I’m trying to finish up shopping for a cheap desktop computer for the hangar. Dell has a compact C521 machine with a dual-core CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and a DVD burner. The price is a flight instructor-friendly $399. The top of the page says “Dell recommends Windows Vista Business”. Underneath, the shopper is offered a choice of two operating systems: Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional.
[Since the only thing that we will use this machine for is running a Web browser and maybe an ssh client, it seemed like a safe way to try out Vista.]
Or a safe way to try out Ubuntu: Dell offers naked laptops! 🙂
Don’t forget about anti-virus software.
I’ve been using Vista for about two months. Bit of a Microsoft fan most of my life, honestly, but I find Vista quite perplexing. On the plus side it is not as prone to slowing down as XP, and it does seem a bit more stable. The new GUI is nice, and having search everywhere is great.
That said: wireless doesn’t work as well as XP. Power management still sucks – the new “sleep on close” feature is brutally unreliable – about 50% of the time when I close my (Dell) laptop running Vista, it fails to sleep and needs a (lengthy) reboot. As for search – what they’ve built in is not yet as good as some of the third party packages, e.g. X1, Google Desktop Search. Outlook 2007 is a lot better then the 2003 version I used for the last 3-4 years, but I assume it will run on XP as well.
Maybe wait for the service pack? I dunno.
You are right, for simple tasks, Vista runs fine. But it will be slower and require more resources so I can’t see why you would want to have it. XP would be fine, or as suggested by Justin, go with Linux. Unless you want an excuse to play with Vista.
As for the “Dell recommends…” line, that is something Microsoft requires of their OEMs in order for them to get the highest level of discount. Duracell does the same thing; put “xxx recommends Duracell batteries” in your ads and you get another 5-10% taken off the bulk battery price.
If you have a good configuration (lots of ram) I recommend Windows Vista. But don’t get Business version, get the Home Premium.
Home doesn’t support dual core. That is, it will work, but doesn’t make use of multi cores.
From the Vista Docs: –
While all editions of Windows Vista can support multiple core CPUs, only Windows Vista Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise can support dual processors.