Microsoft Attacks its Biggest Enemy: Windows XP

[Mikeus Caesar]

Me and my Dad will be pooling money to get copies of Vista for us both as soon as service pack 1 is released, but i too am concerned about the issue raised by Evil Maniac - will our 'perfectly legal' music collections still work?

[Lemur]

The DRM in Vista is almost entirely oriented toward video, so any music collection should still play normally. Most of the irritating CPU overhead is devoted to the "trusted video path" and other such nonsense.

Most people rip from their CDs into MP3, and MP3, by definition, contains no DRM. So it doesn't matter if you move your music from one computer to another, as long as it's MP3 or M4A, you should have no problems.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

That's fortunate. Does Vista have any other major shortcomings anymore, and which Vista should I go for if I choose to get it over XP? Home Premium or otherwise?

[Husar]

Yes, Home Premium has pretty much everything you need/want.
You might want to go for the 32 bit version if you have some old Hardware which doesn't have any 64bit Vista drivers available.

I don't know about shortcomings, for the most part it's a nicer (and I dare say more stable) XP and I have the 64bit Business.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

What're the differences between 32 and 64? Additional security?

[Xiahou]

Yes, Home Premium has pretty much everything you need/want.

Not for me. I'd need Vista Business or Ultimate for it to be of any use to me- no domain/policies, ect with home versions. And since I'm not about to shell out that much- I won't be buying it anytime soon.

I suspect XP will be my main desktop OS for a very long time to come, with me more likely to go to a flavor of Linux than Vista.

[AntiochusIII]

The DRM in Vista is almost entirely oriented toward video, so any music collection should still play normally. Most of the irritating CPU overhead is devoted to the "trusted video path" and other such nonsense.

Can you disable that stuff manually?

[Husar]

Not for me. I'd need Vista Business or Ultimate for it to be of any use to me- no domain/policies, ect with home versions. And since I'm not about to shell out that much- I won't be buying it anytime soon.

I wasn't talking about you.

The Business version lacks the Media Center and MPEG-2 decoder so if you plan to watch TV or DVDs on it you'll most likely have to get additional software like some TV program or a Vista compatible DVD Player. And old XP compatible ones won't work, I tried it. Isn't necessarily expensive though, you can get WinDVD for 30$ IIRC.

[caravel]

What're the differences between 32 and 64? Additional security?

Architecture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit#32_vs_64_bit

[Mikeus Caesar]

and I dare say more stable

Please say you're joking.

I went to my grandparents the other week, to set up a home network. I had to give up the network idea until my Dad emailed me the password for the router, so i spent a few hours browsing the internet. Not only did i find Internet Explorer to run terribly sluggishly, but after a while i got a BSoD!

A BSoD!

I remember all those years ago, old Bill telling us that XP would be the end of the BSoD. Now here we are with Vista and our old friend is still popping up. Turns out it was a conflict with the anti-spyware software, but even so, that is no excuse, especially when said software is meant to be Vista Compatible. My arse.

And if you must know, this was on a computer with more than better specs - 2gb RAM, 3GHz processor and all that jazz, but still about as fast as a 56k connection.

I have to say though, it did look very nice, and a lot of the features were pretty cool. As long as they iron out bugs like sluggishness and eating up the computer, then i shall definitely go ahead with my aforementioned purchase.

[Husar]

I ran the beta on an Athlon XP 2400+ 1GB RAM and a 6600GT with AreoGlass enabled, it did take a split of a second to open some menus but otherwise it ran perfectly fine, if it's sluggish, you might have some other software problem.

That said, I have been using Opera for years, I'm not going to argue in favour of IE but I don't really hate it either.
I haven't seen a single BSoD, not in Beta 2, not in RC1 and not in the release product I'm using now. But then I don't install thousands of "useful" programs like anti spyware either.

[Xiahou]

From what I've heard and from the little I've seen when I had to use it, IE7 is terribly pokey when compared to non-MS browsers or even IE6. Probably because it's bloated with even more "features" that you don't need. (IE: anti-phishing)

[caravel]

I remember all those years ago, old Bill telling us that XP would be the end of the BSoD.

Good old Bill kept to his word. BSoDs are disabled by default in XP, you get a nice instantaneous reboot instead.

[naut]

One question, can the original MTW and STW run on Vista?

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

What are the important pros and cons of Vista as compared to XP?

EDIT: If I did get Vista, should I go from two to four GB of RAM?