# Which OS would you go with?



## sup2jzgte (Jan 9, 2008)

If you were to build a PC tomorrow for surfing the web, some game playing, alot of music and just every day general use which would you install?


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## Motoxrdude (Jan 9, 2008)

Linux. It's stable, virus free, doesnt slow down overtime, extremely fast.


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## hermeslyre (Jan 9, 2008)

Vista, as long as I could use some imaginary money to purchase a Q6600, 8800gts, etc. Then when Alan Wake and all the other Vista only games come out, i could play them.


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## _simon_ (Jan 9, 2008)

As you mentioned gaming it would be XP, otherwise Linux.


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## Geoff (Jan 9, 2008)

Vista for DX10 support, also since XP doesn't support my RAID array (no drivers for it).


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## patrickv (Jan 9, 2008)

Xp


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## footballdude2k3 (Jan 9, 2008)

vista ultimate


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## Gareth (Jan 9, 2008)

Vista Home Premium or Vista Basic.


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## Geoff (Jan 9, 2008)

Garethman!!` said:


> Vista Home Premium or Vista Basic.


Why would you go with Vista Basic??


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## Gareth (Jan 9, 2008)

Vista Basic is perfect for music and gaming + internet, Premium is more for movies and recording television. Also, Vista basic is less on system resources, and I do not regret getting it for my laptop 1 bit.

So you get the security of Vista, without all the resources.


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## Geoff (Jan 9, 2008)

Garethman!!` said:


> Vista Basic is perfect for music and gaming + internet, Premium is more for movies and recording television. Also, Vista basic is less on system resources, and I do not regret getting it for my laptop 1 bit.
> 
> So you get the security of Vista, without all the resources.


You do know you can turn off the effects of Vista Premium right?  And by getting Vista Basic you don't get any of the advanced features, especially networking.  It's worse then XP Home IMO.


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## Gareth (Jan 9, 2008)

I have all the networking features id expect to find on XP home on my Vista basic laptop. Yes, I have Vista Ultimate on this desktop but I keep most of the effects on except for Aero Glass.


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## quagmondo23 (Jan 9, 2008)

Vista is probably better for basic things with the nice look and feel. Works with most games and directx10 support is cool. All round good for basic things (and gaming)


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## The_Beast (Jan 9, 2008)

vista


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## Shane (Jan 9, 2008)

Vista,aslong as you have enough ram theres nothing wrong with vista at all and its faster than Xp imo.


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## Motoxrdude (Jan 10, 2008)

O, i didnt see that you wanted to game with it as well. Go vista, xp will be obsolete in a short period of time as it doesnt support dx10.


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## sup2jzgte (Jan 10, 2008)

I wonder if I can put all 3 on there and boot different ones when need be?


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## Motoxrdude (Jan 11, 2008)

You can, but you would have to partition your hard drive and it can be a pain sometimes.


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## El DJ (Jan 12, 2008)

Linux.
It's lightweight, boots up fast, and doesn't have all the unnecessary crap that XP and Vista comes with.


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## Motoxrdude (Jan 12, 2008)

El DJ said:


> Linux.
> It's lightweight, boots up fast, and doesn't have all the unnecessary crap that XP and Vista comes with.



Eh, linux is not the best choice for gaming.


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## El DJ (Jan 12, 2008)

Yeah, true, not so much for gaming, but for other things, it's pretty nifty.


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## MightyKing (Jan 23, 2008)

Definately XP, I'm a vista user and Vista just will not allow you to enjoy your games. Plus it eats tons of ram. 

Havent tried Linux, but heard it was really good. By experience of XP and Vista, I would go XP 100%


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## MatrixEVO (Jan 23, 2008)

MightyKing said:


> it eats tons of ram



Get more, problem solved. RAM is cheap, upgrade it, and Vista will run so much better. 4GB is ideal. As we speak, Vista is using a little over 1GB of my RAM and I only have FireFox open. I never run out, but sometimes it goes up to 3.2GB usage, and Vista would  run like crap if I had only 1GB or 2GB of RAM.


