Techno Child

What you need is to be convinced to switch to mac

The only reason why I would consider switching from xp pro to vista would be the nice visual effects. There are absolutely no extra features that I would need thats for sure.

The same reason why I would think about switching is the same reason I probably don't want it. The visual themes will probably be less skinnable since I doubt "Style XP" would work on Vista and isn't the "explorer.exe" different? I'm pretty sure that rezhack wouldn't work but could be wrong.

The simple answer: Stay with XP until m$ drops support... ...then switch to mac

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American Zombie

I don't think protected mode works if you disable UAC or at least it did not for me. One of the first things I did was disable UAC (Annoying POS) and when I did then protected mode was disabled for IE. When I turned UAC back on then protected mode was enabled again.

j79zlr

There ya go, IMHO most people will disable UAC ergo disabling IE7's protected mode, and alas you have XP with a shiny new minesweeper. For the low low price of a few hundred dollars + upgrading all of your commercial software.

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Grandmaster

Doesn't UAC stop giving you the warnings once you've set it up right? Like a firewall?

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LordOfLA

A lot of people will see alot of benefit from the upgraded TCP/IP stack. A lot of people will benefit from a kernel that is not as wide open to the world as the current XP kernel. A lot of people will benefit fro DirectX 10, especially if they have an xbox 360. A lot of people will benefit from better memory management that reports what its doing (unlike XP).

If you only look at cosmetic changes, you will see no reason to upgrade. The changes worth upgrading for, as with the 2000 > XP upgrade are under the hood so to speak.

And if you look back, I think you will find the same resistance to the XP upgrade, yet everyone who resisted is now largely running XP unless they are luddites.

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j79zlr

Most of the PC's at my work are still running 2000, alot of companies are the same. The absolute only benefit to XP over 2000 is cleartype text.

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Grandmaster

Your post was spot on, except the last paragraph. People are now running XP cause they have machines that are capable of running XP. Don't also forget that XP become really stable after SP2.

You can live on the bleeding edge if you want, I just want a computer that works.

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LeeJend

I just read the "system requirements" to run Vista as intended. - KMA M$.

I saw the leaked pricing for the Vista version equivalent to XP Pro - KMA M$.

I bill by the hour for beta testing operating systems, not for free - KMA M$.

I saw a summary of the Validation plot, I mean plan, for Vista. I'm not a criminal, also see my comment about billing for SW testing above - KMA M$.

I've been busy this week downloading and testing various Linux distro's on my 4 home PC's...

Maybe when SP1 comes out in 12-18 months I'll think about Vista, if the price comes down and the Validation doesn't look like spyware and a waster of my time.

Advice valid since I bought my first PC in 1983.
--NEVER BUY THE FIRST RELEASE OF SOFTWARE!

PS I was surprised so many OSNNer's show no interest in Vista. 95, 98, 2000, XP were all must haves in the tech community.

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NetRyder

I see no reason to convince anyone to do anything, but I can go ahead and list a few of the things that make Vista appealing to me as a user.

System-wide indexed search: Functionality-wise, I think this is somewhere near the top of the list for me. Many of you here know that I'm a fan of Windows Desktop Search even on XP. It's great, but it still feels like an add-on. On the other hand, indexed search is at the core of Vista; it's pretty much present everywhere, and I think power-users will find it useful. And before anyone brings it up, indexed search is *NOT* a substitute for a disorganized file/folder structure; it just makes things, especially repetitive tasks, a whole lot quicker in my experience.

Previous Versions: The ability to undelete files or restore previous versions of files. I think this is a nice safety net to have. A few months ago, I accidentally pulled the power cord and turned my desktop off. F@H was in the middle of writing checkpoint data to the disk, so when the system came back up, the data was in an inconsistent state. I used Previous Versions to recover the most recent well-formed file, and the process resumed from there without a problem. Yes, it's a trivial example, but that could have been more critical data. Not a substitute for backups, but it's faster and more convenient to recover from such problems this way.

Much better out-of-the-box hardware support: XP is five years old now. That's old. It predates most of the hardware in our PCs. Everytime I reinstall XP on a machine for some reason, it's the same tedious, time-consuming process of going to every hardware vendor's site and downloading the drivers for everything. I've installed Vista on three different machines with vastly different hardware, and almost everything was detected and worked out-of-the-box. It's a much more pleasant experience right from the start.

Tablet and Media Center enhancements: I have a Tablet PC. I also have a Xbox 360. They're both awesome devices. In order to stream video to the 360, I need MCE 2005. MCE 2005 is a separate SKU without Tablet support, so I have to choose one or the other. With the Premium Vista SKUs, I get both Tablet support and Media Center. And they both include evolutionary enhancements to their XP-based predecessors - Vista automatically learns as you write on a Tablet, improving handwriting recognition, for example.

Fit-and-finish: Not the most important thing in the world, but I like my environment to look nice and consistent. Aero is certainly not perfect, but it's a big step up from XP's UI, even with third-party themes, in my opinion. This is totally subjective, I understand, and some of you might prefer XP. Up to you. Still, this isn't really a deal-breaker one way or another.

Other than that, I think it's just lots of small things everywhere that make using Vista more enjoyable for me. There are some things I like better in XP, but overall, I think the good in Vista outweighs the bad. Others might be able to list other Vista features that they find compelling, like BitLocker or UAC, for example, that you and I might not.

Again, I don't benefit in any way if the guy next to me switches to Vista, so I'm not trying to convince anyone or change their opinions, but since you asked, I just thought I'd tell you why I'm personally going to upgrade (besides the fact that I'll have at least three, if not more, free Ultimate Edition licenses to use anyway). I don't "need" it (and as Grandmaster said, nobody does), but I want it.

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j79zlr

I'm surprised you said OOB hardware support, when I installed Vista I had to search down a bunch of different drivers and then install them with compatability mode to get almost everything to work. Pretty much the only thing that was detected and installed was my ATi X700. I know its a RC still, but the support for me atleast was definitely less than ideal. Linux interestingly enough supports everything I have OOB with the exception of my ATi card.

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NetRyder

Sure, as with Linux, driver support really depends on your hardware. Driver availability in Vista is currently better for some than it is for others. There's no way to avoid this unless you're a closed system like the Macintosh where the same company that makes a small, limited number of hardware models also creates the software (OS) for it.

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Shamus MacNoob

Out of the 105 computers I handle at work I have 1 with win 2000 and 1 with win98 < not on network all the others are on XP

I will buy Vista I will wait a few monthes let some bugs and drivers get fixed.


The one and only thing that did not get installed right for me was my microphone everything esle was flawless

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