your operating system?

[ibanezjunkie]

what operating system do you use for your browsing/computing? i just upgraded from XP Pro to Vista Ultimate and its a hell of a leap, the sidebar is a really cool idea too.

i still know some folks who use '98 and '95.

[ragnarpk]

xp ftw, man. i decided to skip vista completely, as it happens to suck, and wait for the final version of windows 7.

[ibanezjunkie]

i had to upgrade my hard drive, the amount of RAM and my DVD drive in order to get vista to work, but it does seem alot more futuristic than XP, and alot of stuff is much easier and alot more customisable.

the solitaire is good too.

[WackyT]

Been running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Release Candidate since May.

[Robert****]

Mac OS 10.5.8 but I will soon upgrade to Snow Leopard.

[markb]

OSX 10.4.11 Tiger. Never got round to Leopard but I might make the jump to Snow Leopard.

[ibanezjunkie]

i always hated Apple stuff, i know theyre fast and reliable but i could never get past the £1-2k price tag. i could get a Mesa/Boogie for that!

plus, the weird layouts and stuff, im a Windows kid, its alien to me

[sunvalleylaw]

OS 10.5.8, soon to be 10.6 Snow Leopard. I also run XP on my macs when I have to, but I hate it. I had Vista running on my Mac for about 5 minutes once, and trashed it right away to go back to XP. But I only use it for two legal programs, other than that, I am in the Mac world.

[street music]

XP PRO here, I don't want VISTA as there too many limitations with it. Never had any experience with MAC and it would be hard for me to use anything different my office.

[R_of_G]

mac osx 10.4.11

considering moving up to snow leopard but i am still quite satisfied with tiger.

[vroomery]

Mac osx leopard. Hopefully upgrading to snow shortly. I used to be all about windows and then spent a few years running different releases of ubuntu up through hardy herron, but then I got my macbook and haven't looked back.

[Kodiak3D]

I have XP for now. Tried Vista, hated it. Windows 7, on the other hand, is a very nice operating system and I'll probably upgrade soon.

[peachhead***]

I reckon I will be the odd man out- I'm running Vista, have been for the last couple of years. Personally, I like it. I'm even running it at work, with very few problems.

[deeaa*]

I'd say don't go Vista, it's a terrible system, too big, slow and needs a LOT of patches and tweaking to make it work well, and win7 is just about here. I have installed and used Vista on 4-5 machines and while some work acceptably, some are terribly slow and clumsy, and all are annoying to use in real life.

Instead, get Win7 freely downloadable evaluation version, it's good for 120 days and then change to a full one when it's available. It's way better.

I myself run Xp Pro on my main machine (sometimes boot to Linux side but very very rarely) as well as on my main laptop; we have another laptop w/Xp home as well, a Linux (Ubuntu) desktop box and I also just had a Vista laptop for a year, onto which I also put Win7 beta on and used that for a good while. Still, good riddance in favour of the Xp one again.

I'm changing to Win7 on my main desktop around Xmas I think, this time probably taking the 64bit version too, so I can use more than 2 or 3 gigs of mem.

At work they have had macs for years, also in the studio, but they're being phased out as nobody likes them, they're hard to use if you're used to windows boxes with all the options etc, and they are expensive to maintain plus there's not enough software support. (To me too they seem like crippled and limited OS's and they're damned slow and inefficient for the price - sorry maccies, but it's how I feel.) If you want a basic, safe system for surfing and writing etc. Ubuntulinux is great. Works really really smoothly even on the old desktop which is (I think a 2.6GHz P4 with very baseline specs, and old office computer not any gaming platform). I'd love Ubuntu if only it could offer me at least most of what I need to do, but so far only Windows offers all I need.

At work we run most of the stuff over the network from a mainframe, using Xp Pro terminals or win2003 server terminals within Xp; I logon to it from home too using Cisco remote terminal etc.

[pes_laul]

I have windows 98 on my computer at home.

