OS To Buy for 3 year Timeframe

No question, this is an easy answer. For now buy XP Pro SP2 (& be sure to be guaranteed to get the CDs or DVD, for when you need to reinstall). It may be SP2 in Vista before people want to trust a switchover. I used Win 2000 until SP2 came out, and I didn't miss anything.

SolidWorks is working as hard as they can on VISTA edition, but still that doesn't say anything about how long it takes to get SWks running like a clock nor about add-ins and when they would be ready.

Better to deal with the devil we all know here on this Usenet group rather than the one heading into Wild Indian Territory, where workarounds will be the norm for quite awhile.

In two years, the world will have changed a LOT.

Bo

I agree with Bo on this one, if I was buying systems today, they would be Windows XP. Would not even give it a second thought.

If there was some monumental improvements in speed, reliability, etc in a year with Vista, I would consider getting the Vista OS, wiping the system clean, then installing Vista on the old/new hardware.

With some of the stuff Intel/AMD is coming out with down the road the hardware landscape will be very different in two years and Vista/ SolidWorks for Vista will be much more mature to take advantage of all the new hardware.

Regards,

Anna Wood

Ditto - What Bo and Anna said

Even SolidWorks recomend using XP when working with "Large assemblies or complex parts" - From the Customer Portal under News and Tech Alerts "Available - SolidWorks 2007 Pre-Release Vista Version"

John Layne

XP. Tried and true.

1. OS is stable and well known.
2. Hardware is available
3. Vista doesn't add any gotta have capability
4. Support for VISTA isn't well developed (I am talking about general knowledge here or elsewhere)
5. Cost of retraining for VISTA

And one bit of FUD which I am sorry to say I have to add

Since SW is so tight with MSoft the possibility exists that they will give future releases priority on VISTA instead of XP. This could mean orphaning XP versions. On the other hand, if what you have gets the job done why keep up subscription?

Since you are looking at a three year time frame the above risk is probably minimal especially if you use SW a year behind current release.

TOP

Or...if you are indeed wishing to test yourself to see how VISTA & SolidWorks progress, you can have the computer delivered with Win XP Pro on one hard drive, and have a copy of VISTA on a separate 2nd hard drive when you want to start testing it.

Thus you keep your testing really separate from daily work.

Bo

Ok, I'll throw in my perspective as well. The cost of switching to Vista later is less than the costs that will likely be incurred running SW on Vista now. There is no performance reason to be using Vista, in fact the current situation is very much the opposite. Specifically, video drivers are not ready, and SW for Vista is still in pre-release.

In the past, SW has supported previous the MS OS until MS stop supporting it. SW only recently dropped support of Win2000 (one of the 06 SP's IIRC). MS will be supporting XP for several more years.

Howdy,

Thanks for all the feedback. We don't do subscription, we typically buy the latest working version, update it to the last SP we can get from our VAR, then repeat the process every 3 years. Which is why, I'm embarrassed to say, we are on SW 2004 right now. However now we are working with a vendor who uses SW 2007 so that is probably going to push us to get SW 2007 so we can share assemblies. This makes sense anyway because it's about time in in our 3 year cycle to upgrade our computers and SW version.

I'm going to recomend a XP rig that we will install the SW 2007 on and hopefully that will keep us going for another 3 years.

Thanks for all the feedback.

~pope