If XP is dead then what.... Vista next?

I currently have XP and replacement of desktop PC is in progress. AND am about to update from CS3 ext. to CS4 ext. AND to add further fuel for headaches am looking at a Laptop to carry on photo trips.

Problem I am not a computer wizz, just a basic user in that I can handle simple installations etc. but once the discussion turns in any way to computer lingo I get a bit lost.

My PC has pretty good high end spec. and on this machine I currently have CS3. Lightroom 2.4 Noiseware plug in,Fluid mask 3 plug in.Topaz plug in, Onone Genuine Fractals plug in, plus Photomatix HDR and Helicon Focus stand alone.

If I go with the newest Vista will all this gear function or is it all going to fall over on me? Thanks for any assistance in advance

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Andrew G

If your gear is working fine you don't have to go on to Vista. Some of the new upgraded softwares aren't that much different from the previous version. Since Win7 is coming out soon why not just wait for it and skip Vista altogether.

AusPic said:

If I go with the newest Vista will all this gear function or is it all going to fall over on me? Thanks for any assistance in advance

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It should all work fine on Vista. You're more likely to have problems with hardware that requires special drivers (such as a scanner, for example) than with software.

Tocar is right in that Windows 7 will be released next month (October 22). If you buy a machine that includes Vista right now, it should come with a certificate that lets you get a free copy of Windows 7 so that you can upgrade your system when it comes out. But if you expect to use Windows 7 (and most people who have tried the pre-release versions are pretty enthusiastic about it) then it may be easier to wait. After October 22 you should be able to buy a machine that already has Windows 7 installed - this will save you from having to do the upgrade.

Alternatively, it wouldn't surprise me to see some discounting on the prices of Vista-loaded machines after October 22. If you're willing to do the upgrade yourself, you could save a bit of money (but I wouldn't get my expectations TOO high on this one).

If all your software works on XP, I say stay with it. There is little or nothing functionally to be gained in going to Vista/W7, mainly eye candy. There is a real reason to move on only when you acquire some critical software that will only run on Vista/W7. Considering system security, if you follow good practise, your XP set up will not be any less secure than a Vista/W7 set up.

Wait and see what Windows 9 delivers.

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Malcy
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http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g114/Luminarium/Wa
lking%20the%20dog/Sabdenfold-2.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/malcy/

IKB said:

If all your software works on XP, I say stay with it. There is little or nothing functionally to be gained in going to Vista/W7, mainly eye candy. There is a real reason to move on only when you acquire some critical software that will only run on Vista/W7. Considering system security, if you follow good practise, your XP set up will not be any less secure than a Vista/W7 set up.

Wait and see what Windows 9 delivers.

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I would agree. I have just setup a friend's new laptop which came with Vista Home Premium and what a nightmare. Pop up messages all the time and difficult to track down how to disable them (they really have done a good job at hiding wanted stuff) and found no encryption facility with that (and similar) versions, unlike with XP. Getting it sorted has been a PITA.

I only recently had to swap to XP-PRO because having to build a new computer (motherboard started playing up) I found things like the new graphics card (Radeon Saphire) and the duo-Intel motherboard only had drivers for XP and Vista. I have been using the lovely stable Windoze 2000 for several years and just wish I could have continued with that. In comparison, XP-PRO is neither as stable nor as good an OS, imho.

Once set up as required - I never had to change things with Win2K - whereas with XP, I use a programme via icon on desktop several times, then can suddenly find it has disappeared the next time I go to use it. So, will have to track down why. Fortunately, I use PowerStrip and can restore the icons but strange it happens.

Progress? I think more a case of evolution. IBM's OS/2 Warp3 was the best OS I ever used. Just a pity that everyone jumped on the Windoze bandwagon. Bit like the old Betamax video system.

Nearest (funny) I can relate to is the visitor to Spain went into a restaurant under the bullring. He saw a chap on the next table eating very big meatballs. So, he told the waiter he wanted the same.

However, when his meal came, he only had two small meatballs. He queried why.

The waiter said, in broken English "Señor .... the matador does not always win"

Zone8

The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process. -Edward Weston
http://www.photosnowdonia.co.uk/ZPS

Thanks for that, I can relate to the customer somewhat as I feel I am about to get some smaller meat balls! The PC I have really does have legs, given that it is XP and is functioning very well.....OOOPS!

