stupid question i think.... but my pal bought a laptop today and is askin me if he would be ok downgrading from vista to xp cos he hates vista??? i aint sure some help please
I don't know why this seems odd.. I absolutely know where he's coming from. When i first got this pc I had loads of trouble getting a select few things to work. Ask him what his reasons for it are because I've now sorted out the problems I first had and now everything is fine and dandy and Vista really isn't that terrible
not really a stupid question at all as it happens. MS have been asked so much, that they now offer a vista-to-xp downgrade Contact the vendor and ask for a set of XP recovery CDs (there will be a charge, up to £40!) or just an XP disc (just the media, no license) for £18 The former will save you a call to MS, the latter will need you to ring up, explain what you have done, and then they will give your mate a new license. heres one of many articles: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=543 However, I would urge everybody to give Vista a chance - I was far from impressed when I first use it, but give a few tweaks to UAC and it's silent and just gets on with things...no pop ups every 10 seconds. I'm running 64 bit and i've had bot all in the way of problems. I much prefer it to XP now. Then again it needs a PC with some fair beef to run nicely with full eye candy
we downgrade all our laptops to XP - laptop companies (esp tosh) are releasing XP drivers even for the newest laptops. Business wise, Vista is not a good choice. to get it even to run well, you have to have ALL machines spec'd up to the hilt, never mind it's compatability issues. Microsoft have really pushed it too far with this one....
So whats the crack then will Microsoft fix it with updates eventually?I remember xp was shit at first too
it's not so much things that are broken, it's more what microsoft are expecting of it's customers - it's need so much resources to run well - running at home and running in a work environment on a network are 2 very different things - great expense/waste/time/inconvience/etc - and for what? is it really that much better an operating system - it's more VISUAL changes than owt else. Then there's compatability issues - many companies use lots of legacy products, some adapted to work with the MS NT style framework - now here comes another version of windows, different again! personally, i just MS are expecting a lot from people. It just shows when companies, like toshiba, when vista came out , all there laptops were vista - now they've backtracked and offer vista AND XP versions
For home use, I'm now much happier with Vista ad my OS than I ever was with XP (apart from the first month or so when I'd just upgraded from win98 ). I'm not sure if a lot of my problems with XP could have been related to my custom built PC though.. quite possibly!
So I'm planning on buying a laptop in the near future, all I will be using it for is browsing internet, downloading films etc, converting videos to dvd format and playing football manager games. Will vista do these things without giving me grief???
as long as all the extra little applications that you use, like dvd converting software, don't have any problems with vista - you should be fine!
Yeah Vista is fine for all of that. I think i prefer it to my old XP PC. Only problem I've found so far is that Nero doesn't work on it. But Alcohol does...
Nero works fine on mine with vista home premium, had to try a few different versions to get it to work tho.
