Xp or vista on sony vaio sr

johnnutz

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May 29, 2009
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I just purchased a sony sr390:

-2.5ghz processor
-4gb ram
-320gb hdd

It comes with vista installed but will have a xp downgrade disc as well. I am planning on installing xp because I'm more familiar with it and think with the resources the laptop will provide, should run like a dream (I'm turned off by Vista's resource requirements). I am aware of the limited memory addresses with 32bit xp however I can live with ~3.5gb of available ram.

So what do you guys suggest?
 

dgusta

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May 31, 2009
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I've never been impressed with Vista. I use it on a computer connected to a projector in my home theater, and it works great but I stick with XP on my notebook (I consult IT for a living). In my experience working with day-to-day MS Office stuff, Vista is slower on the same hardware. In Microsoft's attempt to make the computing experience more intuative for the beginner, they made it more cumbersome for folks that know their way around a PC. Sure, you can choose a classic XP theme in Vista; but it's still clunky.
 

frozenlead

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I love Vista, and I prefer it over XP. The features it has makes doing slower things in XP faster - for instance, searching through the start menu. If I want to run something, I just hit the windows key, type the name, and hit enter - a vast majority of the time, windows will choose the right thing to open for you..almost as if it was linux! No clicking or waiting for menus to appear. The search bars in every window are nice, too, especially if you change too many files in a day to remember where you put them all.

I still use XP, though, for repairs on other computers, and some of the lower 3rd party apps don't support Vista. But all of the applications I've ever really needed to run have Vista versions.

I'll admit, office 2007 and the whole "ribbon" idea is annoying for those of us who've been using the office suite since it first appeared, but it only takes a bit to adjust. Same with Vista. Once you get used to the newer features and where things are, Vista is a breeze, and XP is the one that feels clunky.
 

johnnutz

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May 29, 2009
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Well I got the new laptop. I had planned on installing xp but decided to run vista for a little while just to see what its all about. I have to admit I like it so far! It is certainly more handsome than xp and seems to be running well. If I run into problems I'll switch to xp but for now I'm liking Vista!