From what I can tell, Vista does not offer much of an improvement. It is shocking that a company as large as Microsoft, and that has spent billions developing Vista, had to drop several of the key reasons for this development. Particularly, the new file system that they had to abandon and was at one time touted as the crown jewel of this new OS.
After being severely burned by Microsoft with their inferior interim ME "product," some years ago, I learned the hard way to never upgrade to a new OS on an existing computer. Considering that the price of computers has continued to drop, an upgrade OS is foolish at best and could be worse if it can not perform well on an older machine. Because the MS OS is basically free to computer marketers,***, and because they have to work out any serious problems between the OS and the machine, it is my view that one should only buy a computer with the OS installed. At the most you are buying the OS at rock bottom wholesale but for the most part it is absorbed into the cost of the machine anyway. I may purchase a Vista computer if I want to move to a more powerful machine some time in the next year, but I am probably going to be satisfied with computers that run XP reasonably well. Nothing much under 3 gig uP though. As I found out, even Linux OS requires a pretty good machine to make it work reasonably well. That is why I gave a 450 MHz machine to my mother and reloaded Win98 on it for her to use mostly for web e-mail. Sincerely, Rick, KV9U ***I know that companies do pay MS something under $100 for the OS, but they get a huge amount of support and other perks that they feel make it a no brainer. That is why Linux OS has no traction with OEM's. And why the price of some of the Linux OS loaded computers and even the no OS computers are some higher in cost than what you would have expected. For more info, check out Rob Enderle's address on this subject on the internet. jhaynesatalumni wrote: >Since people are being told they have to upgrade to new faster >computers to run Windows Vista, I wonder if that means there will >be a lot of somewhat less capable machines available used or free >that will run Linux and earlier versions of Windows just fine. > > > > >
