XP Pro, Vista Business, or Vista Home Premium

Hi, hopefully you can help me out with this problem.

I'll be going off to college this year (Shippensburg University) and was looking at getting a notebook. I feel like I'm pretty tech savvy but am unsure of what operating system to choose? The school of Business at Ship recommends Vista Home Premium or Business, but the general campus tech page says to use XP Pro. I don't know if I would have to connect to a domain? Do you think I should call them and check? I mean, Home Premium is less expensive than Business, but I won't be able to connect to a domain if necessary.

Which one would you choose in my situation?

Thanks a bunch

 

Xp Pro

Read this
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

 

If one of the school's recommendations is VHP, you probably won't need domain connectivity. If you can swing it I'd recommend a laptop with a 3 or 4 year accidental coverage warranty, an Intel C2D 2GHz or higher processor, 2GB of memory or higher, an Nvidia graphics card, a 100GB or higher hard drive, and Vista Ultimate to cover all the bases. If you don't need it until the fall, wait until late summer to buy it. Hopefully Santa Rosa and DX10 laptop graphics will be out to the consumer by then.

 

xp pro, vista is a pig

 

thanks guys , anyone else wanna help me out?

 

Most colleges I know recomend XP Pro. However, I highly doubt your computer is going to be connected to their Active Directory. Nonetheless, I would recomend Vista Business because it's the equivalent of XP Pro and you won't find any new notebooks with XP installed.

 

Unless you wanna game and the laptop has a nVidia card, go with vista business. You can go with vista anyway and hope for the best when it comes to drivers. Of course media center is aaaawesome, so maybe ultimate is the one?

 

Vista Business does not play native MPEG-2 codec (for DVD movies). You have to buy the codec from Microsoft or acquire it from other source in the internet (some are free).
Games folder is empty.

Vista Home Premium have most codecs installed included MPEG-2 for DVD movies in WMP11. Home Premium have several games installed in the Games folder.

 

Thanks a lot guys. I'll e-mail the school's tech department today. I definitely want to play DVD's so if I can use home premium, then i will

Thanks again, I'll post what they say when they get back to me

 

Vista Premium has Media Center.

 

Yep, sure does!

 

yep, but not the extra stuff included with business (which you will probably not need). So if you need those and want to have media center, ultimate is the way to go.

 

After experimenting with Vista, I'm back on XP Pro and sticking to it.

 

I just checked my E-Mail and the tech said that Home Premium is fine. I'll go with that then

 

I'm with Vista Business. I suggest you take it. I mean it has added benefits of special security and software features for your study at least. Home premium has Media Center Edition though but Business has more technical features.

By the way, Vista Business also has games if somehow others found none. You just enable it in Windows Features in Control Panel. Along with these games are Chess Titans, Hearts, Mahjong Titans and other seven games totaling 10.

And then again, it's your final decision.

 

Another thing to note is that Vista Business may not have the native codecs for playing DVDs, but most notebooks with a DVD drive come bundled with the neccessary codecs anyway by way of OEM software. I just watched a DVD on a HP dv2000t w/Vista Business (and it worked fine).

 

I would go with XP Pro for now, based on the fact you can't go wrong choosing XP pro.

But, Vista on the other hand is still too much of a risk IMO. Worked great for me (except some drivers), but has been nothing but problems for many others even on already installed new machines.

 

If you're going to a university, you may be able to get Vista Business for free.

However, I've heard scattered reports of Vista being unable to connect to some campuses wireless networks. Just something to be aware of.

 

I just found that its true, from another post. Thank you.

 

Business does not install the Windows Games by default, that's why it is empty ; you'll have to install them manually. I'd go for Windows Vista Business. As for the codecs, download them off the net.

 

You can always use K-Lite package for your codecs. It is so bad heard MS just want to squeeze out every penny in your pocket.

 

Same goes to any operating systems... I guess. This merely depends on wireless broadcast security settings. i have no problems connecting with public or campus wifi networks so far though. discovery of wirelss networks is faster than xp... on my experience.

scattered rumors and news sometimes are false. people are well accustomed with this flow.

 

Well, all I know is, Vista is the only mainstream modern OS that can not connect at the University of Wollongong. And it's not even the newest OS either.

 

Have you tried contacting the network admin of UW? it's kinda weird if they wont permit vista connections.

 

They're holding off on implementing the Vista-enabling workarounds until they can be sure that both Vista and the workarounds will be secure.

 

A couple of points:

I've just got a Vista Business upgrade and I'm trying it out. I doubt it will survive another 48 hours before I revert to XP Pro. The display is doing funny things. This may be by design (although I have disabled the eye candy) but it is making the machine unusable.

One of the problems I hit was getting the wireless connection to work. This issue with the Broadcast flag may have been part of the problem.

John

 

so that's clearly the big reason... it's not that Vista is unable to connect with wireless networks... it's jus they (WU) dont wanna.

