xp or Vista?

[winny]

Hi, I have an comp and am looking to upgrade to a wi fi lap top. I am ok on computers but would not class myself as expert. I have xp office and am a bit worried about changing to vista as all new ones seem to be vista and xp not available. Also I do all my hubbies self employed books on excel and dont want to loose any data etc. can anyone re assure me?

[ACtheTROLL]

not really.

Vista is fine ... and usually fine with office 2007.
I've used it since the beginning .... and never really noticed the change.

HOWEVER - office 2007 used different formats for all it's documents .... there is the option to save in an older format. Or for older versions of office ... you can install an add on that lets you open nef format files ....
the formulas will work old to new without problems.

All that said ... there are reports that office 2003 has problems with vista (I'd be interested to hear any opinions too)

Progs in general tend to need a vista version .... mainly utilities (virus, disc cleanup etc) almost certainly need to be upgraded. other progs ... you can try ... may may not

look on the vista website for compatibility issues if you MUST have something working

[zinnie]

Hi 'winny'.......personaly I would stay with XP, the thing you know and works......I don't see any real benifit to you to move to 'vista'...but there are lots of risks. You can still buy laptops with XP. Not in places like 'pc world', but reputable places 'on the net' like ebuyer and dabs are selling them and probably amazon.

[rojash]

In response to customer demand, both Dell and Fujitsu Siemens are offering a free "downgrade" to XP, as are a number of other manufacturers. In a recent poll on Silicon.com (which is a site for IT professionals, so not exactly overrun with technophobes), they asked which OS members would use if given the choice. Overwhelmingly the vote was for XP, followed by OS X.
Vista came top in PC Magazine's "disasters of 2007" charts.

I have two machines, one running XP and the other Vista. Vista is used only for testing our software for compatibility (I'm a software developer). There is no way that I would make this machine my regular workhorse, as it's frankly a slow,clunky pain the @ss.

XP service pack 3 is about to be released, and all reports are that after installation, the performance gets even better in comparison to Vista.

[zinnie]

Hi 'rojash'.....you have summed up the situation really well