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## MightyKing (Jan 23, 2008)

Yeah you're right, apart from the ram I just don't like how it has compability issues with some software. That would the the only other con. Other than that I loved the OS, full of Pros.

It's just that everything ran smoothly with XP, we just have to give Vista some time.


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## Gareth (Jan 23, 2008)

I have yet to Vista be un-smooth, on this PC and on my Laptop, it actually boots and runs faster than XP does on my other partition on the same HDD. XP also has nothing except games installed as I use it to play some old games which don't work on 64-bit.


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## MightyKing (Jan 23, 2008)

But not all games run on Vista.


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## JLV2k5 (Jan 23, 2008)

Vista is the future, all newer games run on Vista. 

Vista 64 supports more than 3.5 gigs of RAM

Vista supports DX10 GPUs

Vista has a nice look


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## Gareth (Jan 23, 2008)

Indeed, why get a brand new PC and make it look like your old Pentium III 1GHz PC 

Vista is the wave of the future, I agree JLV2k5


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## JLV2k5 (Jan 23, 2008)

Thank you. Go Vista


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## tlarkin (Jan 23, 2008)

Depending on what kind of games you want to play. Some companies port their games to Linux like ID, and there is a small gaming community.  If you are more hardcore into gaming I would suggest windows, but heed my advice before you take it into consideration of XP versus Vista.

Here go the Cons of Vista:

Compatibility - not everything that works in XP works in vista, however all new games and software will run fine in XP.  We are no where near running a full 64 bit OS anywhere in any market.  32bit will still be around for several more years to come, possibly longer.  Heck MS just finally pulled the plug on Win 98 like a year or two ago.  

DX10 - thats right, DX10 is a pro and a con.  The con side of it is, that since Vista is so resource hungry and offers no actual performance increase you will get less frames per a second in your games running DX 10.  This may be fixed (I would hope so) in the near future or it may take some time.  DX 10 only offers better eye candy.  Google it, and you will see many examples of how DX10 runs games a lot slower than DX9 in XP.

Resource Hog - Vista is the most resource hungry OS ever created.  Compare it to XP, Linux, and OS X (Unix, etc) and no OS requires that much to run.  Other OSes also have just as much if not more Open GL eye candy and intuitiveness over Vista.  I just hate to pay for something that does not offer me any kind of real world performance increase.


Security - its not more secure over XP, it uses the same permissions and the same kernel, the only difference is that it gives the illusion of more security constantly asking your opinion if you should open or download something.  

SMB2 - increased network traffic by 1600% and breaks compatibility with other non windows platforms.  Only affects you if you have a mac or a linux box on your network and wish to file/print share to a vista box.

I will stop there, but could go on and on.

Now for the Pros of Vista:

64bit support - break the 32bit memory barrier, which for some may be a plus.  I don't know of any application that requires more than 3 gigs of RAM.  Unused RAM is wasted RAM, but at the same time unused RAM is not always a super bad thing.

DX10 - looks pretty, gets the latest eye candy in gaming

Aero - if you want a 3D desktop environment and don't want to run Linux/Beryl/Compiz or OS X then this is for you

Some things overhauled - faster find and search options, stability monitor, it auto sets a lot of things up (which can be a con to some) for those who don't know how to network or do other mundane tasks.

XP Pros-
-Stable
-Runs all windows applicaitons current and future
-is not a resource hog

XP Cons
-only DX9 (until they release DX10 for it, there is an open source project)
-32bit (though there is a 64bit version of XP Pro)
-no nifty 3D desktop environment

Linux pros
-secure - NO known viruses in the wild
-open source - you can always find a solution for free for whatever you are trying to do
-many choices and flavors to choose from
-great online community support

Linux Cons-
-Higher learning curve
-It is not windows, many people expect it to be
-There is always a linux alternative, except for gaming 
-some compatibility issues but not that many

So, really it depends on what you want to do.  The choice is up to you and I just listed some facts to help you make your choice.  My personal opinion is that vista does not offer any reason to upgrade at this point in time.  This is my opinion and you can search through these forums to find all what I have said about vista if you truly want to know.


