Vista. Enterprise. Only copy I have which is legit

Worth it?

Might want to run the compatibility test thing from Microsoft first to see if there are drivers for all your hardware. Oh and wait for SP2 so they can iron out some of the bugs. And buy a couple of gigs of extra RAM.

Other than that... Well, I've been running Home Premium x64 for a while now and it works mostly. Not a huge step up from XP though, more fluff, eyecandy, bells and whistles. Most games seem to work OK. New TCP stack, haven't really noticed any huge performance boost but there's supposed to be one I think. New task scheduler for more efficient CPU usage, but any performance gains from that is eaten up ten times over by the added bloat. No WinFS, which was announced as a major new feature in Vista but scrapped during development. Huge letdown, ntfs is a hog.

In summary, if you like eyecandy and want to be one of the cool kids playing with the newest tech and showing off your hardware (you have a pretty decent setup if you can run Vista!) - I say go for it! I know I did.

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cheers mate, just what I was thinking.

The thing that keeps putting me off is that I don't want to do an 'upgrade' - just a fresh install. And that means loading all my apps on again.

i had loads of trouble installing vista business upgrade onto machines

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sigged by Firebird of Stratics! Thanks!

and thus my reason for wanting a fresh install. Shame the only version I can get through work is Enterprise. No media center y'see.

Bugger

Fresh install is definitely the way to go. An upgrade takes hours (fresh install will just decompress an image, takes a few minutes), and there's a good chance it will fail horribly. If you want Media Center, do what I did and go with Home Premium. If you're doing a fresh install anyway you can get the OEM version of Home Premium dirt cheap (around £65 or thereabouts last time I checked).

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is vista really worth it considering i run XP in "window 98 mode"

i tested Vista and cant really say anything negative there.
i recommend a full install, NO upgrade though. worked on any hardware i tested so far. performance boost: there is one if you are using a core2duo processor due to the better handling of dualcore machines, xp is not handling them propperly. and a minimu of 2 GB ( my personal opinion )
would recommend a good firewall though until SP2 is released knowing the bugs MS usually has ( sorry, forgot they are called `features` )

Using Vista Ultimate here, and I do admit to having quite a good rig (Core2Duo clocked at 3.2Ghz, nVidia 8800GTS etc) but honestly its better than alot of people give it credit for; and will easily surpass XP soon as hardware makers sort out their software which they make for it. In my opinion it does seem to recover much better from crashes - I've been playing and doing everything under the sun for the last few weeks and nothing has cocked it so hard that Task Manager won't come up and be able to close it, which it also does much faster than XP did for me. I haven't encountered any of the bugs, blue-screens, lock-ups, sudden restarts or multitude of other things I experienced with XP.

To dispel a few other myths floating about, I also have Vista Ultimate running on my ancient Athlon with 1Gb of PC3200 ram without problems or major slowdown compared to XP. Having a good firewall is also essentially whether or not Microsoft release SP2 with an improved one built in - because Microsoft firewalls are just hopeless.

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Ha ha Varyne, me too. I hate the XP task bars and stuff. Bells and whistles be damned.

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I use osx most of the time, but work with databases and play games in xp. yeah, with the windows look set to classic.

The IT department from work changed the hardware several times on the xp machine, all except the prime investment, mirrored raptor hard drives. I have had the privelege of a 4 years working install, I see an error message every two months or something. Never fatal.
Now the guys are joking that work will force vista on everyone. Mind although I like xp now, it took 2 years to adapt to it. Perhaps I should come up with some cunning tactic to avoid this new.. solution to all my computer problems :P

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I installed vista way back in november when final version came out. Disappointed to say that not had a single crash, found one thing that didnt work with it or had a single problem relating to it. Could be I am one of the lucky ones, or it could be that if hacks said that they installed it and had no problems it wouldnt make good reading so they have to bitch moan and cry about things in order to get attention and make themselves feel important

but i am important damn you all to hell, yes even you toodles

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