XP downgrade vs. Vista

About to purchase a new E6400 and still deciding which operating system.
I noticed that I have a choice to downgrade to windows XP which I am extremely familiar and happy with. Im not familiar that much with Vista and I am concerned with all the complaints I hear.
I definitely expect to upgrade to Windows 7 when available in the winter.
Im just not sure which operating system i should go with now until then.
Did anyone else have this delemna?

 

Use XP if you are more comfortable with it.

Vista is stable and secured now... just has some annoyances.

 

Personally, I'd go with Vista, but at this stage in the game it doesn't matter much due to the release of Windows 7 expected to be very soon. As long as you keep XP patched and follow the usual safe computing rules (AV/Antispyware and Firewall enabled at all times, no surfing to dangerous/sketchy sites, no opening odd e-mail etc. you should be fine with XP

 

Most likely all the complaints you hear about Vista simply aren't true anymore. There were some weird quirks in Vista RTM initially, which have all been fixed now. And Vista has never been as bad as many people suggest. That's just because people who tried running it on their years old XP computer experienced Vista as being slow. Vista wasn't designed to be used on such old computers, but runs absolutely fine on newer machines.
Many, many people even blame Vista for its "weird behavior" although they've never used it.

If you like XP, you can also choose that. The biggest difference between both of them would be that Vista is more secure. Also, its interface is different from that of XP, which some people hate whereas others like it. But as you are going to upgrade to 7, well... you will have to get used to that anyways.

Sorry, I don't know which ones you mean. Could you explain?

I double that.

While everyone should indeed follow this behavior, Vista will be more secure nonetheless. Mostly because of:

- UAC (Security improvement unless you're using XP without administrative rights and exactly know what you're doing).
- Service hardening and ASLR (ASLR = memory randomization) which reduce the risk of successful worm attacks, unless you are shutting down all services that are listening to external or have just a single computer protected by a router. A personal software firewall also protects to some extend (from the outside, it can't prevent any software to communicate to the internet), but it can also become a threat itself.
- Low integrity mode ("Protected mode") of Internet Eplorer, in case you are using it (can as well be used for any other browser, but you have to set it up manually).
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I, personally, would choose Vista - I started using it when I got my M4400 last december, but had followed its development since two years before it shipped. I can almost guarantee (and I really don't say that very often) that you won't be disappointed by Vista if you're using it on your Latitude with at least 2GB of RAM.

 

I've been a sworn XP recidivist for a long, long time. Finally gave up the ghost and went with Vista on my newest Laptop. Took a bit of getting used to but the most annoying thing to me (UAC) is now livable since I've figured out how to use task scheduler to get around some of its startup issues.

There are still things that I find annoying, and even using the tweak guide it still boots a bit slow, but I'm finding it to be acceptable day-to-day.

Playing with Win7 on another HDD on the same laptop, however. Quite nice and won't be hesitating to move over once it is RTM.

 

Dell will install XP on the computer but give you Vista recovery disks.

If you get the downgrade, you risk nothing after making an image of the hard disk right away.

 

I've bought two notebook's with XP downgrade right's and both time's recieved the vista and XP OS disc,so you will have the choice of installing whichever you want.....no dilemma.

 

I second Vista SP1. It got a really bad rap when it RTM'ed. Buggy, Slow etc.

But if your new machine has >2GB RAM, it's not that bad. It is "safer" than XP and I personally find it more stable.

My only grouse with it is that the boot up is eternally long with all the backing up, indexing, shadow copies etc. True it reaches the login screen pretty quick but the hard disk keeps churning for another 7 mins or so.... It doesn't do that in XP. On the flip side, standby/sleep for me works much better in Vista so I don't really do a full shut down much nowadays..

So net/net: I recommend vista over XP

 

I'd highly recommend you take a look at the vista tweaking guide, CruiseTown, if your boot time is killing you. Lots of tweaks to speed things up substantially, particularly if you don't need certain things. My Vista 'cold' boot to fully useable desktop is 29 seconds, with no HDD churning thereafter. All thanks to the tweak guide.

Disabling external monitor seek and floppy seek in the BIOS shaved off ~10 seconds alone. Disabling uneeded (and unused) services, bloatware, etc. can really improve your boot time tremendously.

 

But please, use sane tweaking guides only. One of the good tweaking websites out there is tweakguides.com, they also have a Vista tweakguide. And keep in mind that your harddisk isn't silent for a reason - whenever you're facing problems, remember that.