Why Vista?

[jeff_duntemann]

Slashdot aggregated an item indicating that when you play audio files in Vista, network performance slows down. Nobody's quite sure what's happening, nor (more crucially) whether it's a bug-i.e., accidental-or a consequence of a feature. If the latter, the feature is likely to be

Comments

[tonyinknoxville]

At work we use Win2003 Servers for development. Home is XP Pro for myself.

If I were to build a new system it would get XP Pro. If not that, then a flavor of Linux and then VMWare to run those Windows apps I just can't live without or desire to purchase new licenses for.

Good luck on your hunt.

Begat, Begat, begat.

[n8ux]

I had to be dragged kicking and screaming from DOS to Windows 3. Then 3.1 came along, and WOW! What an improvement over the way we were doing things under 3.0. Then 95, and WOW! What an improvement!

And so on.

I'm now writing this on a 6 year old original install of XP Home, which is so crud infested it now takes around 7-8 minutes of continuous drive churning to boot up. Vista seems to come with all the crud already built in - no need to install 3rd party software. WOW!

My "important" machine runs 2k pro - it a 1.2 ghz machine, and it's snappy.

N8UX.

Crossover and/or VirtualBox

[rkhalloran]

Crossover is a commercialized WINE package, purportedly with somewhat better support of Win32 programs. Virtualbox is a freeware VM similar to VMWare. You might try these as options.

I can say for much of the day-to-day stuff I do, Ubuntu (actually KUbuntu for the KDE desktop) works as well as anything available from MS. If not for the file-format issues, I'd probably chuck Windows out entirely.

Visio on Crossover

[rkhalloran]

When I was trying to run Linux as my primary desktop at the office (of a Very Large Financial Institution), I found Visio ran, with minor glitches, very well under Crossover, as did most of the MS Office suite except Project.

Adobe packages were less successful, though I gather from the Codeweavers site that people have had reasonable success under recent versions.

[alanajoli]

We had to buy a new computer (my laptop was crashing amid my novel deadline) in the three week period that Dell was only selling computers with Vista. Given that it wasn't an option, we're actually mostly enjoying using it. It's mostly bells and whistles, from what I can tell, and I'm sure it's probably slow for the amount of machine we bought, but it's faster than my old laptop, and I don't have to worry about the hinge for the screen breaking and destroying my chance of meeting a deadline. ;) But then again, I'm a little less computer savvy than most of your crowd, so there are probably hosts of things that could be better if I knew enough to complain about them.