I think I really must replace my 10year old PC as it is almost as slow as me now. I think I know what PC to buy but it is only available with Vista pre-instaled. Now someone has sown the seed of doubt that vista is a resource hungry gimick and I would be better waiting for 7. Only prob being that you shouldnt get it straight away as it will have loads of bugs…. so wait a few months. That should mean this PC will be about 11 years old and even slower! does anyone have any good solid advice ie not I bought vista and I love it because its nice!

Help! 😐

I am currently using beta version of Windows 7. Seems to be stable and not too buggy. Best thing it’s free to download and use for the next year or so.

I’m just waiting for Win7 and will then buy a new PC. As it’s really an evolution of Vista, it should have a lot fewer bugs than that had when it was first released (which seem to be resolved now). By all accounts, the beta is very solid.

Personally I prefer Vista to XP – don’t know what all the fuss is about except that it is very memory hungry. 7 is meant to be fantastic, and less resource hungry. If t’were me and didn’t want to wait would buy now with Vista and upgrade to 7 early next year

Just got a new laptop with Vista and whilst I was hesitant after reading about Vista’s flaws, even considered waiting for Windows 7, got to say I don’t think Vista is the mess it’s been made out to be on some chats….in fact I can’t see what folk are moaning about.. it’s quite intuative and has better features than XP. As Capn.Mainwaring said, if you can’t wait, buy now & upgrade if you feel you really need to.

This isn’t a comment on how good Vista is but one on the state of play at the moment.

The VAST majority of windows PC’s in the world still run XP. Pretty much everything works on XP, it’s not hugely resource hungry and it’s dirt cheap. Microsoft have elected to release windows 7 beta not particularly long after releasing Vista, probably because it wasn’t selling very well.

Personally I would stick with XP until Vista has reached release and then see what the critics have to say about it. You can pick XP up quite cheap nowadays if you look around. Vista will fall by the wayside if windows 7 turns out to be good and you’ll have wasted your money.

Will it be a free down load up grade? Or a massive re-instale job? You have probably guessed by now computers are not the love of my life! Prefer nuts & bolts things that once you take them apart you can see how the should work, even if you cant get them back to together!
Thanks for the coments all valuable.

Upgrade will be a cost – at least until the manufacturers start offering free upgrades (3-4 months away?)

Windows 7 is as RC stage now, and still free.

samuri, got your knickers in a bit of a twist there. Vista was released in 2006. Although buggy and criticised at the time it is now very stable and as Mof said is much more feature rich than XP. XP was launched in 2001 so is now waaay out of date. Windows 7 will be released in October, so expect new machines available in time for Christmas.

Vista is fine as long as you have 2gb memory, or at least 4mb if you are going to do a lot of multi media manipulation (sounds like you’re not). Memory is cheap now so this is not a big deal.

You will be absolutely fine running Vista for the next 5+ years, or migrate to 7 when you want. It will cost, but not that much, and expect it to be pretty smooth and intuitive

A new PC should come with 4GB of memory these days. Don’t accept anything less.

Personally I prefer Vista to XP – don’t know what all the fuss is about except that it is very memory hungry.

Common misconception I think. Vista uses all the existing memory, but it is not very memory hungry.

I think i will go for Vista, thanks for the advice guys.

Dare I say get a mac!

It obviously depends on what you want to use it for, but for most folk they work pretty well.

Dare I say get a mac!

Only f you want to pay twice as much as you need to and be limited on software and device compatibility.

They are pretty though – like iPods.

get linux!!

(hand grenade in running away now)

Free Windows7 until next year: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx

Win7 is already better than Vista and it’s not even released yet. Vista is great when it works, but when it breaks its horrible and this is not uncommon. Granted things improved drastically after SP1 but not enough. I moved directly from WinXP to Win7 about 1 month ago.

Looks like Win7 will be available pre-installed in October this year. Expect various PC manufacturers to be offering free upgrades from Vista around July.

To the OP – if I were you, I’d wait a couple of months.

Just got a new laptop with Vista and whilst I was hesitant after reading about Vista’s flaws, even considered waiting for Windows 7, got to say I don’t think Vista is the mess it’s been made out to be on some chats….in fact I can’t see what folk are moaning about.. it’s quite intuative and has better features than XP. As Capn.Mainwaring said, if you can’t wait, buy now & upgrade if you feel you really need to.

Yes a lot of the problems which early adopters got bitten by have now been sorted (for instance poor quality drivers, Explorer bugs, 3rd party applications trying to access inappropriate parts of the disk).

It’s now a workable OS, though I perceive 7 to be faster on the same hardware (and still not as good as OSX 😈 )

NCB – Best Buy (in the US) will be offering free Win7 upgrades on any Vista machines bought after June 26th. I suspect you’ll see a few others following suit. Even if you intent running Vista for a while, I’d say it was worth waiting a couple of weeks to get that free upgrade voucher.

thanks guys all usefull info 🙂