talkmagic.co.uk

OK - apologies for another PC related question....

I note that Vista is available for an official download from the US Microsoft web site for $159.00 which equates to just £81 compared to the £149.99 for the same package in the UK. THAT'S A WHOPPING SAVING OF £70!

There's little info to state if this can be downloaded and then installed on a UK English PC. Does anyone foresee any problems with buying the download from the US?

There's many different versions, so it depends on which version. Some aren't even that much of an improvement over XP.

Any more info you could give on the types, I doubt there all the same price. If thats for the Ultimate version its very cheap, but it wouldn't be a good price for the Home Basic version.

This is purely word of mouth, but I know two early adopters who are having immense problems with Vista. I'm not sure of specifics, but it's mainly hardware related.

Oh, and apparently, it runs like a slug compared to XP.

Perhaps wait for Vista R.01???

Microsoft never get it right, but it's sometimes better to wait a few months anyway until the public have done their beta testing for them.

seige wrote:This is purely word of mouth, but I know two early adopters who are having immense problems with Vista. I'm not sure of specifics, but it's mainly hardware related.

Oh, and apparently, it runs like a slug compared to XP.

Perhaps wait for Vista R.01???

Microsoft never get it right, but it's sometimes better to wait a few months anyway until the public have done their beta testing for them.

It all depends on your machine. It can run alot faster, and alot slower depending.

If you have an old machine it will run vista very slowly. Also alot has been moved from the CPU and onto the GPU, which means if you have a poor graphics card it will struggle.
Vista Ultimate supports 128GB of RAM for example!! Obviously no motherboard can support that much as of now, but obviously that WILL be very fast.

And as with any Microsoft OS - yes you should wait until it has been out a while.

Thanks for the feedback and as yet I've not read any reports due to it perhaps being too soon after launch.

The software versions are BOTH the Home Premium upgrade and it's a like for like price comparrison directly from the Microsoft web site so near enough £80 price difference is worth considering if the software actually is the same and all that I need to do is select UK English upon installation.

The machine I'm looking to install on is a 64-bit Athlon running at 2.something Ghz with 2Gb RAM and a 256Mb graphics card so it should be plenty fast enough.

I'm just far too impatient to wait

seige wrote:Oh, and apparently, it runs like a slug compared to XP.

That's what I heard too...

Ona slightly unrelated note, has anyone else seen the new adverts for Apple Macs with david Mitchell and Robert Webb?

I heard that Bill Gates was on the news last night trying to defend the price differences and that he replied that it was due to exchange rate fluctuations that it around double the price in the UK compared to the States.

I had a play around with a few PC's in PCWorld yesterday that had Vista on them and they all seemed OK in terms of speed.

dat8962 wrote:The machine I'm looking to install on is a 64-bit Athlon running at 2.something Ghz with 2Gb RAM and a 256Mb graphics card so it should be plenty fast enough.

Sounds like a more than capable enough machine. Should actually run quite smoothly. Also if your graphics card supports DX9 or above it should be even better.

There's a thing you can download from MS website, a tool that tells you how compatible your machine is. I'll try and refind it....
edit:
Here is a link that might not work:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/produc ... _id=20029b

The problem with a new operating system is usually hardware drivers and software compatability. When XP first came out it was a nightmare getting drivers for printers, soundcards, scanners etc. and a lot of games and other programs wouldn't run on it. If you are going to get it I would advise keeping XP as well, partitioning your hard drive or even better getting a second one, and setting up a dual boot system.

seige wrote:This is purely word of mouth, but I know two early adopters who are having immense problems with Vista. I'm not sure of specifics, but it's mainly hardware related.

Oh, and apparently, it runs like a slug compared to XP.

Yup. The drivers are coming "later". The real minimum hardware you need is 1GHz CPU and 1GB RAM. That's a simple operating system, not a cure for the world's ills, by the way! Well, it's a new way of pushing pixels around a screen and looking at YouTube mostly.

I was lucky enough to get a freebie (legit) OEM copy to test. I'm still wondering whether to put it on Big server this Monday. Still dunno yet, though.

Hey,

I work for a M$ partner...so we've got a few versions of Vista knocking around...

I've noticed compatibility problems on hardware and software (what's quite funny is even some M$ software we've had to first patch up to the hilt then "alter" the open source (well not strictly speaking "open" but that's what they call it!) all to make it work with Vista...and it comes with the dreaded Internet Exploder 7...we've done some testing in this area...stick IE7 and FireFox side by side (nothing new here for those in the know) and there's on average a 10-20 second delay on IE7...we even managed to convince my boss...now he's like a stick of rock when it comes to M$ cut him in two and it'd have Microsoft written all through him!

