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Should I upgrade to Vista

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skirmish

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Posted September 17, 2010 at 10:39AM

Hi there

I'm currently struggling to get my PC to install XP SP3 so I'm considering forgetting about doing that and just installing Vista. What I'm concerned about is that the MS updates for SP2 have now stopped so could that cause problems for me?

When I bought the PC it had XP Media Centre loaded but it came with a free Vista upgrade disc however I never loaded it as I'd heard bad reports about Vista.
My PC is HP Pavillion with 2GB of RAM.

Do you think I should finally make the upgrade or would I be better off sticking with XP?

Thanks in advance
David

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chub_tor

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Posted September 20, 2010 at 10:59AM

If you already have a Vista Premium Upgrade disk then personally I would put it on as an upgrade. The only time that I have done a clean install was when I was forced to by changing from 32 bit to 64 bit and upgrades have always worked fine for me. BUT do as mooly suggests and update to Vista SP2 immediately you are up and running with Vista as it does make a huge difference to the boot up times and general running of Vista.

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mooly

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Posted September 20, 2010 at 8:07AM

chub_tor, don't know what to say really :) I can only go off my experience with Vista... and currently with ALL updates etc it's a flier. That's on 2gb RAM.

I know from cold boot it's ALL up and running in 90 seconds. It's slick, responsive and a joy to use.

I guess ultimately it's up to skirmish to decide.

My only slight reservations are going down the upgrade route... however if you do that you can always still do a clean install if needed.

In many ways it's the ideal chance to start afresh and reinstall everything... have you really that much that it's a problem.

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skirmish

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Posted September 19, 2010 at 11:23PM

Please remember that I already have a Vista premium upgrade disc whereas I'd have to go and spend £70 on Windows 7. To be honest I'd rather put that 70 quid towards a newer PC with 7 already installed than just buy the software.

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chub_tor

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Posted September 19, 2010 at 10:08PM

mooly you may well be right that Vista will work OK on skirmish's machine as I was basing my experience on the versions before Service Pack 2 was released. I well remember cursing the slow start up and general slow operation of my machine with 2 Gb RAM when I first put Vista on it. 4Gb cured some of the problems and SP2 did improve matters. But the vast difference that I got when I upgraded to Windows7 has coloured my judgement and I personally would never recommend anyone to go from XP to Vista when they have the opportunity to go from XP to Win7 which runs very happily with 2Gb RAM.

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mooly

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Posted September 18, 2010 at 12:17PM

Can I just say something here :) ... as Vista keeps getting such bad press on these forums.

chub_tor thinks it will it strugle with your spec of PC. Why ? Sorry C_T... nothing personal :)

I use it on an (now nearly 4 year old) Acer 9301 laptop with AMD Turion 64 mobile processor. With 2gb RAM it's absolutely fine... 1gb... no it struggles.

Vista has matured, the service packs have taken care of most of the niggles... for me it never freezes, never crashes... if a PC struggles then I assume you mean it's slow... well I use Aero and the sidebar and believe me, it isn't slow at all. I sit here with essentially zero HDD disk use, no thrashing of the HDD.

I would still recommend the clean install route though.

Also if you aren't sure then why not take a disc image of your C drive with Acronis or other program, put the image on the D partition if you haven't an external drive and then go ahead and try Vista out as a clean install... if you don't like it just use Acronis etc to put the old image back.

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Kevscar1

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Posted September 18, 2010 at 6:51AM

Do upgrade now wait another year and a new Widows OS will be out, you can miss 7 completely and get somethig where everybody is saying this is better than 7.

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Forum Editor

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Posted September 17, 2010 at 10:55PM

that you would rather not spend any money just now, but I strongly advise you to reconsider. A move to Windows 7 would be a much better move in my opinion.

I have nothing in particular against Vista, but Windows 7 is far better, and you'll make the move in due course anyway.

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skirmish

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Posted September 17, 2010 at 7:06PM

Thanks Mooly. To be honest I'd rather just do an upgrade than a full install as it will take an age to reinstall all my software.

In case I do a full install can I save all my emails and transfer them to the Vista system?

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mooly

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Posted September 17, 2010 at 6:55PM

Vista is great, I would never ever go back to XP... don't believe all you hear. It's super stable, I find it boots up fast, in under 90 seconds and it's generally a joy to use.

I too got a free upgrade disc with my Acer laptop, and installed it at the time as an upgrade... which was OK.

However... you can do a full clean install from an upgrade disc which uses the Vista disc to format your HDD, then install Vista.
click here

I did this 12 months ago and it's brilliant. Use Microsoft Security Essentials,

click here

as it's really light on resources.

I wouldn't think twice...

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skirmish

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Posted September 17, 2010 at 6:34PM

Well my PC has an Intel Celeron running at 3.2GHz with 2GB RAM. Do you think that would be sufficient for successful operation?

The reason I'm tempted to use Vista is because i already have the upgrade disk and I'd rather not have to spend £70 on Win 7 at the moment.

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