Tom, I guess I'll be brave and be the lone Vista proponent. I have set up a dozen computers with Vista now, and like it very much. Initially Vista had 2 main issues. First, it required new drivers for all the hardware. The hardware companies didn't want to spend the money to develop drivers for their older product, so some old items just will not work with Vista. I had one computer setup for someone who had an older HP scanner that was still working great on XP, but HP had no plans to make a driver to use it with Vista, so it was toast. He went out and bought a nice Canon scanner - so HP lost my business on that one. The other problem with Vista initially was that it requires better hardware than Microsoft said it needed, so many early installs ran horribly. If installed on a computer with sufficient hardware, it ran fine on all the systems I put together. When the service pack 1 finally came out, Vista ran miles better, as is usual with Microsoft OSs. Vista still runs best with lots of memory and a good display card. I worked on a horribly slow Toshiba laptop for a friend that was an early Vista computer, and it was a horrible dog! It had decent specs and enough RAM, but was painfully slow. After service pack 1 and a driver update, though, it ran fine. I travel with a Thinkpad notebook computer (T60P) that came with XP. It had a hard drive fail, and since Vista SP-1 was available I installed that on the new hard drive. The computer ran noticeably faster with Vista than it did with XP, and still does after a year and a half. I think that is because Lenovo was very good at working up the drivers for Vista - the Thinkpad hardware really works smoothly with Vista. I have a second hard drive for the laptop with Ubuntu running on it, and Vista is equally fast at doing every day jobs as Ubuntu. And Linux, to me, is like Apple - they work great in their own way, but are much more limited in hardware and software compatibility as compared to Windows. Linux has the steepest learning curve, as well, but is neat, stable, and very reliable once one gets familiar with it. I run some old software using Vista successfully. I regularly run a DOS database for old records at Kawai, I run the old Lotus Smart Suite a lot (Lotus 123, Lotus Approach), which was developed for Windows 98, and I use the Ecco Pro information manager at Kawai, and these all work fine in Vista. The backwards compatibility for me has been excellent, and besides telling Vista to run some old software in compatibility mode, everything I have tried to use has worked. One old audio editing program needed to be replaced - Cool2000 - because it would crash occasionally in Vista, but even then, I used it for 3 years until I found another one I liked equally well (GoldWave - from Canada). My daughter's computer at home has Vista 64 bit, and wow is that computer fast. It is so nice to use - but I'm currently using my 4 year old machine, which has Vista 32 (the processor won't run 64 bit). Suggested hardware for Vista is easy today. -2gb RAM (3 is nice) for 32 bit -4gb RAM (6 is nice) for 64 bit -Core2duo processor - any of them will work. Core i7 920 is a really nice choice right now, though. Very slick and fast running. -Display card with 256mb RAM on board, minimum for smooth operation of Vista. 512mb or 1gb is really nice -Fast USB card of 4gb for something called ReadyBoost. This makes Vista run quite a bit faster. Honestly, these same specs make the Mac OS-X run well also. Like Vista it will run with less, but to me it isn't very satisfying to buy a new computer and have it just be adequate. I want it to be slick and fast. I have set up a couple of Mac computers for people as well, and I do like OS-X as well. A lot of people buy them and install Windows XP or Vista alongside the Mac OS, because Apple hardware is very high quality but they need to run some Windows programs. This is kind of an expensive way to go, however. BTW, I read just a few days ago that Windows 7 will have a fully licensed copy of Windows XP included with it, for any software or hardware that refuses to run on newer version of Windows. This will require the latest processors to function, but will seamlessly run XP programs. Don Mannino ----- Original Message ----- From: Tom Servinsky To: pianotech at ptg.org Sent: Sunday, May 03, 2009 6:08 AM Subject: [pianotech] Windows Vista- your comments? List We are about to upgrade our computers and was wondering what the take is on Windows Vista. I know there was some discussion awhile back, but couldn't remember the pros and cons. I'm especially interested in the cons. We currently are using Windows XP Pro, which has served our needs wonderfully. Just wondering if it's worth trying to get XP installed or go with the pre-installed Vista? Tom Servinsky -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20090503/fe1bd10e/attachment.html>
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