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## MightyKing (Jan 23, 2008)

JLV2k5 said:


> Vista is the future, all newer games run on Vista.
> 
> Vista 64 supports more than 3.5 gigs of RAM
> 
> ...



I totally agree with you, but as of now, Vista slows you down (at least me) in having flow of what you do. Not sure if I'm making myself clear. But the moment Vista becomes stable and compatible somewhat like XP then I'll definately go back to Vista.



@ tlarkin

Thanks for clearing this up. Great comments. Specially the 


tlarkin said:


> Security - its not more secure over XP, it uses the same permissions and the same kernel, the only difference is that it gives the illusion of more security constantly asking your opinion if you should open or download something.


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## daniel11 (Jan 23, 2008)

Of course vista because vista have directx10 !!


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## TFT (Jan 23, 2008)

I voted Vista but will stay with XP until the UK's crazy prices are reduced.


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## JLV2k5 (Jan 23, 2008)

Way to go Vista, taking a win so far.


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## 20thCenturyBoy (Jan 24, 2008)

I'd still go with a Debian flavor of Linux for everyday usage.


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## JLV2k5 (Jan 24, 2008)

MightyKing said:


> I totally agree with you, but as of now, Vista slows you down (at least me) in having flow of what you do. Not sure if I'm making myself clear. But the moment Vista becomes stable and compatible somewhat like XP then I'll definately go back to Vista.



How much RAM do you have, 1 gig?

Vista is fine with 2 or more.


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## MightyKing (Jan 24, 2008)

1.5Gb. I have no probelms running vista at all, but it limits me with that much ram eating lol. I need to get more ram


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## JLV2k5 (Jan 24, 2008)

MightyKing said:


> 1.5Gb. I have no probelms running vista at all, but it limits me with that much ram eating lol. I need to get more ram



At least you know the solution to your problem.. Yes, grab some more RAM


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## MightyKing (Jan 24, 2008)

Yeah, but still, I'd rather wait until Vista is a bit better. For the moment, I'll hold on to XP, I'm sure I'll switch back to vista in a year, or who knows, maybe a couple of months. 

Microsoft will make Vista sooo good, im sure of it.


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## JLV2k5 (Jan 24, 2008)

Yeah I hope. I dont plan on using it until the summer. Maybe some more bugs will be fixed


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## jimkonow (Jan 24, 2008)

it depends on how powerful the machine youre running is...though i prefer XP, for certain reasons i cannot discuss here


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## shawn_selig29 (Jan 24, 2008)

vista ultimate...... having the power to do everything.....and having a os to last longer in the future then xp...


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## tlarkin (Jan 24, 2008)

shawn_selig29 said:


> vista ultimate...... having the power to do everything.....and having a os to last longer in the future then xp...



Another contrived opinion about Vista.  The only differences between Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate will not affect the home user at all.  Ultimate offers encrypted file system support (I hope no home user ever uses this).  Built in faxing software - easily fixed by buying third party, the ability to connect to domain level networks - again more feature limiting on MS's part but no home user needs to connect to a domain controller, and I think remote desktop.  Oh darn, go download VNC its free, there is your remote desktop.


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## mep916 (Jan 24, 2008)

tlarkin said:


> Another contrived opinion about Vista.  The only differences between Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate will not affect the home user at all.  Ultimate offers encrypted file system support (I hope no home user ever uses this).  Built in faxing software - easily fixed by buying third party, the ability to connect to domain level networks - again more feature limiting on MS's part but no home user needs to connect to a domain controller, and I think remote desktop.  Oh darn, go download VNC its free, there is your remote desktop.



You forgot about Texas Hold 'em and Dreamscene.


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## Kornowski (Jan 24, 2008)

mep916 said:


> You forgot about Texas Hold 'em and Dreamscene.



I've got Dreamscene on Home Premium 

All this stuff you here about Vista being full of bugs and hard to run... it just isn't... At all!

I've also found it to be well faster than XP too... but just my opinion!