Hardware...you have to be on the ball (which it sounds like you'll be ok), you can of course not have the full glass interface running...but wouldn't that be a shame...I'll reserve my judgement on that at this stage!

all in all, if you really want Vista I'd wait for either R01 or SP1 depending on which way M$ label the updates. However, personally I'll be holding off and running XP, most of the latest MS software will run on XP (i.e. new versions of Office etc.). And of course other companies software will be tried and tested to run on XP...so all in all...I'm stopping with xp, for now at least!

lmw wrote:we've done some testing in this area...stick IE7 and FireFox side by side (nothing new here for those in the know) and there's on average a 10-20 second delay on IE7...we even managed to convince my boss...now he's like a stick of rock when it comes to M$ cut him in two and it'd have Microsoft written all through him!

Doesn't Exploder 7 have to do some form of online URL checking to protect you from "inappropriate" sites? It'd be interesting to get a packet sniffer on the line to find out. If that's the case, why don't they just include a local proxy with a regularly updated deny list?

Tomo wrote:Doesn't Exploder 7 have to do some form of online URL checking to protect you from "inappropriate" sites?

I think you're referring to the phishing filter in IE7. To be fair to IE you can turn it off (thank the Lord).

There's a lot of talk on this, and how easy it is to spoof FireFox in comparison to IE7. Mainly from closed opinion IE supporters, however there are a number of known issues around SSL in FireFox. Now...I don't want to open that whole IE/FireFox debate again...(to even things up a comment on IE...lest we forget that until recentish version of IE it was possible for a phisherperson to write Java Script to overlay a bitmap over the url address bar meaning phishing sites were a bit more protected i.e. they could make it look as if you were connected to www.hsbc.co.uk where in fact your were connected to 207.1.09.22/GiveMeAllYourMoney.htm)

Tomo also wrote: It'd be interesting to get a packet sniffer on the line to find out. If that's the case, why don't they just include a local proxy with a regularly updated deny list?

There are reasons given for MS for not designing this phishing filter in that way...I see your point regarding speed though...

A MS IE Security Representative wrote:Readers asked why we decided to use real-time look ups against the anti-phishing server as opposed to an intermittent download list of sites in the way that an Anti-spyware product might. We included real-time checking for phishing sites because it offers better protection than only using static lists and avoids overloading networks. Phishing Filter does have an intermittently downloaded list of “known-safe” sites but we know phishing attacks can strike quickly and move to new addresses, often within a 24-48 hour time period which is faster than we could practically push out updates to a list of “known-phishing” sites. Even if the Phishing Filter downloaded a list of phishing sites 24 times a day, you might not be protected against a confirmed, known phishing site for an hour at a time, at any time of day. Because Phishing Filter checks unknown sites in real-time you always have the latest intelligence. There would also be network scale problems with requiring users to constantly download a local list. We think the number of computers that could be used to launch phishing attacks is much higher than the number of spyware signatures that users deal with today. In a scenario where phishing threats move rapidly, downloading a list of new reported phishing sites every hour could significantly clog internet traffic.

Here are a couple of things I found interesting on this issue:

web worker daily

and

scobleizer

Well, I took the plunge and upgraded XP to Vista.

Firstly, I like the interface, it's quite different to XP and there was actually no speed issues despite having ALL of the graphic features switched on so I'm pleased that there aren't the sluggish issues on my setup that some have hinted at.

Now the down side..... It's F****d the rest of my PC! (thankfully I've got the laptop as a fall back).

I used the upgrade tool to ensure that everything was compatible and it showed the thumbs up. however, it doesn't recognise my wireless card and drivers downloaded from the internet won't load. Secondly, despite a standard sound card, Vista doesn't recognise this either so no sound and again, the same problem with drivers!

I did a clean install so it overwrote the windows XP installation but the automatic installation installed a boot menu for Vista and XP, only XP deosn't load without a password that is supossed to be the administrators password but this doesn't work.

Not to worry, there is a factory restore partition so I could use this to reintall back to the shipping XP setup. WRONG. Vista seems to have taken this over and the F10 at boot up no longer brings up the install.

Overall, not happy and recommend that you think VERY carefull before upgrading and older (2 years and more) PC.