If I summarise so far, you seem to be saying it is actually worth purchasing a laptop and " downgrading" to XP!

Does the fact that I am looking at an investment of A$3-4,700 for a unit with the right processor and grunty video card change your advice any?

Does the spectre of a time horizon on XP patches change anything?

Cheers 'n thanks again
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Andrew G

Just wait for Windows 7. If you are desperate to get going use Vista in the interim.

timiano said:

Just wait for Windows 7. If you are desperate to get going use Vista in the interim.

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I think that is pretty sound advice as you can get Vista and an option to upgrade to Win7 when available.

However, I would personally try to get a new one with both on - there are some deals where XP and Vista are both pre-installed and with special offer for Win7 upgrade.

You could also get a Vista-installed model and get the trial Win7 (think is still available)

It´s hard to recommend really. XP has its idiot-sync-kracies but from what I have seen of Vista .... a definite no thanks Matey. The home editions (even Premium) are rather crippled in many respects - I mentioned no ability to encrypt files as one example. Because of all the constant security pop-ups (even when logged in as Administrator) are enough to drive anyone around the twist. It seems to have a default setup designed for morons and idiots that have no ability to work out anything for themselves and no auto ability to switch the darned things off. Quite a search involved to find out how, too and nothing seems to be in a place where it can be easily found, even if you opt for Windoze Classic styles for everything. If you do have to get Vista - allow lots of time to work out how to get into a sensible working situation.

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Zone8

The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process. -Edward Weston
http://www.photosnowdonia.co.uk/ZPS

Will take advantage of extra RAM in a 64 bit OS (Vista 64 now, or Windows 7 when it is released). If you do a lot of editing in Photoshop -- you will appreciate the difference that the extra RAM available through the 64 bit version affords you (it makes a significant difference on most systems... it certainly did on my own).

Vista 64 is quite stable at this point. I use it with 8GB RAM, on a Quad core extreme system - and it absolutely rocks. Like most major OS releases, there was a period of time when there was a lack of driver support, and vendors needed to supply upgrades to support it. It is quite easy to check, if the software you are using is compatible with Vista. Microsoft currently has a free upgrade to Windows 7 program.. for qualifying versions of Vista, worth checking out.

If you purchase a laptop with Vista installed -- it should come with a free upgrade to Windows 7. I picked up an HP laptop for my daugher a few weeks ago, and there was paperwork / web sign-up that will give her the free upgrade next Month. I think most notebook vendors are offering this now.

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Joe

Old Acct: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/postersprofile.asp?poster=hjigihivhdif

IKB said:

If all your software works on XP, I say stay with it.

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That's fair advice for someone who is wondering whether they should upgrade their existing computer. But for someone buying a new computer it is, IMHO, misguided. A computer bought today should last for 3-5 years, and during that time more and more hardware and programs are going to come out that either won't be compatible with XP or won't be able to take advantage of the additional memory possible with a 64-bit copy of Vista or Windows 7. The way forward is with a current OS, and for most folks buying today Windows 7 is probably the one they should be thinking about.

I say this as someone who never saw a reason to upgrade to Vista and have completely skipped over it.

Zone8 said:

I have just setup a friend's new laptop which came with Vista Home Premium and what a nightmare ... Getting it sorted has been a PITA.

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Just to provide some counterpoint I'll mention here that I've tested and eventually adopted Windows 7 by installing the RC version of Windows 7 on three different systems:

an ancient 1.5GHZ P4 with 768MB of memory,
a five-year old Toshiba laptop with 1GB of memory (and a 40GB hard drive)
and a brand new Core i7 system with 12GB of memory.

I haven't had a speck of trouble with any of these systems. The one thing I was worried about was my Epson Perfection 2400 scanner which I bought several years ago - but Epson provides Vista drivers for it which work perfectly with Windows 7, even the 64-bit flavour I'm using on my Core i7 system.

I didn't even have any trouble installing and using Money 97, a program that was originally designed for Windows 95!

Zone8 said:

IBM's OS/2 Warp3 was the best OS I ever used.