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## mep916 (Jan 24, 2008)

Kornowski said:


> I've got Dreamscene on Home Premium



Oh, I thought that was limited to Ultimate.  

I'm havin' problems installing Ultimate x64. Other than that, I'm pretty happy with Vista.


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## tlarkin (Jan 24, 2008)

Kornowski said:


> I've got Dreamscene on Home Premium
> 
> All this stuff you here about Vista being full of bugs and hard to run... it just isn't... At all!
> 
> I've also found it to be well faster than XP too... but just my opinion!



Let me see where I had issues with vista...

Wacom tablets, 1.5 years old, not compatible with vista

Novell client (could be better now) although it worked, not with out its caveats.

Several printers don't work w/ 64bit that we had at my work

several needed applications won't work unless you upgrade, cost of upgrading was thousands and thousands in licenses.  Not worth upgrading at this point.

networking - tons of issues

and of course the giant increase of hardware resources used.

Vista does not out perform XP though, and even if you dig through benchmarks you will find them neck and neck or XP beating vista.  It just gives you the illusion by preloading applications into memory.  Loading time may be a bit faster but actual performance while using an application is identical.  Which is why its not worth the several hundred dollars to upgrade IMO.


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## Gareth (Jan 24, 2008)

Kornowski said:


> I've also found it to be well faster than XP too... but just my opinion!



Most users who have upgraded to Vista have noticed this, including me on my Athlon XP 3000+ college machine!

Athlon XP 3000+
1GB RAM
80GB HDD
Radeon 9250 
Windows Experience Index = 1.0




tlarkin said:


> Vista does not out perform XP though, and even if you dig through benchmarks you will find them neck and neck or XP beating vista. It just gives you the illusion by preloading applications into memory. Loading time may be a bit faster but actual performance while using an application is identical. Which is why its not worth the several hundred dollars to upgrade IMO.



Its actually $69 to upgrade to Vista Basic on Newegg. On a test on my AthlonXP rig I did a month ago on another forum, Vista beat XP on almost every test, one by a very long way.


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## tlarkin (Jan 24, 2008)

Garethman!!` said:


> Its actually $69 to upgrade to Vista Basic on Newegg. On a test on my AthlonXP rig I did a month ago on another forum, Vista beat XP on almost every test, one by a very long way.



Not worth it to upgrade and lose features from XP, also provide links where Vista beats it out because from what I have read it hasn't and I will go google those links now.


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## Gareth (Jan 24, 2008)

Here is the link to the tests I did where I proved Vista beats XP on the lowest of the lowest PCs you would consider running Vista on

http://forums.pureoverclock.com/showthread.php?t=2166


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## ThatGuy16 (Jan 24, 2008)

Vista home premium 64bit for me 

Best OS yet IMO, alot faster boot times than XP i think its just faster in general. Alot of people complain about the superfetch, but i think its a good thing. If you have the ram to support it, its alot faster.

No compatibility issues for me.


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## JLV2k5 (Jan 24, 2008)

It would be silly not to go Vista. All programs in the future are going to utilize 64bit and vista is prepared for this. PLUS, DX10 is available through Visterrrrr


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## tlarkin (Jan 24, 2008)

here they are:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/page2.html

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/13487

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2096940,00.asp

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_vista_nvidia_forceware_performance/

Granted some of these articles are 6 months to almost 1 year old but I don't see or couldn't find anything new saying it has changed.


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## Kornowski (Jan 24, 2008)

mep916 said:


> Oh, I thought that was limited to Ultimate.
> 
> I'm havin' problems installing Ultimate x64. Other than that, I'm pretty happy with Vista.



Oh, Don't worry, Mike, You're right, it is for Ultimate "only"  

What problems are you having?


