Personally, I didn't want to touch vista with a barge pole, far too many bugs, and sinse I also run some old dos games and other programs, I doubt they'd work with it. To be honest, I'm not upgrading from Xp until I find something which I want to do which specifically needs vista, ----- by which time the kinks will hopefully be ironed out.

True Cx2, but there are a lot of dedicated programs and auto running dosbox front ends you can get for specific games, not to mention emulation of other things is much easier. I was terrified of amigar emulation sinse it sounded uba complex, but when I actually sat down and stuck in, the program did all the hard work for me.

I'm sure most people here have run old infocom interactive fiction games using win frotz or similar, which obviously runs the old stuff which a lot of people would've originally played in Dos (contrast what happens if you try to run an infocom game such as hitchiker's guide on it's own, rather than with a Zcode interpreter).

that's why i have no intention of going vista until there's something I want which requires it, ---- which i believe, judging by the amount of time before things became Xp exclusive and windows 98 was no longer good, will be quite a while.

On the computer front, my new pc has completely died on me! I turn on the power, but my monitor picks up no signal, and my speakers pick up no sound though i can here the fans whirring. I've tried all the connections I can, and while it might be the monitor connection I'm not precisely sure.

so i finally decided to connect my laptop to my wireless network, which was amazingly easy to do, ---- accept of course for bt's usual stupidity in not being able to tell me my network key, and just constantly telling me to read it printed on the back of the hub. When i told them this was not a good idea, they suggested I get someone else to read it, then slammed down the phone on me when i persistantly told them they were being unhelpful.

As it happened, a friend of mine turned up on Monday and I had to ask her to read it, ---- though as I'm actually employing her as a reader for my phd, this wasn't as bad as it could've been, ---- stil, I'm utterly staggered by the unsupportiveness of tech support.

maybe that's the point? being cybermen, they only support technology and are useless for humans, ;D.

I have not tried any DOS apps with Vista but there is a command prompt, so I suppose stuff does work. Vista works with all audiogames I've tried, you just need to tinker with the compatibility/administrator settings to get it right, which means checking or unchecking one or 2, perhaps 3 at the extreme most, but it works greatly. They don't sell XP, dark how did you get XP on your new system if they don't sell it, well they do but it's extremely hard to find?

I can tell you right now that I hate bista. When ever my desktop goes, I might go for a mac depending on what is available at that time. I'm happyly running xp on my desktop and unhappyly vista on my laptop. Then again one of the reason why I hate my laptop is all the crapware that came on it. I would make a joke about bista that isn't going to be made do to the pack rules if you get what I'm getting at. This is going to be where I let my money do the talking. mac or vista, for shure mac. OOPS.
As for the disability thing, I agree cx and for shure on that xp and vista thing.

I haven't yet met someone who likes vista at all. A friend of mine actually believes that microsoft in the 1970's, made a perfect, omnicompatible, clear as christal, bug free, crash free os called windows. Sinse then, they've broken different bits of this working Os and released each one as a different windows version, with a new set of things working and broken and actually made no developement progress at all.

Ice master, they are called it services overhere, I was just referring to the cybermen of Doctor who, who have no emotions, sense of humer or imagination and of course are cyborgs, (a lot like It services if you ask me). As for the disability discrimination act, it struck me as pointless if they were so gawmless as to not actually know the key, ---- and anyway I knew I had my friend who works as my reader turning up the next morning, and she got an extra half hour's pay out of it anyway.

As for dos and compatibility, well I've of course used emus for things, but as Xp has been around a long while there are lots of dedicated emu programs, which are often very easy to run (as I said, Winuae the amigar emulater was amazingly symple). But of course nobody has made these compatible with vista yet, and really i don't want the compatibility hassles or the risk of losing some of my favourite games and things.

As for where I got Xp, I bought the Pc from a lovely litle computer firm in nottingham up the road from my parents, and when i said I wanted Xp they just got me a copy complete with run disk. As my brother also very recently bought a laptop for his new job complete with Xp, it doesn't strike me as hard to get hold of at all Andy, ---- it's either an Us vs Uk thing, or just that your going to only the large and flashy shops in control of Microsoft who will try to force you to buy vista.

