Ot, Computer Issue

[Mitch]

Hi All

 

earlier this year i bought a laptop, i was given the option of a update disc which i have but im not sure about installing,

 

disc is home premium but packed in a acer sleeve saying express upgrade to vista and acer upgrade disc, theres two disks in there. not sure whats written on disk as i havnt broken seal on pack

 

Is it worth installing it from xp or should i leave well alone?,

 

if leave alone would this disc work on any pc, reg codes are there, packs unopened may sell if im not using it.

 

 

Mitch

[agent_zed]

if it isn't broke don't fix it haven't used vista but from what ive heard it requires a lot of ram to run the operating system graphics and if you have anything remotely dodgy it will helpfully delete it without asking, so no more "free" software.

 

I guess it depends whether you want the latest operating system now or are willing to wait until all problems are found. similar to a new model of car, wait a couple of years and they will have found most of the teething problems, but then you won't be the first person in the street to have a shinny new toy .

 

best of luck either way...

[Mat-Moo]

Vista is new and shiney wait for SP1 then do the upgrade, but backup first !!! Why not got to vista? after all it is the latest and greatest, but of course needs a higher spec system than XP. But if your laptop was only bought this year then I'm sure it will cope.

 

All views here are total crap and just my own opinion!

[Guest salty_monk]

My friend ran some tests for Islington council......

 

Vista uses 1GB of Ram just sitting doing nothing, no windows open etc. He had loads of problems, loads of software conflicts.

 

His conclusion "good for looking pretty but don't bother if you want to do any work"....

 

I've recently taken an interest as I'm about to upgrade myself.

 

Dan

[Longboarder]

Windows 3.1 is great. Drivers are a bit of a problem. 16 megabytes of ram should be enough for anyone but as I like to play games I was going to splash out and see if I could find another 16 for extra speed. I have been thinking of an upgrade to 98SE but I'm worried this might make my eyes bleed.

Living life at the cutting edge. Worried I might not be able to type fast enough to keep up with Word.

 

Nigel

[Guest allenr03]

All the doom and gloom about Vista is unfounded now unless you are running things like Sage and bespoke business applications. If your machine qualified for the free upgrade (which it sounds like you have) then it had to meet the minimum spec required or Microsoft wouldn't issue the manufacturer the licence.

 

Do the upgrade but do as Mat say and back up first.

 

I use it daily and its great.

 

You may find very old hardware isn't supported but you should be able to get drivers for printers etc from the manufacturer website.

 

I am a PC World General Manager and sell about 200 PC/laptops a week with very few problems, as I say most are related to business users (Every machine I have now it Vista and I can only get XP machines for business account holders.)

 

Good luck!! Not that you'll need it!!

 

HTH

Rich

[Guest motivforz]

im very soon off to university so i started hunting laptops and was myself pondering the vista/xp battle

 

i got the laptop that i finally bought (amazing deal, 800 quid worth of kit from pc world, all for 500 instead still from pc world!!!) upgraded to 2gb of RAM because i know of several problems vista has running when on a machine meeting the basic requirements, altho it shouldnt be too hard to have a machine capable of running it competently, i would have to say the RAM is often the main limiting factor, so you should look at your machine, evaluate how well it will be able to run vista, and devide the upgrade on that

 

the reason i say that is vista is very easy to use, this edition of windows is more orientated around a mac system and so it is much more intuitive (im not a mac person!!!), and doing simple tasks is much better.

 

One thing i would definitely suggest whether you have vista or not, if you use office applications regularly then office 07 (i have this running on xp), which i have to say is a remarkable improvement on previous versions, and when you get the hang of it it is incredibly easy to use, and offers much more than simple word processors etc

 

basically vista is worth an upgrade, it has all the bells and whistles when you look at it, but underneath there seems to be a very good and stable operating system

[Swan Jnr]

we bought a new laptop with Vista installed earlier this year(from pc world) . Its the same spec as my work one but appears to run much slower, just little things but its a noticeable difference. it is very nice to look at and even on the brief goes i've had on it word, excel etc seem a lot better. the lack of speed is a worry though especially as both ours are similar specced machines but with one on XP and one on vista. we've also had some hassles getting usb drives to work properly.