 

if you're machine is designed primarily for XP, then you will get some tweakings to work with vista. If it's Vista ready logo, I doubt all machines with this readiness works. just a thought.

edit:
On my case, my machine is preinstalled with Vista. I downgraded to XP for some experiments... But i ended up reverting to vista after... ah... 48 hours too. it's just Vista is faser and no hassle on operations. the only problem is some software compatibility issues. But i have gone through with it and dealt with it. I just upgraded software which are Vista ready. Problem solved.

 

I am using Vista and can connect to my office network (secured), also I tried public wifi access (some are secured) and can access them also without any problems.

I dont think Vista have problems in their network management at all. Maybe this is just me.

 

true indeed. i dont know where people get false information and making it more redundant and such. perhaps few are real and true... or maybe the problem is with the broadcasting service. i'm using Vista for three months now and no network problems. a stable OS indeed. never turned off my laptop for quite a month now. just sleep, wakeup, sleep and wakeup. i say, way better of leaps and bounds to XP.

 

Just ordered a dell vostro 1400 with Vista Business, I still can play 3D games with it?

I always use KM player / media player classic, so do I lose anything not choosing home premium?

 

I am having the same problem. Looking at ordering a laptop (ibm t1p) and not sure if I should go with xp pro or a version of Vista? Is there still problems with Vista, read some people are having problems. Computer will be used as college laptop. I just dont want to get it with one and regret not getting a different one. Thanks guys!

 

Have you checked with your college's plans for Vista-My college that i'll be transferring to says that they have upgraded their machines to Vista starting in 07. That's why I plan to choose Vista over XP when I go.

 

I hope I will be allowed to post in this thread. I was quite rudely accused of stealing in my other post, and then closed off from making a possible reply.

Forgive me for being a newbie at this, but I didn't know that Word is not included in Windows Vista Home Premium. Is there some other function in Vista, which I can use for writing texts and letters?

What good is otherwise buying a $1000 computor with advanced Vista Home Premium program, if it even won't allow you to write a letter? Should I pay extra for such basic functions?

 

XP MCE...best of both worlds, fast xp pro, with media center attached!

 

I wasn't trying to accuse you of stealing...its just that many just do not understand what a license is. Delete a few billion piracy related posts and you'll get my meaning.

Anyway, there is some functionality...Wordpad. It isn't nearly as good as Word, but it would do the trick. Of course, there is also always OpenOffice, which is a free GNU based product.

 

In my opinion the less bloated Vista is Business and the one that people should get if they don't care about pre-installed business applications is Home Premium. The best of both worlds is definitely Ultimate.
XP is now 6 years old, XP SP2 is 4 years old (almost) and I believe that it's an old OS which shouldn't be bought with a new desktop/laptop. SP1 for Vista will make it's way into new laptops and desktops very fast and people will start to forget XP the way they forgot about 98SE when XP came along.

 

It's just an operating system. Like the government it's supposed to stay out of your way and let you get your job done.

My accounting programs are running on a DOS machine. My CNC router is running on a Win95 based pc. Every machine on the network is running either 2000 or XP. Everyone is doing their job just fine.

 

I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet but....

The only reason I can see that Vista cannot connect to the network is because the network uses the LEAP authentification, which Microsoft voluntary disabled in Vista because it is utter crap since some hackers found the security hole in it (less or as secure as WEP 64bits I believe)

You can probably use it with some 3rd party apps though.

I know the college I'm going to next year used to use LEAP but I think they dumped it, since the college's co-op (store) only offers Vista Business right now...

 

Thanks. I have gone through all the contents in "Start", in search of bloatware to remove (I will post a separate thread listing all these), and found that I can use Wordpad. It also seems as if Microsoft Works is included. There was no payment ad for this. It has word processor functions.
But Microsoft Office is obviously not included (has payment ad and request for Product Key), I consider it bloatware and will remove it unless someone strongly advices me not to.

I used Windows XP before (not my own computor), and it had all kinds of word and manuscript functions and tables for home business work. So I figured Vista Home Premium would have something similar.

 

@eloidan
get open office and you'll be given free office suite that works well, just the looks being worse than the eye-candy ms suites...

a little o/t my fav text editor is still vs2008

 

Thanks mkarwin. I will do that and see how it turns out. Having bought a fairly expensive laptop, I was just expecting a complete unit, without having to buy extra stuff for it. I knew it wasn't Vista Home Business, but still expected some basic functions for small home-business handling, not just entertainment. Is seems as if such functions are included after all.

I understand that Vista Home Premium, or the computor, has no virus protection. It should have I think. That will be necessary to get. (It has Webroot spy protection.) What kind of permanent virus protection is good to install? Webroot? Norton? Some other?

 

Norton IS 2008 & Norton 360 are good.

If you going into the x64 route, you might not even need an AV right now. I don't even have one installed (too lazy to get look for my NIS serial number in the basement)

Avast is one good free one too.