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Microsoft's implementation of scroll bars still annoys the hell out of me. OS/2 had it right, but in Windows if you click on the scrollbar to scroll vertically and you move the mouse a little to far to the left or right, the scrollbar resets to it's original position.

Yep, OS/2 was nice.

Yes, WinXP was(is) good, but as another poster said, it is dated (2001), and spending $4-5K on your new systems I'll assume you want to get a reasonable life out of the system - go with the latest Win7 (effectively, Microsofts Vista patch to address all the Vista complaints)

Also, wait for Win7 to be installed, if you go the Vista > free Win7 upgrade, if you ever need to reinstall the OS, I believe you will have to reinstall Vista first and then update with your Win7 disk to Win7. Microsoft has made upgrades a multistep process since the upgrade program disks need to see the installed base OS before they will work - a real PITA for those who reinstall occasionally to refresh their install for better speed/reliability.

Further, insist on Win7- 64 OS (again the best current technology), win7-32 is a "legacy" software for CPU's that don't support a 64 bit OS and will work fine for most routine tasks (office, surfing, dvd buring, etc.) but graphic intensive programs like LR and Photoshop really start to thrive in the 64 bit environment, why do you think Adobe has brought out their core applications in 64 bit - to save money? No, us users always want more speed and memory access, and the 64 bit environment is the best current way to go.

Finally, make sure you get a high quality quad core CPU (i7-9xx or i7-8xx) to insure hyperthreading is functional and a video card that supports Adobe supported GPU acceleration, because again Adobe has worked hard with nVidia and ATI for these speed ups to address user speed complaints.

Jpegman

Sean Nelson said:

IKB said:

If all your software works on XP, I say stay with it.

Click to expand...

That's fair advice for someone who is wondering whether they should upgrade their existing computer. But for someone buying a new computer it is, IMHO, misguided. A computer bought today should last for 3-5 years, and during that time more and more hardware and programs are going to come out that either won't be compatible with XP or won't be able to take advantage of the additional memory possible with a 64-bit copy of Vista or Windows 7. The way forward is with a current OS, and for most folks buying today Windows 7 is probably the one they should be thinking about.

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I have to disagree. The hardware and OS are not monolithic, they are separate entities. So the OP does not have to change his OS at the time of upgrading his hardware unless there is a fundamental reason to do so such as driver unavailability. An OS upgrade can be done at any time and the upheaval is not worth it unless there is a pressing need. I have tested W7 beta and W7RC and came away wondering what I had gained. The software I use ran on both, security was no better, the start menu is a retrograde step and W7 is a memory hog. If XP is doing the job, stick with it.

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Malcy
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http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g114/Luminarium/Wa
lking%20the%20dog/Sabdenfold-2.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/malcy/

A 64 bit OS only shows advantages if:

1. You do a lot of video rendering and similar tasks that use multi threaded apps and huge file sizes. There will be little real difference when photo processing unless doing complex batch processing on large numbers of images with multi threaded photo processing software.

2. If you are going to going to use a lot of memory (> 2GB/application, > 3.5GB overall). It doesn't help that Vista and W7 are profilgate with memory use (W7 slightly less than Vista).

For most users little will be gained from going 64 bit.

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Malcy
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http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g114/Luminarium/Wa
lking%20the%20dog/Sabdenfold-2.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/malcy/

IKB said:

Sean Nelson said:

That's fair advice for someone who is wondering whether they should upgrade their existing computer. But for someone buying a new computer it is, IMHO, misguided.

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IKB said:

I have to disagree. The hardware and OS are not monolithic, they are separate entities. So the OP does not have to change his OS at the time of upgrading his hardware unless there is a fundamental reason to do so such as driver unavailability.

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Of course you can upgrade the OS and keep the same hardware, or you can buy new hardware and continue using the same OS. But as you said:

IKB said:

An OS upgrade can be done at any time and the upheaval is not worth it unless there is a pressing need.

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Buying new hardware is a "natural" time to change OSes since you need to migrate everything from one machine to another anyway, and since (for most people) the new machine will come with your choice of OS preinstalled.

And if you're building your own machine - well then you've got to install the OS anyway, and it in terms of installation effort it really doesn't make much difference which one you choose.