 

personally i wouldnt get another vista machine whilst its not impsosible to keep using xp. if it was my laptop i'd want to uninstall vista and put xp on it, but its not!

 

just as an aside Rich we took the first one back because it only managed about 10 minutes of battery life (current one manages less than an hour if you actually use it for anything) however it was very funny watching the "expert tech lady" being shown how to correctly use a multimeter by the customer who's lap top she was inspecting! (another one with battery life problem is this common?)

 

paul

[Guest ballin]

Personally I would advise against it, at least until SP1 is released. I installed it on my work box as an experiment when it was first released to businesses, and whilst it looks nice, it really has no benefit over XP yet. More and more apps are becoming compatible now which is great, but its still a very resource hungry OS for no benefit other than looks.

Lets put it this way, I would still have XPsp2 on my home machine for Windows.

[BigLee]

My tuppence worth Mitch - Dont bother at least for the time being. I have XP pro at home and Vista Ultimate running as virtual machine inside it. - The upgrade they gave will be for Vista home, which apart from looking a bit prettier will have less functionality and run slower than your existing XP machine. Without boring you there are a number of enhencements under the covers with Vista out of the box, like IP6 and a whole new networking protocol, but for the average home user these enhancements are pretty much useless. The aero interface will eat a laptop battery much quicker than your XP display - so unless you need to encrypt your hard drive, run the latest wizzy bang games etc. or support a new device that you have bought that only supports Vista I would hold off. At least for now. The amount you'd get for the upgrade version is neglible so I would keep it in a draw untill you get a peripheral that needs Vista and then do the upgrade then. Hopefully Microsoft will have release SP1 by then and plugged all the holes in it!!!

 

Just my thoughts.

[Guest SEgan]

If you want a really stable system the Penguin rules!

[Guest allenr03]

The upgrade disk you have is for Vista Home Premium and is a big improvement over Win Xp, particularly from an entertainment perspective. The media centre actually works (and it is very fast when indexing etc) unlike Media Centre 05 which was pretty poor. The launch issues were all about driver compatibility with older hardware but this is pretty much sorted now.

 

The way Vista works is completely different to XP, it uses totally new code. Every bit of graphic output is now routed through the graphics processor which makes the OS more stable and much faster. The indexing system makes searches virtually instant - its very impressive. It is memory intensive but that is all about evolution to be honest (Think back to Win 98 and we were all running 64mb, going to XP from ME needed memory upgrades too) and if you want to use the newest software it will be developed for the hardware (and OS) that is available. Memory is cheap enough these days (I'll price match anyone!!) so bang 2gb in.

 

Boot up time seems to be longer but to be honest I never switch off, I use hibernate, boots back up in a fraction of the time! Only time you really need to reboot is if you load something new.

 

With regard to the doris in the Tech Guys. The experience you get will vary from store to store (although it shouldn't.) My guys are pretty good and I rarely have to get involved with customer issues because they understand what they need to do to resolve them (and are sensible about it) and their technical skill is very good. The doris doing the testing may not have been a Tech Guy, she could've been a normal Customer Advisor working on the front desk (they are there to process refunds etc and book jobs in, wouldn't normally be involved with diagnosis!)The Techies are usually busy repairing things and only come the front desk to diagnose issues etc.

 

I'm not aware of any issues with laptop batteries, we get the odd one (very rarely) that fails prematurely but its usually down to customer misuse. People treat Li-ion batteries like the old Ni-mh versions and the issues are completely different. If your lappy has a li-ion battery you should set your power meter to warn you at 20% and then charge it fully, they don't like being run down to 5%!! Don't leave the battery in if you are going to use it with mains power for a long period, they don't like that either. And if you are going to store the machine for a while take the battery out. If you completely discharge and recharge like you used to with ni-mh batteries you'll bugger them up pretty quickly. They aren't covered by the warranty either, they are classed as a consumable (with a £60 -£100 replacement cost!) I wouldn't expect a battery to fail under normal use within 6 months though, and that would be questionable, I would probably replace it if you bought it in my store.

