XP or Vista on a laptop?

[hoffy]

I've decided to get a new laptop this year (Thanks Kev!) and have been looking around. At the moment one of the better buys appears to be the DELL Vostro (17 inch, 2.5 Duo Processor, 4GB ram, massive screen resolution). The interesting thing is that they are bannered under "Small Business" and come with XP pre installed, but are bundled with Vista as well.

So, considering I probably will run CS3 with CS4 a possibility in the future, should I bite the bullet and do the Vista thing, or should I stick to a stable XP platform until something reliable comes out? What are the downsides to XP?

[Tannin]

Pretty much the entire industry has switched to supplying XP on business machines now.

Vista is dead.

It had a 9% takeup rate in industry - i.e., 91% of busineses around the world decided that Visa was not worth having. Vista or XP? Well, it depends on if you want it to work properly, and if you want it to work at an acceptable speed, and if you want it to provide a decent (i.e., non-annoying) interface. A YES to any one of the three is a NO to Vista.

[charton]

I have vista on my laptop at home but XP at work. So I guess I have adjusted myself to changing interfaces on a daily basis. You get used to it, but it does take time.

[brett237]

I have the exact same beast that you mentioned complete with the high resolution screen plus for the extra $250.00 for the 22" external screen. Um? the laptop screen is actually "bigger" meaning higher pixel count rather than size so it is a bit of a mismatch between the two.

Processing speed is good and battery life is around two to three hours. Downside, it has a rather plastic feel.

I am running XP simply because it is work's standard operating system. Vista is prettier looking but until I am forced to I will stick with XP. Basically businesses tend to skip every second version of MS products due to the pain and suffering of swapping so must went NT to XP and dodged Windows 2000 with much the same thing happening with Vista. Heck Office 2007 is a retrograde step for the interface compared to the previous version as I hunt and peck around for things that I knew once were. MS needs to consider long an hard what it is costing business for change for change sake. At least Dell is aware of this.

Cheers Brett

[Charmed]

I still say get a Mac

[oldfart]

XP, Vista really struggles on a laptop.

[Kym]

With the latest SP and patches Vista is ok and stable. (Did I say that?) With 4GB it will be fine.
The UI is different and its a bugga to tame if your used to XP.
I have both joy

If you don't want to use it and you are comfortable with XP go that way; especially if you use XP at work.

You can always upgrade later (at no cost as it is licensed to your box).

Notebook battery life will be less under Vista.

XP, Vista really struggles on a laptop.

Not with the spec machine Ash is looking at.

[IanB]

I still say get a Mac

Snob

[hoffy]

I still say get a Mac

Buy my Cinema display then!

[Charmed]

Says she who would love a mac but couldn't afford the extra $ outlay @ the time when I got my laptop last year.

[Andrew.S]

Windows 7
Looks like vista crossed with a mac runs like xp. "Touch wood" no bugs I have have seen in PR7100. Before I installed it on my lap top I would get a driver related BSD once a day. Not any more.

[IanB]

Thought this thread would have received more posts; well I was hoping it would as I'm thinking about going to a big laptop also. Any more comments; anyone gone from desk top to LT. LT have come so far in the past few years; while always dropping in price.

One thing I'll want will be external screen controls for brightness/contrast/colour: any suggestions. How about screens; what's good on a Lt

[hoffy]

From what I have seen, the DELLS appear to have the highest screen resolution. They are even doing 15.4 inch screens with 1920x1200 res(the 17 standard has a smaller res, but you can upgrade to the same resolution).

In relation to controls, I am not sure on how they work.

I had a look at Hardly Normals yesterday (aparently they have a Laptop special on at the moment) and the closest I could get was the Sony & around 1600 on the longest side.

[ricktas]

I have 2 laptops, one with xp and one with vista. I tend to find I am on the XP one more, but if you asked me why, and answer would be, I don't really know, but i just naturally gravitate to the XP one.

[rappleby]

I run a HP dv9815TX with Vista 64 Ultimate, 4GB RAM and have had no problems apart from a dodgy Audio interface that produced a slight hum when plugged into an amplifier, but other than that, smooth sailing for me. $3,000+ but you get what you pay for in laptops.

I heavily use Adobe CS4 Master Collection on it, and things like NetBeans, webservers, MySQL DB's, Cubase and never slows down for me. Graphics are also sensational.

For Vista to work effectivley, you need a high end laptop (top of the line processor/graphics card/maxed out RAM). We don't use it at work but are lining up Windows 7 in the near future.

Personally, if you have the money, get the best available with Vista and then upgrade to windows 7 when it comes out. Make sure you get a 64bit Ultimate though, all the other versions (Business, Home, etc...) are rubbish. Just my opinion though.

[Slide]

Get XP. I've got a Dell inspiron 1525 which came with vista on it unfortunately. CS3 and Adobe bridge seem to take turns a crashing every second time I open them, also most games seem to crash right when you don't want it to, not to mention IE will run fine for hours and then just crash. If you want a nice looking OS the crashes all the time and uses heaps of system resources get Vista, if you want something that works and isn't a big drain on the system get XP or Mac.

[perfectdistance]

Vista certainly likes to have more power ... given the choice I'd go with XP for a laptop. I have vista on my desktop and it really doesn't add anything.

[lloydy]

XP... Vista doesn't add anything unless you want to run Media Center.. VMC is a better product than MCE.

On my laptops I run TinyXP.. its a cutdown version of XP without all the junk.. takes about 4GB disk space instead of 12Gb

Why a laptop? if its your main M/C why not go with a desktop.. bump up the CPU with a quad core, put a pixel shifting monster of a video card in and a couple of TB of disk and you won't have to wait for CS4, image stitchers etc when post processing your photo's.

IMHO a laptop is only useful if you are on the move.. but you still need a beast at home!
BTW.. Dell is a pretty good brand.. I have 2 of them

[milspec]

Windows 7 works a treat otherwise go with Ubuntu

[phild]

XP can only address 4Gb of RAM, I used to hate Vista but since building a quad core desktop with 8Gb Ram I have come to appreciate the capabilities of Vista Ultimate 64 bit. CS4 has 64 bit support and really flies on Vista 64 bit.