Geekly opinions valued here...

[crookedtune]

I doubt it. You're licensed for one install, so it shouldn't matter if you move it from one machine to another, AFAIK. In any case, M is not going to pursue a home user with a dying PC.

I recently moved onto a new Vista system, and gave it 3G. Probably overkill, but I got a good deal, and want this to keep me going for a few good years. So far, I have never regretted overspending on RAM, and often regretted underspending.

[buddhu]

I run Vista (reluctantly) on a Core Duo with 2 Gig RAM. It's still a little sluggish.

For Vista I wouldn't want less than 2 Gig if I were gaming at all or doing heavy Photoshop or any music or video editing. 4 Gig would be much better and a RAM upgrade is high on my shopping list.

I'd never go back to a desktop machine. My last 4 PCs have been laptops and the freedom from desks and spaghetti is to good to give up. Even in the office I use my laptop while the desktop sits usually neglected.

Currently running one of these.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/117852/a ... -5920.html

It's better than I expected.

[fearfaoin]

I doubt it. You're licensed for one install, so it shouldn't matter if you move it from one machine to another, AFAIK. In any case, M is not going to pursue a home user with a dying PC.

I wasn't worried about the legality, it was more of a technical question. IIRC,
XP "called home" when installing and checked to see if this was a different
configuration. If so, it refused to install. I think you then had to contact Micro$
to reset their database or somesuch arse-pain. I was wondering if Vista was
similar.

[crookedtune]

Ohhh....I guess you can figure they haven't softened up their stance.

[Tyler]

I run Vista (reluctantly) on a Core Duo with 2 Gig RAM. It's still a little sluggish.

For Vista I wouldn't want less than 2 Gig if I were gaming at all or doing heavy Photoshop or any music or video editing. 4 Gig would be much better and a RAM upgrade is high on my shopping list.

I'd never go back to a desktop machine. My last 4 PCs have been laptops and the freedom from desks and spaghetti is to good to give up. Even in the office I use my laptop while the desktop sits usually neglected.

Currently running one of these.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/117852/a ... -5920.html

It's better than I expected.

My bro-in-law just bought himself one of those new Acers and he's really happy with it.

Yeah, anything less than 2gig of RAM and Vista is practically unusable. Surprisingly enough, there are lots of OEM boxes that come with Vista and only 500mb.... But, of course, if you go into Burst Buy or Circuit S****y and you pay attention you'll notice that all their 'demo models' that they use to sell their bottom barrel computers all have at least 2 gig so that the unaware think they'll be getting a computer of similar performance capability...
One such store tried to take my younger sister for such a ride, and thankfully she had the common sense to call me before making a final desicion. I went back to the store and let the salesguy give us the pitch again (he totally said "the ammount of ram doesn't matter as much as your processor speed with Vista, you'll be better off with 500mb...see it works great on this here demo model...").
Of course, I said, "Hey, can I drive?" as I batted the the Burst Boy away...
"Hmmm, Start--->MyComputer---->(r.click)Properties---->General Tab....Hey, call me crazy, but this demo computer appears to have 4 gig of RAM. I thought you said this thing was the same as what we were going to buy, eh?"

We got a free upgrade to 2gig and a "store discount" on that unit...

IMHO, after spending the better part of a year with the OS, Vista is a pig.
Lots of unneccesary eye candy that eats up ram (thankfully one can still choose classic view, which helps a little), lots of useless add-ons like that crazy wigits bar or whatever the hell it is, redundant items (two f'in clocks on your desktop? who really needs/wants two friggin clocks?).
There are one or two items that I feel are an improvement on XP, namely the file tree start menu. I love that feature, but not enough to warrant choosing Vista over XP, providing I had the choice.
Vista will also act as a local host and compile ASP code (or so says my programming instructor, I've never tried), and I haven't done a whole lot of reading up on that because I dont' use ASP. (anyone else know?...I'm lookin' at you, Chris).
If I had my druthers I'd switch back to XP, but a bunch of my laptop's perif hardware isn't compatable (a buddy of mine with the same laptop switched his back to XP, but had to scramble together some hashed up drivers for all the components for it to work right, and he gets frequent error messages about odd things...not really worth the effort IMHO, at least not in my situation).

My laptop runs fairly well with Vista on 2gig of ram, but then again, I'm only using my computer for minor programming, mostly web stuff (XHTML, javascript, php, SQL, yadda yadda yadda) and school, and I don't really need more than that. I'm not a gamer anymore, so I don't even have an advanced graphics card; i just run on my integrated intel thingymabob for now. When I reall need an advanced graphics card, I'll probably need more ram too, then I'll just give my laptop to my wife to replace hers and get myself a fantastic whang-biz-with-racing-stripes laptop package.

For those who are into the geekier side of computers, there is an article in this months CPU about life after one year of Vista. One of the opinions expressed was that M$ ought to release XPSP4 as Vista2 next year

[tuaz]

I'm not a geek, but if you don't want to spend a lot for a powerful system (meaning the hardware may be underpowered for Vista),

and you're not dependent on software applications that need Windows to run,

then you might want to install an easy to use Linux OS on your system, to co-exist side by side with your Vista. The latter will still be there if you need it, but for run of the mill stuff you could boot the LInux.

For Dell, I would recommend SimplyMEPIS 7.0 because Dells seem to be finicky about what Linux OS can run on it without tweaking.

[Ronbo]

I'm not a geek, but if you don't want to spend a lot for a powerful system (meaning the hardware may be underpowered for Vista),

and you're not dependent on software applications that need Windows to run,

then you might want to install an easy to use Linux OS on your system, to co-exist side by side with your Vista. The latter will still be there if you need it, but for run of the mill stuff you could boot the LInux.

For Dell, I would recommend SimplyMEPIS 7.0 because Dells seem to be finicky about what Linux OS can run on it without tweaking.

Why don't you try to find a copy of windows xp, and install that on your new machine? I am sure that there are still builders and computer shops who have legit XP licenses. Linux will also coexist alongside xp, and together you have two operating systems better than Vista.

[Tyler]

If you go with an XP/Linux combo, remember to partition your hard drive....
Just IMHO, Ubuntu Linux is the most user friendly OS for non-geek types if you want to get away from M$.