Windows Vista What are your plans for Windows Vista?

Hmmm.......so if I did a clean install on a new partition, does that count?

That's what I think I'll be doing anyways.

I also have another fresh-new-in-the-box 80GIG drive I may just stick into my primary machine too which has XP Home and install Vista there. Decisions, decisions......

 

I’ve no desire to switch my own working machines and will only move to Vista when there is some feature I want that XP can’t do. I only moved from 98 to XP about a year ago. I had XP from the day it came out but it took years to tie down all the privacy leaks in it. I’m sure Vista will be even harder to tame and it will probably take longer before the net community finds all the leaks and offers ways or software to plug them. By that time there should also be plenty of info around on how to strip out all the unwanted components.

I’ll get Vista on disk and on new machines in the next few weeks, but it’s purely for learning purposes.




_______________________________________
I’m not paranoid, but I know you all think I am.

 

I plan on building a new computer sometime this year that will multiboot WinXP Pro and Vista. This computer will keep WinXP Home and maybe dual boot with some flavor of 'nix (it's time for 98SE to say goodbye).

 

I'm dual booting Vista with MCE now - on seperate HD's - and will continue to do so with the Vista final.

Regards - Charles

 

It's not an easy question to answer as I have a few PCs (two desktops at home, a laptop and desktop PC at work).

I have played with Vista Beta and release candidates, so have already clean installed (I'm not a fan of upgrading OS) . As far as my home computers are concerned, at the moment I don't have a killer reason to upgrade (I'm still on Win 2000 pro on the two I use the most)

However, at work over the next 6-12 months we will be replacing some PCs as part of our continual replacement program. I expect the new PCs will come with Vista OEM. I need to be using a Vista system before then, so will probably either upgrade my current system or get a new one in before then. I'd like to be able to hold off until SP1, but don't think I'll be able to.

 

Poll on Vista decision

I need more info on performance infor on my current 3 computers before I can decide
moldyfig

 

Been using the beta since March 06 on the second box - Athlon XP 2000+ - runs OK

I will put the new version on the main box - dual Athlon MP 2800+ next week, I hope.

Ran well with 2G & 512M mem + 128M vid card, lets see what it does with dual 2.8G & 2G mem + 256M vid card.

 

When will Vista be released?

 

Vista will be released on Tuesday (Jan 30).

I've used Vista for the last year on several different systems. For the RTM release, I built a new system and it's the only OS and is my primary work system. I run XP in a VM for tech support issues.

 

I'll more than likely wait until Service Pack 1 is issued. I'm currently dual booting with XP and Vista RC2 and don't really have any reason to change now other than for tech support reasons. RC2 is close enough to the real thing for that type of thing in my opinion so, I'll be patient. RC2 will expire eventually and then I'll have a look at where Service Pack 1 is at. It'll probably 6-12 months before I change. When I do, it'll be a clean install. I'm not one that's fond of carrying over the extra baggage of the previous operating system.

 

I was going to buy a new pc but now I will wait for sp1 and just buy an upgrade and dual boot so the family can start getting use to using Vista. The wife always complained about me changing stuff around, but when 95 went out then it was 98 then ME and then XP.

 

I'm staying with XP for as long as I can.

I just don't trust new technology right out of the box...until they get the bugs worked out, and I'm sure there will be some.

 

The RC's should expire in June 2007. But, should you have to reinstall, you won't be able to activate it. So be wery, wery, caweful!

 

I posted my vote to this forum. Actually there was nothing that totally matched my own personal plans, so I checked that I will buy a new PC with Vista in the next 6 months. That is my plan for my desktop machine. This is already several years old and it's time to upgrade. But I bought a superb new Dell 1705 Inspiron laptop a few months ago. This machine is fully Vista compatible and with the highest end video card option, it also runs dual external displays with Matrox' DualHead2Go converted, which is very nice if you are used to running dual displays on a desktop as I am. I LOVE this machine. And no ridiculous shiny display which reflects every bit of light in the universe. What idiot designed those new shiny displays anyhow? The Dell has a standard matte finish display which is very bright and sharp and reflects nothing. Of course I immediately reformatted the machine and installed naked XP Pro when I bought it and got rid of all the marketing garbage Dell puts on there. I'm sure I'd like to give AOL a try... yeah right!

The new Dell laptop also has a 100 GB Harddrive which made it ideal for my plans with Vista. I partitioned my drive 60/40 between XP Pro and Vista and now have a registered copy of Vista ultimate RTM installed in a dual boot configuration. This way I can run my familiar and fully setup XP OS when working from the laptop, and I can play around and test things on Vista any time by simply rebooting and choosing Vista from the boot menu. And as fast as this new laptop is, it reboots fully in well under a minute. I would *highly* recommend this option for anyone interested in Vista. Forget installing on a Virtual Machine or anything like that for real usage. VM is good for testing but it cannot possibly be identical to working from a native installed OS. I have received reports of any number of problems from people trying to do this and I always recommend a clean install on a nice big separate partition. With today's harddrives, there's little reason not to.

Since I installed after reformattoimng and using XP for several months, Ineeded an after market product to do the partition. I found a great deal on the old reliable Partition Magic for $20 here:
http://www.satellite-store.net/p22/Par-2.dwt
This was before they were bought out by Norton.

When you do this, by the way, you can also access your other partition via Windows Explorer no matter which OS you are running at the moment, so there's no need to transfer all your data over to the new OS. You would only want to install critical software there that you want to run under Vista. And then you can use something like our handy Synchromagic utility to keep the data files for those apps in synch. Favorites or Outlook files, for example. If you use our software like clipcache or linkstash or courier email, it is a simple matter to synch your data back and forth between the two partitions, or you could even run all three of those apps under Vista accessing a data file on the XP partition if you like. Very neat.

Unless you only use your computer for basic web surfing and email, you should consider the dual boot approach. That way you don't need to worry about upgrading all your software for windows Vista but can still familiarize yourself with what is clear the future of Windows computing.

----
Joseph Burke
President/CEO
InfiniSource, Inc.
http://www.infinisource.com/
http://www.RoseCitySoftware.com/

 

Yea that PM8 sure is sweet. matter of fact it makes it so easy a 10 year old can use it. Total of 2 minutes to cut up a hard drive.

 

Hello Joseph,

That's the system I had my eye on and was all set to purchase when I spotted HP's top of the line laptops with dual HD's.

Partitioned both drives into OS - Data partitions for a total of 4 partitions.

MCE sits on drive 0 and Vista on drive 1.

Used PM8 - great software

Regards - Charles

 

I've used XP Pro on all my machines for the past five years and, from what I read, see no compelling reason to switch to Vista.