you didn't, they're going to charge you an arm and a leg for something you could do yourself. You're getting smarter at this computer stuff, man. I am proud of you. You are ASKING QUESTIONS before you go and do something silly. I like that. obligatory gay quote: And I am not gay, man... not that there's anything wrong with that.
I read on the Internet ... Vista is to XP what Me was to '98. Just say no. Essential Vista reading: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/13/vista_suicide_note_r.html http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt
DON'T do it. Vista is new, and as with all MS products, I'm sure it will have some flaws, possibly major. Wait a year or two for updates and fixes if you absolutely have to have it. If the only reason you're interested in it is style, you can pimp out your XP interface to look like Vista with a little hunting for software on the internet. From what I've read, it's a resource hog, and it's designed to push hardware development (MS and Intel are in bed together, which means MS made a product that would requre people to buy faster machines), so your laptop, while compatable, is probably substandard. Heck, I have a $3500 Dell XPS M1720 gaming laptop, and I wouldn't put Vista on it for fear that it would slow it down. I've said it before, and I'll say it here: XP is rock solid, and is the Windows 98se of the 00s, and Vista will probably be known as the Windows ME of the 00s.
Thanks Swoly. Contrary to popular belief I remember what you guys tell me and most of my questions now are more on how stuff works than problems I am having with computers. Well, what I am seeing is wait for a while and let the bugs get found and fixed so I guess I will just wait.
Have you used Vista? We have been trying to use it via Beta at both of my clients. So far I have not been impressed at all. It is hella bloated and incredibly buggy. I also Beta and RC'd 2000 and XP and neither of them were as bad as Vista has been. I'd seriously wait until the kinks have been ironed out on this one. I eagerly await SP3 for XP even though it is not coming anytime soon. I think the last I read was early 2008. The amount of updates that are out there should be bundled into a new SP.
Vista Beta is nothing like RTM. I run it currently on an older system: AMD XP2500, 1gig of ram and ATI9800 pro. It's definately slower than xp, but not too bad. It's stable enough. The biggest problem would be driver support. Personally, I like it better than XP, though I don't think it was necessarily worth the wait. Some nice things in there include nicer and easier networking, not running as admin, UAC (kinda like a gui SUDO in Ubuntu, though many people will think it's a hassle) and great hooks for development. Aero is nice eye candy. It also has a lot of neat little things, such as the new file explorer bar or hitting f2 to rename doesn't highlight the file exetension. I know, fascinating huh The new start menu is annoying though and the widgets are nothing compared to OSX. Anyhow, I would agree with everyone else though. I would wait, but because of driver support. The comparison of Vista to ME is ridiculous though.
I know I used Beta in several different ways in my post. I meant we are testing it at the moment but the versions that we have are the full versions. I agree that it looks pretty but I have to disagree about the functionality. There are a ton of apps that do not install and many more that do not install without a patch. Also like you said, driver support is minimal at best. Many companies would also have to do a hardware upgrade just to run it as well. I just do not see the benefit of upgrading with XP runs so smoothly. This is a pain in an enterprise environment.
I actually have Vista on my laptop right now, so hopefully that gives a different perspective. My answer to you, DONT INSTALL IT. Ok, it's really slick to look at, it has nice little features to stare at, aeroglass looks kind of sleek (and it eats your RAM). But other than that, it's a pain in the ass. For starters, a lot of drivers may not work properly. My sound driver works but doesn't work optimally for example. Second, a lot of software isn't optimized for Vista either. You'll install something and it'll think you're installing on Windows NT/2000. It gets to be a real pain in the ass. Third, there's no reason to switch. XP works fine right now, so stick with it. Although, I will admit Vista does look pretty snappy. Stuff like the preview windows, desktop searching (finally), gadgets (a rip off of widgets), etc... are nice to see. And the desktop interface does look a hell of a lot better than XP. I think the comparison to ME isn't fair. ME did absolutely nothing other than introduce the system restore feature and a lot of bugs. Vista has a lot of new features, there's no just no point in getting them right now.