 

If you ever have an issue with PC World ask to speak to the General Manager and be nice! You'll find you'll get a very good response, and if you don't let me know - I'll help you out.

 

And if you ever buu anything check the online price first, do a collect@store then pop in and pick it up. Lots of things are significanty cheaper - The Sony W2000 40" LCD TV (which is the dogs whatsits) for example is £1399 instore but £1120 on collect@store and you can still take it home today!!

 

Rich

[TonySuperSpec]

I wasn't going to put in my two penny's worth but I think I must clarify some of the comments previously made..

 

Rant begins...

 

I am and have been for many years a fully Certified Microsoft developer with specialist responsibility for OS test etc.

 

I have been getting Beta test version of what is now released as VISTA for the past 5 years.

 

1. This is not the full blown version MS is working on, its a cobble of XP with some functionality improvements for the users

 

2. Yes the graphics are being re-written not as Richard stated to use the graphics processor only but to at last get rid of the older structure that has been in the OS since the original NT which in fact was a simple rewite of the Windows 16 version but using the 32 processors available at hat time i.e 80486 etc.

 

3. The real new version will have when fully released have new Graphics again, new File system and improved techniques for interprocess communications allowing far better multi tasking .

 

4. The use of the .NET environment within the current release of Vista is incomplete and is only really framework 1.2 whereas the development have completed another rewite we are told to 2.2 which is smaller and faster, hence the size and the slow boot time.

 

 

OS development is a long haul, NT which is the heart of XP started in 1984 and was never fully completed to the original specs and performance criteria originally published.

 

This new OS was started in 1996'ish and has gone through so many rewrites I've lost count...

 

I would not load Vista on any of my machines, certainly not the Home edition possibly the full professional but you won't get that a a free upgrade.

 

If you had a machine with '95 and the problems through '98 and '98 SE then this seems to set the scene for MS and there OS changes. NT 3.5 went through many revisions until the name change to 2000 and then to try and tie in more users the release of XP home which is a poor version of 2000, and XP Professional which is 2000 with attitude.

 

If you do upgrade I agree full backup of anything you want to keep.

try and use the recover original OS option during upgrade, its not always obvious you can do this but it is available, not sure how OEM versions implement this.

 

Rant over

 

Cheers

[gomatthome]

prior to the launch of Vista most pc's were sold with the option of a free upgrade to vista.

 

 

I have two lap tops one with vista and one with XP whilst vista has some interesting user features and is good at swithcjing between open applications etc but it basically does the same thing. if you are familiar with XP i would stick with it. My son however has vista and thinks its great. Most universities now recommend that its students run vista as it is compatable with their lan's etc.

 

I use my pc's for business and a lot of software is not compatable SAGE etc - but is gradually becomming so. in addition if you run Sky antime to download sky movies etc they are still not vista compatable so if you were to upgrade you would have a problem.

 

As the guy from pc world says you cant now get a new machine without vista so its not a bad system its more to do with the software manufacturers upgrading their software to make sure it vista compatable.

 

If you check on the internet / box that any software you have installed after purchasing your pc is vista compatable then for a newish machine you should have enough processing speed / memory that you should not notice the difference and could upgrade.

 

 

 

phil

[Guest 2b_pablo]

I have it on my home laptop and also running in a virtual machine on my work laptop. I have to say I think its great. Looks pretty some nice new features and of course media centre. I have the Ultimate version tho (free thanks to MSDN ) and Office Ultimate too.

 

I installed it on my home dell latitude laptop and all I had to do to get online was enter the wireless password. Didnt have to install any drivers whatsoever.

 

I did however upgrade the RAM to 2GB. Cost me £50. Well worth it tho.

 

As for the virtual PC install its running off 730Meg ram and its fine for browsing and email but doesnt like being pushed too hard.