Promotion Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic FULL VERSION [DVD] [OLD VERSION]

Over All Rating Reviews :

I now have several experiences with this new OS on a number of platforms and can offer a bit of advice/experience from the perspective of someone often asked by friends and family to work on their computers. I generally prefer to build my own systems from parts. However, most of my experience below is on machines that were purchases - 2 HP systems and a Lenovo laptop. I'm still choosing XP when I can.

1. Don't assume things will work in Vista like XP. Driver incompatibility, and differences will slow you down -- budget mucho time to resolve these issues. For example, many cite driver and device incompatibilities, some virus and spyware programs work, and some don't. The mature members in my family use Juno over dial-up. Forget this in a web client -- dialup is way too slow. The Juno remote client that downloads email for off-line reading in XP doesn't work in Vista. Supposedly, one can configure Windows Mail to do this (Outlook is gone). However, I haven't had an opportunity to try it. I usually suggest taking them back to XP since the look and feel will be similar to what they've had on their Win 98 systems.

2. No matter how hot your box, Vista is slow to start and shut down. I recently worked on a Vista box having a Pentium quad core processor and 3 GB of ram. The system takes several minutes to start and shut down. Vista loads about 2x more resident processes than XP. On the same hardware that translates to about 2x as long for Vista v. XP.

3. Make the restore disks! My daughter's Lenova laptop running Vista stopped booting up. Lenovo service is pretty helpful (Cheers to them in NC)and we had no hardware errors- just a corrupted drive that had to be re-imaged because the onboard restore files were also corrupted. If we had made the restore disks when we first got the laptop, we could have fixed it ourselves from the backup. When you make them, the first disk has to be a CD, then the others should be DVDs or you'll have a huge number of restore disks. Its better to do this when you first get the computer. This is different from XP where I had the disks in hand (ie you don't have to create them).

Summing Up

Vista has a nice look and feel to it. I can navigate it OK from my XP experience, and we prob. will all have to live with it at some point. Understand that its slower than XP to start and shut down, and it may not be the best choice for everyone (esp mature users, those that are challenged). Budget lots of time to work out the incompatibilities and make the backup/resote disks asap!.

Best wishes!

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