I have an HP NW 8440 laptop, 3gig of ram. I put Vista Business on it and found it much slower than XP 32 bit. I put XP Pro 32 bit back on it. Vista SP1 can now be downloaded. It is supposed to be faster, we will see. I just ordered a Dell 690 with 64 bit XP., nVidia,Quadro FX 3450, Dual Core Xeon Proc 5150 2.66GH. 8 gig of ram. I hope that it is significantly faster than my laptop...
"Death match: Windows Vista versus XP" Author: Randall C. Kennedy (InfoWorld)
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Randall goes through 10 key points for the match-up and notes specifically that XP Pro will outlast the lifespan of VISTA, and hence along with the other 9 points, he gives the match to XP Pro until "Windows 7" arrives (in which case we will have another basket of bees to deal with).
And how about the Windows XP expirating? We have new Vista Business to install and as I can see we will be unable to downgrade do XP soon. How are you managing to solve that kind of problem?
Windows XP may stop being sold by Microsoft later this year, but you are still going to be able to buy XP Pro copies until then.
Resale of boxed legitimate copies are already sold on eBay and elsewhere.
As far as I hear most companies selling higher end workstations are offering XP Pro installed until at least the time Microsoft stops retail sales (maybe longer if the mfgr buys up extra XP copies).
Downgrading from Vista to XP Pro has been discussed elsewhere on the net in detail, findable on Google real easy.
The best way in my estimation is just throw in a new hard drive (they are truly cheap these days) and install XP Pro and load up SolidWorks. You can still keep the VISTA install on its original hard drive and use it if you must.
Even after MS stops officially selling XP, you will still be able to buy it. Look hard enough and you can still find places that sell Win 98 and Windows
I heard about Vista being stable and faster on the last updates, but i'm scared about massive upgrades like this.. It would be nice to confirm if it worths by testing.
In what sense are you upgrading? I would say you are changing operating systems and CAD systems and you are looking for compatibility and performance issues. First of all it isn't always a good idea to change three major systems at the same time. First I would upgrade the hardware. That alone will probably give you the biggest benefit. Then if you are going to SW2008 why not do that next if there is some benefit to doing so. If there is no benefit and SW2007 meets your needs why not stay with that? I am still finding SW2008 less than stable and still having many obvious bugs. Finally, having seen the benefits of a hardware upgrade and possibly a CAD upgrade, then change the operating system last. There is not an overall consensus amoung users either in or out of the CAD world that Vista is a good OS.
I agree with Paul.....as from what you can read on the net, Vista is not a good OS for cad, and from what I understand the Sp1 is in a lack of driver compability. I also read that XP outrides Vista easilly when it comes to speed
I recently upgraded all three, new hardware, new OS and new version of SW and i don't regret it. Bought a dell T7400 with XP64, 8Gb of ram and installed SW 200864 bit on that. About stability: I don't think SW2008 is less stable than any other release. I expreianced a lot of craches in the beginning but after turning PW off it works as is should. I might be wrong but I think that every release is more or less stable while working on non converted files, the more i work with the files the more stabel it becomes. The benefit of 64 bit is that you can add more memory than with 32bit, today i have 8Gb installed and it's faster than anything i ever tried before. There are a few things with XP 64 that could work better, printer drivers and a few other incompabilities but i use my laptop to solve those problems. I must say i like the 08 version of SW, it really hit the point of productivity, at least for me, it's much faster then any previous release, everything is just under the cursor on the screen, no unnessecary travel with the mouse.
Good to hear the comments as they seem to ring true with what the "talk" is on the net. I suspect my 2008 Swks install, when I finally switch will by to XP64, sometime later this year (to my Macs of course).
Microsoft is going to support XP way out beyond 2010 for security fixes, etc., so we are not going to lose on key support stuff.
MS's timeline for XP's future is:
June 30, 2008 -- PC manufacturers stop selling computers with XP installed. Jan. 31, 2009 -- Microsoft stops selling XP altogether. April 14, 2009 -- Mainstream support (free live support and warranty support) ends. Free maintenance is limited to security fixes. April 8, 2014 -- All support for XP ends.
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