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## tlarkin (Jan 24, 2008)

JLV2k5 said:


> It would be silly not to go Vista. All programs in the future are going to utilize 64bit and vista is prepared for this. PLUS, DX10 is available through Visterrrrr



Yes I totally agree with you, the problem is, 64bit will not be the standard platform anytime soon.  Consumers only drive a small part of technology business, where enterprise solutions (companies that buy 10s of thousands of computers) aren't just going to up and upgrade because they think its going to be the best.  The market doesn't work like that.  64 bit has been around a lot longer than you think, Unix and Linux  have been doing it for years, and OS X had pseudo 64bit support in their last OS, which came out almost 2 years ago.  

XP has had 64 bit support for a couple years as well, if you downloaded and ran the 64bit service pack.  Notice how the market has not shifted anywhere near 64bit platform yet.  Only some have shifted and even then they are including libraries for both 32 and 64.

Now, given that and the fact that Vista offers no real performance increase over XP, and DX10 gives slower frame rates, and Vista offers no real benefit or feature that end users really want, I don't see it worth the upgrade at this point in time.  On top of that, Vienna, which is slated to come out in 09 or 10 will have all those features that Vista had to drop, like EFI support, ZFS and sshfs, etc. and will most likely actually be more stable and offer more of a performance increase over Vista, why not just wait till then.  We all know MS has a history of writing crappy OSes and bloated applications.  need I bring up windows ME, or Win95 rev A, or Win 98 first release?  The 9x kernel was ultra crappy and they no longer use it, they use the NT kernel now which is a lot better, and have finally made the NT kernel into a decent OS.  Windows NT workstation sucked majorly, which is why it never was seen in consumer markets until XP.  You can argue that windows 2000 was the first, but in all honesty windows 98 and windows ME were on consumer machines at that given time.  So, it really wasn't.

So, if you wait two years you can get MS's newest OS, with all the features they had to cut from Vista, and they will be using the same kernel as before which will be far more improved.  Hopefully they won't feature limit this next OS release.

If you don't have an OS at all, then I can see Vista being a more viable buy.  If you have XP, in my mind don't waste your money upgrading.  Wait for Vienna and all the cool technologies that will come with it.  EFI will completely change how hardware works with both the user and the OS.


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## pc-tech (Jan 24, 2008)

XP Pro w/Linux dual boot


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## jvillarreal1000 (Jan 24, 2008)

So i have a Dell laptop that's about 2 years old with XP on it.  Should I wait for Microsoft to come out with an improved OS or should I make the transition to Vista.  I'm either going to do that or just reinstall XP since I haven't had major problems with it.  Thanks!!


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## tlarkin (Jan 24, 2008)

jvillarreal1000 said:


> So i have a Dell laptop that's about 2 years old with XP on it.  Should I wait for Microsoft to come out with an improved OS or should I make the transition to Vista.  I'm either going to do that or just reinstall XP since I haven't had major problems with it.  Thanks!!



Well, you need to figure it out for yourself, and well to be honest, some of those features I mentioned are hardware dependent, so if you don't get a motherboard that supports EFI, then you don't get the benefit of it.  In my experience vista is not faster by any means so i would say no.  Some people say it is faster or that my hardware must be crap and I must be a noob since vista doesn't run well for me.  However, that is not the case.  I am not your typical user though.  So, what I say and think may not reflect what the average computer user thinks.  

Its like my old man used to always say, "If it ain't broke don't fix it."  If XP works great why upgrade?  You will get zero performance increase from Vista, just click on the links I already provided in this thread.  Especially the Tom's hardware one.


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## Camper (Jan 25, 2008)

Windows 7 is slated for the second half of 2009 with a customer release in 2010. So if you can live with XP for a few more years I would go with XP.
http://cybernetnews.com/2008/01/18/windows-7-release-date-in-2009/
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/65951


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## INTELCRAZY (Jan 25, 2008)

Interesting Distro... Call it "Communist Linux"... Oh wait, this applies to Linux as a whole...


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## MightyKing (Jan 25, 2008)

ummm


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## jacklazara (Jan 25, 2008)

Xp Sp2


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## voyagerfan99 (Jan 25, 2008)

I'd stay with XP until Vista's SP1 is out of the beta stages. I don't care for all the security warnings with Vista that don't bother me, especially when there is nothing important on the PC to steal.


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