Vista

[Scotty]

How many have upgraded to Vista?
Is it woth the expense of the Upgrad?
Jim

[AntonyF]

I was going to, mostly on the fact that it looked prettier. But then I started to think: "Well, do I really need it?" Answer is no. They've spent 6 years between products and have offered no compelling reasons to upgrade.

But of course I wish I did upgrade! I decided to reinstall XP on Sunday. Didn't realize that it was SP1+ that introduced support for drives over 137GB, so XP tried to "fix" my 250GB drives and I spent all day Monday trying to fsort out the mess and recover files.

[ankhor]

How many have upgraded to Vista?

No idea, I won`t.

Is it worth the expense of the Upgrade?

Nope, have been looking around what the websites write about it.
It has better protection, but that is only implemented in the higher
price region of Vista. According to the sites.
So actually, according to them, it is SP3 with a hefty pricetag.

Sure it might look pretty, but is that worth the price?
I say no.

[Soquili]

I was thinking about getting Vista, but the Ultimate edition is too over priced for an operating system.

Looking over the new PCs that come with Vista they are offering Home Basic edition or Home Premium edition. Not much incentive to purchase either of them.

Home Basic isn't worth the cost, it doesn't have the "pretty" enhancements or the security features of the higher priced editions.

From the sales reports I've seen few people are buying Vista in box or pre-installed.

The company I work for has a deal with Dell computers to continue providing Windows XP on all new purchases of computers for this year.

[WolfMoonHP]

Not only have I not seen anything terribly impressive in Vista, I haven't read anything about the new MS Office Suite that seems like a major improvement.

There is a limit to how much one can tweak programs like Word, Excel, etc., and still have the new "features" useful to enough people to make them want to switch.

There is room for improvement in PowerPoint, but even that would be of interest only to high-end users. For the average teacher, preparing classroom presentations, the current version does just about everything necessary.

And I'm still waiting to find a use for Accerss. The only databases I maintain are book and record collections, and I do that in very simple software.
---
Will

[jyoung]

Not going to waste my money. Haven't heard much good about it from the reviews so far. And if I have to be running at least a gig of memory to take advantage of Vistas premier (or whatever it's called) OS, then how much memory will I really need to run applications on top of it? This could turn out to be Microsofts "Edsel".

I've also read reports that the EU is not taking very kindly to it.

Joe

[Scotty]

I agree I have the 1G memery and a 1.6GH processor but that just runs the basic Vista, to take advantage of the full Vista gonna cost me another 2-300 dollars (cDN) to uprgrade my system. My XP Home is running just fine with out the expense.
Jim
P.S. Thank you every one for reponses.
Jim

[AntonyF]

If I did buy Vista I'd buy OEM. I never buy retail price.

In terms of Office 07, I have it installed. It is quite different in interface, and I hate it. I was hoping Outlook would be more efficient with faster search, but you have to just install the MS search system (and it doesn't work right) and it's a slow old dog.

But it's easy to get tied to Outlook. At work it's with Exchange, at home I use Outlooks contacts and calendar which syncs with my phone and PDA. Otherwise I'd go to Thunderbird.

[Soquili]

I could buy the Vista Business edition through the Dell contract where I work but it doesn't have the BitLocker feature of the Ultimate edition . And a few other features are also missing in the Business edition.

Office 2007 isn't my favorite version, but it was free when I attended one of the Launch events in mid January. The developers track did show some interesting things that can be done with the Ribbon bar.

[matelot]

I have had some cursory scans of Vista hypes and the only difference that it would make for me is that Vista seems to include Windows defender and Windows One Care. I use both Win Xp Pro and Win XP Home and these editions seem to work ok for me. I do have Defender and I subscribe to One Care so it seems to me that I am well covered security-wise and as my OS's are not problematic, why spend more cash?