XP is seeing a new lease of life as an OS for netbooks. It should continue to be well supported for some time yet.

IKB said:

Sean Nelson said:

IKB said:

If all your software works on XP, I say stay with it.

Click to expand...

That's fair advice for someone who is wondering whether they should upgrade their existing computer. But for someone buying a new computer it is, IMHO, misguided. A computer bought today should last for 3-5 years, and during that time more and more hardware and programs are going to come out that either won't be compatible with XP or won't be able to take advantage of the additional memory possible with a 64-bit copy of Vista or Windows 7. The way forward is with a current OS, and for most folks buying today Windows 7 is probably the one they should be thinking about.

Click to expand...

I have to disagree. The hardware and OS are not monolithic, they are separate entities. So the OP does not have to change his OS at the time of upgrading his hardware unless there is a fundamental reason to do so such as driver unavailability. An OS upgrade can be done at any time and the upheaval is not worth it unless there is a pressing need. I have tested W7 beta and W7RC and came away wondering what I had gained. The software I use ran on both, security was no better, the start menu is a retrograde step and W7 is a memory hog. If XP is doing the job, stick with it.

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Malcy

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I'm not sure if older OS's like XP will take advantage of newer hardware technology that has (and will) become available, since mainstream support is stopped for XP.

Anyway , I never was very enthousiast about Vista, that came preinstalled on my laptop. It was very sluggish compared to Linux on the same unit.

Last week I have replaced Vista for Windows 7 RTM, and I must say I'm quite impressed with the over-all performance, fast boot time, much lower memory footprint, faster file copy, less uac pop-ups, and a cleaner interface compared to Vista.

Is Windows 7 better than XP? Well when XP came out I wondered what I gained compared to w2k also, but because the mainstream support for XP is already stopped , I really would go for Windows 7 rather than Vista..

JohnnyWB
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pleeze ignore ze typo's

There is little about at the moment that cannot run on XP. The latest chipsets and processors will run happily on XP. At work, we run several hundred computers on XP. New PC's and Laptops come with Vista business installed and are immediately changed to XP. We have no plans to move to W7, there is simply no advantage and a huge amount of cost. My home PC runs Ubuntu Linux with XP on a secondary HDD for the few things like my TomTom Sat NAV that won't run on Linux.

You can criticise me for running XP and Linux, but I just can't see the point or any advantage of paying the price and upgrading to W7 (or vista).

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Malcy
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http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g114/Luminarium/Wa
lking%20the%20dog/Sabdenfold-2.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/malcy/

IKB said:

You can criticise me for running XP and Linux, but I just can't see the point or any advantage of paying the price and upgrading to W7 (or vista).

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I'd never criticise you for using what works best for you. I've been an XP man myself these last several years because that's what worked best for me.

My only point was that if the OP is buying a new computer, he'd be foolish not to at least consider using it as an opportunity to move to the latest and greatest OS. I did that when I bought my new system last month because I expect the system to last the same several years my last one did, and I'm pretty sure if I didn't move to Windows 7 now then I'd regret it some time during that time period.

IKB said:

There is little about at the moment that cannot run on XP. The latest chipsets and processors will run happily on XP. At work, we run several hundred computers on XP. New PC's and Laptops come with Vista business installed and are immediately changed to XP. We have no plans to move to W7, there is simply no advantage and a huge amount of cost. My home PC runs Ubuntu Linux with XP on a secondary HDD for the few things like my TomTom Sat NAV that won't run on Linux.

You can criticise me for running XP and Linux, but I just can't see the point or any advantage of paying the price and upgrading to W7 (or vista).

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Malcy
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I think it would be unwise and costly to go for the latest OS for production use in a corporate environment, and therefor understand very well you swapped the bundled Vista business for XP (at no extra licens cost) and have no plans to move to Windows 7

For home use, I think it is not the same situation as a corporate environment, although it might be wise (and I personally prefer) to use the ubuntu LTS versions over the fresh releases, available every 6 months, even at no cost.

I don't think the licence cost of an oem XP or an oem Windows 7 (bundled with the new pc) would differ very much.

JohnnyWB
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pleeze ignore ze typo's