[bedroom rocker]

i use vista, i havent had any real problems with it, . easy to use, etc

[deeaa*]

btw, round here you can get Vista for free basically...nobody wants 'em. If you buy a new machine they come with Vista but people usually pay a little extra to 'upgrade' back to Xp upon purchase. My machine came with Vista but it's been swapped to Xp Pro.

Another option with Vista machines is you get a voucher with it to upgrade to Win7 when it is released.

I had Vista Business on my laptop and when I sold it the buyer made me test Xp on it first, wouldn't accept a Vista only machine.

Vista is a nice enough system when it works, though. If you tend to do same kind of things all the time it's really quick too, and very nice to use; great FTP built-in etc...once I got it up and running/patched I was quite happy with it. Only a few times it went into some kind of infinite loop and crashed, once it took about two hours when it 'recuperated' from some sort of systems failure.

The only major problem with Vista is simply that it is so unnecessarily resource hoggin' behemoth.

It's like using a Humvee to drive your garbage from the kitchen door to the thrashcan 15 feet away...you need a hugely powerful machine to run even the basics and still it can take ages to boot or if you make system changes like new HDs and stuff it can be reallllly sloooow too. And then you get to run Word almost as fast as you did on a 486-based machine ten years ago.

Win7 is basically exactly the same except they've made it way smaller and lighter - it's what Vista was supposed to be and internally the same.

It has a lot of things about it I miss on my Xp box also...but nevertheless, it's the Win ME of these days, a fall-between system MS is dropping like a hot stone and moving to win7 as fast as they can.

Even the Win7 and Xp are too slow in my book, although I guess quite OK. On Xp I strip out all the pictures, taskbars and animations, system sounds and such, keep it to a bare minimum and disable most of the system tasks that aren't needed like indexing etc. and adjust swap files and use RAID arrays etc...and on a 3,6GHz dualcore it's barely acceptably fast. Hell still takes a minute to boot up with all my drivers loaded.

At work we have a couple Win95 machines which run a few laboratory programs that won't work on newer systems, and every time I use one I'm simply blown away. It's some real old Pentium one 120MHz machine or something, and it takes like 15 seconds from a push of a button till you get to write stuff and surf the net already. And especially powering down - you just hit 'shutdown' and it just blinks and shuts off in mere 2 seconds or so. Opening software works like magic, it feels like it anticipates when you've clicked on an icon, they launch so fast.

Amazing. We tend to forget how fast and efficient the old OS's were when these newer slouchers are so overgrown in size.

Imagine, a modern PC has like umpteen times the power the whole NASA had when sending people to the moon...and still it can be such a time consuming task just to start a machine and write a simple message for instance - it requires all the power available...its just the OS's have never been completely rewritten or specifically built for the hardware, they're all just built upon the previous ones, layering systems atop each other, dependencies and whatnot every which way, backwards compatibility and all that jazz...all built with so lax standards and inefficient non-direct coding that it will work with any CPU and system out there.

I guess there is no way out of it...at least until they really came up with a working mini-kernel system that has a truly efficient interface for adding subroutine systems, like Direct-X for graphics but better, and better standards for CPU/display buses and such.

[Kazz]

I had been using Vista for about a year....heavily patched but I loved it....This weekend we stepped over to Win7 on both our desktops....resisting the urge to move to Win7 on the laptops....but it will probably win out in the long run. Win7 is slick as can be.....and if you load the install files to a USB drive....you can be up and running to the desktop in 22 minutes for a fresh install....amazing.

[deeaa*]

Yes I was quite amazed how quick and simple Win7 install was, already on the beta version before RC1. VERY quick and handled dualboot etc. seamlessly. Almost zero user interaction required altogether.

For WinXP I always create my own setup DVD with NLite for each new PC I build, including all the XP patches and most of the needed mobo drivers plus is set to setup with no serial queried etc; in-built instead, and that is a breeze to install but win7 still takes the cake in install speed and ease.