Better OS: XP or Vista? (I do have specific questions)?

Question

This question probably floats around a lot but I have specifics to deal with here:
I currently have two comps, a desktop with XP and a laptop with Vista.
Specs of desktop: 512 MB RAM, 160 GB HD, XP Home Edition. Has worked beautifully for the past three years and counting.
Laptop: 2 GB RAM, 240 GB HD, Vista Home Premium. Only six months old, no major problems yet. I usually use it for school use so if I occasionally do some gaming and what not, it's not a hassle.

A lot of people tell me (and offer to lend me the XP OS software) that I should zero out my laptop and install XP from fresh.

My question is should I keep Vista as is and give it more time or go with the system I'm more familiar with?
As far as daily activities go, I'm a moderate gamer and plan to use my laptop mostly for school purposes. So far the speed my laptop has offered has been more than adequate and I have a flash drive I use ReadyBoost with if it becomes a problem. Any opinions on XP/Vista are appreciated.

Answer 1

People are afraid of change. Change is good.

Vista is good. It will be better. Give it time.

Even if you wanted to downgrade , I would say no , because , I've seen many cases where people would downgrade and then ask me why the sound won't work , or some other problem like that.

A lot of these computers that use vista are built for Vista ONLY. Theres a lot of ways to optomise vista , search for " Making Vista Faster" on google , one of them being turning down graphical options and stopping some un needed tasks from coming up.

Also , stopping the User Dialogue Security Feature from coming up.

All in all , keep vista, you're gonna need it in a few years , so , right now , your a step ahead of everyone.

Just learn to use it and you'll get used to it. Wait it out , and for your patience you shall be granted a great gift , that is a better vista.

Good Luck,

Joe

Answer 2

Well microsoft will move to Vista sooner or later so make yourself more aware of the latest operating system rather than one thats eventually going to be used less. Vista has two major problems which people dislike and have pushed them away from it: 1. it's extremely resource intensive, you need mamoth hardware to run it but then again think about what it was like going from Windows 98 to XP, same problem. The second problem is more significant and effects lots of people. For the past century people are used to the way Windows works, with Vista they changed it so significantly that people were put off, I for example was put off Vista as I wanted to dual boot it but it had no boot.ini (something common among all Windows operating systems for the past year). Maybe if I'd of kept it and learnt more about it I imagine the benefits would be more obvious in 3 years time or so when nobody is using XP, you may as well get used to coming technology rather than dated technology, XP is over 5 years old now.

Answer 3

The laptop should work decently with vista considering it has 2GB of RAM but as far as a system with 512MB, vista is nothing but a headache. I run vista on a new desktop and it is nothing but trouble everyday. So either way would be good on the laptop but on the desktop I would keep XP. By the way, just to prove how much faster XP is I used it on a desktop with half the RAM of my vista PC and it was much, much faster, even with half the ram.

Answer 4

The first two answers make no sense to me. There really is no compelling reason to run Vista. The only possible reason would be the spiffy interface, but you'll probably turn off the newer features anyway because it slows down your PC(s).

Run XP fresh, clean install, on both machines. By the time XP is actually "too old", you (and I) will be switching to a mac or linux.

The editor in chief of PC Magazine resigned, and in his las column he wrote all about how bad Vista is.