your operating system?

[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.