Windows Vista in a new Dell Laptop?

[Boomyal]

Looking to buy a relatively inexpensive Dell Inspiron 1501 (w/Vista) for my daughter. Is the Vista gonna be ok? I still see a few 1501's that come with with XP but most have the Vista.

 

[Xcusme]

Re: Windows Vista in a new Dell Laptop?

Personal preference Boom, some folks like Vista, some don't, it's just a re-work of XP in my book with some security 'features'. You have to option of wiping the HD and installing whatever OS you like too.

 

[dave4151]

Re: Windows Vista in a new Dell Laptop?

I just got my wife a HP Pavillion laptop with Vista and haven't had any problems yet. It has a 1.6 dual core processor and 1 meg of RAM for $950.

If you are going with a lower end model I would go with XP. I've read Vista needs a lot of processor and RAM.

 

[Colorado04]

Re: Windows Vista in a new Dell Laptop?

Just a thought for buying new. Order it from the factory with either OS installed. I took my fiends Dell laptop from Vista to XP. It worked out ok but I couldn't get all of the factory software that would have come with the OEM build. The big thing is the recovery cd set that you need to make when you first start up the machine. The Recovery CD set doesn't seem like much, but having it will save you a lot of time and grief when you need to reload the system. These cd's will take the machine back to "out of box" state. In order to make recovery cd's for him I had to use third party software.

One issue that I experienced with going from Vista to XP was liciencing. When I contacted Microsoft Canada, they told me that the only Vista licience that would be transferable to XP was for Vista Business or Enterprise. The lower versions of Vista liciences were not valid for XP versions. My friend had to go and by another XP licience.

A general observation that I made was that a two year old machine with a clean XP build seemed to operate at similar speed to a brand new machine with Vista on it.

 

[Boomyal]

Re: Windows Vista in a new Dell Laptop?

All of the inspirons direct from Dell are now loaded with Vista and come basic with 512k.

I'm finding some new ones on ebay that still come with XP, most with 512k but some with 1gb.

 

[BoatBuoy]

Re: Windows Vista in a new Dell Laptop?

Might as well join the fray.

From WServerNews, 4/16/07:

"Windows XP is to to be phased out by year's end. The bell is tolling for WXP, with Redmond's plan to stop XP OEM copies as an option for system builders. That means this; any Windows PC bought from a retailer must come with Vista - regardless of what the customer wants. While you can already find a multitude of retail machines running Vista, you might still want XP, be it lack of drivers for hardware or poor application support. In January, that'll no longer be possible. Many businesses are still ordering machines running XP in bulk due to concerns over Vista, so there could be some backlash if the issues aren't addressed before then. Retail availability will probably still last for a while afterwards, but part of the reason people choose OEM is the cost reduction."

 

[jimr]

Re: Windows Vista in a new Dell Laptop?

I just got an acer aspire with vista home premium and 1 gig of ram and it is a lot better than xp so far.......except the jump drive i bought to help transfer files says it works with vista but doesn't. I read if you get vista get at least 1 gig and get at least the premium edition or else you will be upgrading it.

 

[Dunaruna]

Re: Windows Vista in a new Dell Laptop?

Boom, I've just purchased an inspiron 6400, I got it with XP Pro. On the Dell website XP is still an option on all the inspirons. 1 gig is pretty much the norm but 2 gig upgrades are offerred on most machines for a 'special' price - maybe it's just an aussie thing, dunno.

 

[rwise]

Re: Windows Vista in a new Dell Laptop?

yes at least 1 gig of ram minimum! Windows is a fat pig, takes lots of hard drive (vista takes 15 gig of hard drive is what I have heard) and lots of ram