Could someone explain why i shouldnt get vista?

[Chairman Meow]

Windows ME is effectively Windows 2000 Home.

Not really... Windows ME is Win9X/DOS-based, but Windows 2000 (in addition to all later versions of Windows*) is NT-based.

*Except Windows CE, which doesn't count.


As for the original topic of the thread, considering that buying a copy of Vista would cost a couple hundred dollars (unless you get it with a new computer, but a new computer will cost several hundred dollars), perhaps the question should be "Could someone explain why I should get Vista?"

 

[Maniacal]

If you want to use the new Aero desktop, this is true. However, one could purchase Home Basic, save some money, and run the same desktop as Windows 2000, with the same video card.

Yeah, but Home basic is, well, basic and you don't get some of the godo features (I'll admit I didn't pay enough attention to remember the difs).

 

[Speedo]

Vista sucks up resources like you wouldn't believe, according to what I've heard. RAM especially. I believe an OS should run in the background, like a service (or daemon, right Padma ), not as a program running in the foreground.

That's not quite accurate. Vista operates differently from XP and previous Windows incarnations. SuperFetch is an intelligent system that attempts to determine what applications you use most frequently, and tries to keep them in memory. From what I've read, it also attempts to pick out patterns in your useage - if, for example, you get home from work every day at about 1730 and open Firefox, Outlook & Winamp for your daily dose of browsing, email & music, SuperFetch will "learn" to pull those programs and their libraries into memory so that they're ready for use. SuperFetch tries to keep every bit of memory populated that it can, though it naturally dumps cached programs as memory is needed by active or manuall started programs. From what I've seen, the end result is quite nice if you can feed SuperFetch plenty of memory. Anandtech's Vista performance guide goes into this in a bit more detail.

@ the OP:
I don't think Vista is really that different from any other previous Windows release. There's nothing fantastically & magically new that makes you "need" to run out and get it, but when you do an upgrade it'll be the thing you want to get.

BTW - 4000th(!) post.

 

[Maniacal]

@Superfetch: For the tiem thing does it need to be on before hand? As I turn on my comp when I get home and off when I go to bed.

 

[Speedo]

SuperFetch only works when the comp is on. When Vista first boots, it'll spend a few minutes pulling things into memory. I don't know every detail of how it works, but presumably it will still learn the times when you run programs and benefit you, if you're running them long enough after boot for SuperFetch to do its thing.