XP vs Vista vs 7

[rudeguy]

I am putting together a neffing/gaming/htpc rig. I am not a hardcore gamer but I do like to mess around once in a while. The main use of this rig is going to be neffing and watching movies. Here are the things that are most important to me, please feel free to add things I may have missed:


Fast boot up times (sick of Vista taking 5 minutes to boot)
Program/game compatibility
hardware compatibility

Basically I don't want to have to run an emulator to play games or run programs. I don't want to have to worry about a new vid card or WAP not being compatible.

Thanks guys

 

[lxskllr]

Vista shouldn't take 5 minutes to boot. I'm at about 3 minutes to a usable desktop. Sleep works pretty well in Vista also, so you can be up and running in seconds. I wouldn't even consider XP. That's like buying a shiny new AGP gfx card for your system :^D The 2 choices imo opinion are Win7 and Vista. I prefer Vista, but Win7's ok too. It's free to try, so see how you like it.

 

[hans030390]

Vista shouldn't take 3 minutes to boot either. Minus the Gateway boot screen, Vista usually took well under a minute (if not around 30 seconds) to boot on my laptop.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: hans030390
Vista shouldn't take 3 minutes to boot either. Minus the Gateway boot screen, Vista usually took well under a minute (if not around 30 seconds) to boot on my laptop.

I misremembered. I found a post where I broke it down. My method of measuring boot time is the only one I consider valid. The built in timer lowballs the time, and says I'm finished booting before the computer's usable.

Depends on how you caclulate time I guess. Here's my results booting twice, using my watch as a timer.

Button push to O/S selection screen 32 sec
O/S selection screen to usable desktop(object dock loaded, can launch apps) 65 seconds
All apps fully loaded including Sidebar with 19 gadgets 20 sec

Total time 117 sec

 

[imported_dlb]

You're asking the question too early. Windows 7 is not released yet and therefore all opinions about it carry pretty large error margin. Actually we'll know it really well no less than half year after the release, until then there might be some surprises.

Vista vs. XP?
XP any day.

 

[evident]

Originally posted by: lxskllr

Originally posted by: hans030390
Vista shouldn't take 3 minutes to boot either. Minus the Gateway boot screen, Vista usually took well under a minute (if not around 30 seconds) to boot on my laptop.

I misremembered. I found a post where I broke it down. My method of measuring boot time is the only one I consider valid. The built in timer lowballs the time, and says I'm finished booting before the computer's usable.

Depends on how you caclulate time I guess. Here's my results booting twice, using my watch as a timer.

Button push to O/S selection screen 32 sec
O/S selection screen to usable desktop(object dock loaded, can launch apps) 65 seconds
All apps fully loaded including Sidebar with 19 gadgets 20 sec

Total time 117 sec

i admit that i do like vista, my bootup times are a tad slower than my xp partitions, but i normally sleep it so it doesnt really matter to me.

 

[Rottie]

If you play games and dont care about direct x 10 then windows xp is for you as long as microsoft put windows xp on life support.
My notebook with Vista Home Premium boot time takes about 45 second....

 

[California Roll]

If I was in your boat, it would depend if I had to buy a new OS or not. If I had to buy Vista, I would just install Win7. If I already had a Vista license, I would go with that.

Either way I wouldn't install XP.

 

[VinylxScratches]

Use Windows 7 RC for now until it comes out to save money?

 

[zerocool84]

I never had my Vista take longer than 1min to boot up even with icons all over the place and the side bar full. No reason to get XP in this day and age. Old, outdated, less secure, and so many other reasons not to use it. Only use XP if you have a program that needs it. W7 isn't released yet and I will not recommend anything that isn't released yet to someone as their only OS.

 

[pcslookout]

Originally posted by: zerocool84
I never had my Vista take longer than 1min to boot up even with icons all over the place and the side bar full. No reason to get XP in this day and age. Old, outdated, less secure, and so many other reasons not to use it. Only use XP if you have a program that needs it. W7 isn't released yet and I will not recommend anything that isn't released yet to someone as their only OS.

Same here with a 35 second bootup time on Windows Vista 64 bit.

 

[neothe0ne]

I actually would recommend Windows 7 RC over Vista (and Server 2008). The only compatibility issues Windows reports don't seem to matter:

- .NET 1.1 reported problems with x64 but I don't see any after trying a program which needed it
- HP QuickLaunch Buttons reported problems in x86 on my laptop, but the buttons work fine

I'm fairly sure 7 uses less RAM than Vista as well. In any case performance is much improved, and gaming is better than XP in some cases on my HP laptop (L4D is much better, CSS probably took a small hit but anything recent can run that well anyway.)

 

[imported_dlb]

Originally posted by: zerocool84
I never had my Vista take longer than 1min to boot up even with icons all over the place and the side bar full. No reason to get XP in this day and age. Old

So?

outdated

How?

less secure

Very questionable statement. I used to say that for average user, it's the opposite. Not because it's technically worse but because people think that it's secure.

and so many other reasons not to use it

Like?

Myself, I see 1 reason to go to Vista: many like the way it looks.
And several against (importance of each varies from very big to none depending on who you talk with):
-It's heavy
-DRM
-Driver signing kills many small programs (like Unlocker). They are often useful and Windows looses some functionality because of it.
-Vista way of "work" is: "Are you sure? Really? You know, it can hurt. But do you know that...? But it may harm you. But... (much later) No, for your own good I won't do what you request".
XP talks too much IMO, but Vista took it to the extreme. And sometimes refuses to do what it was asked to.

Originally posted by: neothe0ne
I actually would recommend Windows 7 RC over Vista (and Server 2008). The only compatibility issues Windows reports don't seem to matter:

- .NET 1.1 reported problems with x64 but I don't see any after trying a program which needed it
- HP QuickLaunch Buttons reported problems in x86 on my laptop, but the buttons work fine

I'm fairly sure 7 uses less RAM than Vista as well. In any case performance is much improved, and gaming is better than XP in some cases on my HP laptop (L4D is much better, CSS probably took a small hit but anything recent can run that well anyway.)

I would never recommend using unreleased, unsupported OS for anything but testing it. It can really cause troubles.