I was forced buy the economy of scale to go to Vista on my new pre-configured bundled machine. I have XP-Pro on one desk Top and XP Home on my laptop. I have a new XP Home OEM **** that is siting in my basement. Along came this Acer with a 22" flat pannel screen, an intel dual core with with 350GB HDD and a multi-DVD/CD ROM/RAM with lable flash and more USB,Fire Wire,audio and media reading ports then I will ever use with 3GB of DDR2 ram. It also came with a photo,fax,scanner/copier,all in one printer with reasonably priced cartridges all for $548. It has decent graphics Geforce 7100 I think with 256MB dedicated DDR2 ram but it can also borrow from system ram.The down side is that it is a Vista system!!! Seeing how I needed a new printer and Newer computer this was a no brainer. It was not a pre bunndled package from the OEM. Instead the Big Box store I got it from had way too many of these desk tops and monitors and printers so they put them together and then discounted them so that you bought each one seperately but at full price wich was like $800 but then they discounted the sale down to $549 total. Trust me I looked at for what I payed for this I can not come close at Walmart or anyplace else even for an emachine with these features.
Now the good news! Vista is not that bad! I would not specificly pay money to buy Vista even the Vista U64!!! I find it is easy to navigate and I have yet to run into anyting I could not do that I used to do with XP.It really is an easy transition. The only down side is that I do have some software that I can not use. My Roxio 9.5 Video Crator will not work with Vista and their is no fix for it. So I have to use Windows media software wich sucks! I downloaded some Corel photo editing software that seem to be working fine but that is just for stills!
I would agree that Vista does not offer me anything I need or cannot get someplace else. I thinkthough for the average Joe Stupid it does have a lot of intergrated things that make life easier for them. I never had a problem though with XP since I was willing to serach for free open source programs that did what I needed to do.
In fact other then to just play with aero I do not use it I and keyboard jokey and just use quick keys and such.
I think that Vista was the bigest mistake Microsoft has ever made. I think it was kind of like the Pontiac Aztec was for GM. It was Ugly no one inside GM thought it should have been built yet it was because no one had the b a l l s to say something until it waas too late. So even though it sold like a lead ballon and had to be discounted tot he floor to sell any they kept it in production long enough so that when they pulled it it would not look like it was because it was a total failure! They where giveing them away to employee's to use for free to drive to and from work just to increase the numbers seen on the road to try and spur public interest. At one point they where discounting them with all wheel drive and loaded to below $16K out the door. I think they went as low as $12k before they build the plug. See they had to build them and try to sell them once they had spent so much money on R&D and testing and certifications and marketing and tooling up etc........I thin think Vista is more of the same! Microsoft had this on the table for so long and made so many rewrites and it was so late comeing to market that they had to drop it on the market and try to recoup some of their money! They know it is junk! They should have just taken the XP-Pro 64 bit and reworked that and put it in a nice new box with a new GUI and called it good. This would allowed them to keep milking the XP cow wich is loved and it would have given them time to start fresh! They should have kept XP for busines use but forced the comsumer side to go over to this new OS based on XP-Pro 64.
Now as it turns out XP is going to stick around for low end systems since Vista can not be made to work on them. All I want to know is will XP and all it's variants still be for sale for those of use that do not want Vista???? If I had the money I would have bought 3 liscense for XP since I absoulutely love it!
Oh anyone with a dual core processor if you did not already know this here comes a wamy!!!! SP3 shuts down the AMD core optimization program and instead of dual core operation all the time you are only useing one core until demand gets high then Windows will allow the other cores to work. SP2 does not do this. So if you have a choise and like your system to work the way AMD intended do not go to SP3.
