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Laptop buying debacle.

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by o-frackers

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Wanting to possibly purchase a laptop for my wife for Christmas but I'm not sure if I want to get a laptop with a Vista OS or one with XP....should I wait for this Windows 7 that is supposedly coming out in the near future?

9 replies

by larryd4

For the average user Vista is not a bad purchase.

Most people who are sticking to XP are the techies who either just hate Vista because its Vista or its the gamers who want to make sure all their games keep on working.

My Mom and Dad have a PC and a laptop on Vista and have been quite happy for the past year.

by o-frackers

The motive for asking the questions basically resided on whether or not there would be confusion on her end, in changing over to a whole new OS. I myself have been over to my brother-in-laws house and been on his HP which so happens to have Vista Home, and I had a few annoyances navigating through common tasks. I'm just wondering if maybe you are right and she may not delve too much into the laptop outside of surfing the net, or doing minimal computing tasks. The main thing is ......Will she get confused using a laptop w/ Vista, while doing school related tasks, or doing budget type stuff? Navigating through some of the OS is going to be necessary. And since she is so used to XP, is it going to frustrate her to no end?

by oh smeg

That can have either Loaded. That way if the User has a lot of Problems with the Current OS Loaded they can have the system changed tot he other. In this day & Age that generally Involves buying a system loaded with Vista of some form and the ability to Upgrade to XP as you already know that a complete set of XP Drivers are available for it if required.

The only real problem that you may face with Vista however is other Software & Hardware that may not be compatible with Vista so if there is no need to connect existing Printers, Scanners and the like or use existing software there is very little chance of issues arising with Vista.

However if you plan on connecting the system to existing Hardware or using software that you already own and are licensed to use on more than one system that is not Vista Compatible your only real choice is to buy a system with XP loaded.

Home use generally speaking shouldn't run into issues with Vista unless there is one of the above to be considered.

Col

by o-frackers

I'm not so much worried about myself, in the sense of dealing with Vista. I just question my wife with dealing with it. But who knows maybe she'll surprise me, and Love it! Thanks for the advice.

by cain1k

Take in account what she does. My roomate has an Acer with Vista Home Premium and it works for her with 1gig because she only IM's and web surfs. With myself I have a laptop that could be on the same but I had a copy of XP and prefer that since I run Adobe Photoshop, SQL Server 2005 Management, and Dreamweaver, sometimes at the same time SO I need all the memory I can spare.

If you make a list of what she uses, I'd even suggest checking open boxed items that are usually $100 or lower at best buy for cheaper laptops. Generally only have a 2-3 year life span anyways and so you can get something at a lower price to manage for her.

by o-frackers

I appreciate the advice.....I'm currently evaluating two different models of laptops, and I'm about to make a decision soon.

by winthrop.polk

Go ahead and get the laptop but be sure it has an intel Core i7 processor and at least 3 GB DDR3 Ram. Go ahead and install XP and wait for windows 7. Then upgrade. AMD may be releasing a new chip soon.

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