Buying Laptop - How bad is vista?

R

River

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Hi,
Looking to buy a new laptop. Dell broke down after 2.5 years. Pretty good innings I suppose.

Would mostly use for music, video, wireless internet but would also do quite a bit of word, excel, powerpoint. Looking around the €1,000 mark. Speed would be important for me, HD Memory would not have to be huge 160gb probably do.

Anyway was looking at options. Dell, Toshiba, Vaio, HP etc. All recent models seem to come with vista though and I've heard some bad stories.
My question is how bad is vista if you get a decent notebook with good RAM / processor speed? (min 2.1 Ghz, 3mb RAM).

Would vista put you off all these models?

Obviously Mac's are an option but a little more expensive than what I'm looking to spend.
 
I've resisted Vista so far, so I can't comment.
You can still get laptops with XP, though. I bought a Toshiba a few months ago from [broken link removed], a bit dear but I needed it to work on my network and I was afraid to mix XP and Vista.
(No connection with BMS)
 
I also bought a laptop last Xmas with XP. Heard too many scare stories about Vista.

The thing to remember is that it is very large and processor hungry, so if it is going to be installed on a laptop then it will have to have a very good processor and a large amount of RAM.
 
You could install your existing XP on the new machine if you can't order it with XP. Vista is slow out of the box, but it can be speeded up considerably with a bit of simple tweaking (just do a "speed up Vista" google search.)
 
We bought a Toshiba laptop with Vista on it about a year ago, it has 2 MB RAM and is absolutely perfect. The only teeny tiny problem we had with Vista was that it didn't recognise our printer driver so we downloaded a new one from the canon website. TBH the only people I have heard complaining about Vista are those who have Dell computers because Dell semmingly pre load their computers with loads of software and some of these have issues with Vista.
 
Its grand you need min 2gb of ram though, takes a bit of getting used to though.

I have a dell laptop with 3gb touch wood going fine.
 
Marianne S said:
We bought a Toshiba laptop with Vista on it about a year ago, it has 2 MB RAM and is absolutely perfect. The only teeny tiny problem we had with Vista was that it didn't recognise our printer driver so we downloaded a new one from the canon website. TBH the only people I have heard complaining about Vista are those who have Dell computers because Dell semmingly pre load their computers with loads of software and some of these have issues with Vista.
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Sorry make that 2048MB RAM!
 
I got a laptop for christmas last year, it came with Vista and TBH I have no complaints. I have been able to install what I wanted and found that many of theprograms I've downloaded have worked with Vista or have had their own Vista version.
I don't have a problem with speed but I'm going to take a look at googling the 'spped up Vista' suggested to see if I can make it even better!

ad
 
recently got a HP notebook with vista installed.....and im getting rid of Vista...seems to "hang" whenever I have a few programs running at once, and especially when IOve more than one web page open at a time
 
Vista is really bad, shuts down at frequent intervals for no apparent reason. Also has lots of very annoying features that you can't switch off.
You do get the hang of using it however, very frequent saving etc, and it has improved a little with all the updates that have come on stream. A case of putting up with it. XP wasn't all plain sailing either.
 
extopia said:
You could install your existing XP on the new machine if you can't order it with XP.
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Depends on the license. OEM Windows licenses are tied to the machine they originally came with or were installed on and are not transferrable even if deleted from the original machine. If you do manage to install on another machine then you may have problems with product activation, getting Windows updates etc. You may be able to get a genuine generic OEM Windows but there are some dodgy offers out there (especially on eBay). Otherwise you would have to buy Windows retail which will probably be c. €100+.

If you buy a machine with Vista preinstalled then the manufacturer may be able to provided OEM XP install media. I did it recently with a HP6910p. But I'm pretty sure that this option for downgrading only applies when going from Vista Business to XP Professional (and not, say, Vista Home to XP Home).
 
IMO, Vista is perfect for the home user. Fancy GUI and little shortcuts all over the place to make day-to-day internet browsing, music/movie playing all work like a charm.

but if you plan on doing anything intensive (software development etc) that requires you to configure lots of settings that then Vista's not for you. just my 0.02c
 
Cash-Money said:
IMO, Vista is perfect for the home user. Fancy GUI and little shortcuts all over the place to make day-to-day internet browsing, music/movie playing all work like a charm.

but if you plan on doing anything intensive (software development etc) that requires you to configure lots of settings that then Vista's not for you. just my 0.02c
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Im purely home user...99% of use is internet browsing and / or downloading music, films etc and I find it constantly freezes when i have 3 r more web pages open - IMO a problem that should have been ironed out in the development stage.
 
I have just bought a Toshiba with Vista. Despite my initial reluctance I have to say that I am completely won over by Vista, very nice. Vista on a brand new machine should be fine, upgrading an older machine however may mean that the minimum requirements are not met.

If you buy XP, you must know that the machine will not be supported for very long as Microsoft have phased out XP support. Vista will last you longer.I'd rather buy a machine that is supported than one that will soon be declared officially obsolete and with no support at all!!!
 
d2x2 said:
If you buy XP, you must know that the machine will not be supported for very long as Microsoft have phased out XP support. Vista will last you longer.I'd rather buy a machine that is supported than one that will soon be declared officially obsolete and with no support at all!!!
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That's what Microsoft wants people to think.

Better, would be to consider if you really need a Windows machine.
 
Also a recent buyer of a toshiba laptop with vista.
I find firefox is noticably faster than internet explorer, both for starting up & for general surfing.
 
A lot of software isnt supported on vista and will cause system issues, I discovered this after recently purchasing a Laptop with vista installed. After installing some media software (the brilliant but now defunct musicmatch) I had running on XP, I found hangs frequent, even after going to properties and selecting the "xp compatible" option. I didnt have to be doing anything with musicmatch, it could have been sitting in the background and hangs would still occur.

Since deinstalling musicmatch and finding a vista supported alternative I havent had any hangs.

Lesson learned is make sure any software you install is supported on vista and if youre getting hangs, deinstall or disable software to try and find if anything is causing the hangs.

I still prefer XP but am warming to vista so I guess its just a familiarity factor.
 
briancbyrne said:
Im purely home user...99% of use is internet browsing and / or downloading music, films etc and I find it constantly freezes when i have 3 r more web pages open - IMO a problem that should have been ironed out in the development stage.
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Brian, that looks like more of a software problem on your end tbh..

How many Vista machines have i seen in bits because of people not watching what they're installing? too many. and they all blame Microsoft. its like blaming Nissan for all those cigarette burns on your front seat!

little tip for people with Vista who's machine is taking too long to startup etc...

Go to Start -> Run and type "msconfig" (no quotes) and hit enter. Click on the startup tab and look through the list. Uncheck the ones that you know you don't want starting up (apple, google, yahoo et al are all culprits for starting up their agents without your request)... if your unsure what your unchecking do not uncheck it without googling the process first
 
d2x2 said:
If you buy XP, you must know that the machine will not be supported for very long as Microsoft have phased out XP support. Vista will last you longer.I'd rather buy a machine that is supported than one that will soon be declared officially obsolete and with no support at all!!!
Click to expand...
I don't think that this is correct. Vista is a sow. IMHO it's better to stick to XP Pro + SP3 and skip Vista on to Windows 7 (of course not until SP1 or SP2 for Windows & is available:)).
 
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