As for the pc problem, well I've looked at the monitor cable and it seems there might be a pin issue. As for the lack of sound, the system might be muted, but I can't even tell if it's working at the second unfortunately. If I can be certain it's running, unmuting it won't be a problem. I'm really hoping it's just the monitor plug and mute and nothing more serious, especially as I've begun to transfer things over there.

at least I stil have this laptop for the net, and a spare dvd player hooked up to my Tv for watching ds9 and doctor who and other such fun stuff, ----- it's just a shame my 5.1 surround sound speakers are sort of immovable from my Pc.

I hope lennix is there when it is time for a new PC and the reason why I would choose a mac over windows is do to the fact that it seems to run better then windows, but I would go for lenix over windows anytime too. matter of fact, I'm using firefox over IE do to the fact that it offers more choices when it comes down to the interface. My firefox could look different then yours. Also if I chose to run it without any changes and have a little smaller footprint then IE then I can. Oh my, MS doesn't understand choice, but money talks. Let's make a 60 gb OS and have lot of eye candy shall we? Matter of fact, let's make 30 different versions of the same OS , and charge different prices for each? No one wants to config it for their on needs anyway! also lets make it so that this OS is the only one they can get. Good Idea? Uh, noep. Sorry about the rage, but I'm tired of that kind of adatude when it comes down to the OS. I think you should beable to install only the parts of the OS you need if you wanted to (no wmp or ie for me thanks. prefer winamp or firefox).

lol Agree with you. didn't really know about that flaw. All I knew about them is that my grandfather's mac boots a little faster then my PC and my xp PC boots in about thirty secs give or take a little. my laptop on the other hand takes closer to a min, but that my be do to the fact of all the crapware I haven't remove yet. Although I got most of it gone. Soney and MS don't make it easy for me to find out what I really need running at startup. wich reminds me, I really need to make those restore disk that I been putting off for a year. I really don't want to pay $40 for something that was in a hidden part of the hd if the hd goes. The thing that gets me when I get a computer from the store is all the software demos that comes on it. To me that is asking for it. Someone might think that if it is there it needs to be packed. They might think that sence they bought the computer then they own everything on the computer. I wouldn't blaim them. Afterall who wants a bunch of useless oftware on their PC? So my thing with some of these computer companys is no crapware please? As for vista, throgh in something that will be of major use to me along with a reasonable price and I will think about upgrading. Also make it work good with my hardware. It's the software that is suppose to be hardware demanding not the OS. I'm not saying go out and pack. I'm just saying that you are asking for it when you put demos on a computer and sail the computer exspect to make even more to remove it or when someone buy's the software. The place that I bought my laptop tryed to sell me msoffice 2007. they told me that my version wouldn't run on vista. i basicly told them that I'm going to try it and see. I'm using office 2002 and it's doing ok for me. They also tried to sail me the  geek scrod, but I had a brother that would do everything that they would have done for free.

Cx2, I wasn't actually being serious about the perfect windows, it's just that each successive version seems to have a different set of problems, and future versions fix those problems only to create new ones the previous versions didn't have.

In my general experience, laptops always take longer to boot than Pcs, even though this laptop has better ram than my old laptop, it stil took longer to boot up, running virtually the same set of programs, ---- i believe it's to do with the smaller and more compressed hardware.

su8bscription plans, i do rather like what dolphin do. you buy the initial licence for a product, then simply have to perchice version upgrades. Even if you need a hole new copy to install on another machine, it'll only cost you as much as the current version upgrade. While admittedly the initial cost is rather expensive (though luckily my secondary school education budgit payed for it), buying version upgrades is only at most

That's pretty much exactly what I mean Dark. Instead of bringing out new versions which are completely different they should instead build on an existing version, and keep building on that. Of course this makes marketing it a little more difficult, but frankly they could get around that with quality of updates and support for new things like improvements to 802.11X wireless or bluetooth and so on.

As to laptops, they do tend to have less cache as I understand it. Cache is a very small amount of really really fast memory the computer uses so it doesn't have to fetch stuff from ram as often, the speed it runs at actually makes ram look slow laugh. This could be part of the reason at least.

Hi,
I am also using Windows XP.
I have tried Vista also. Some things about it I like, but i dislike more things about it such as the compatibility issues with most audio games.

People complained about XP as much as they are about Vista now when it was originally released. I recall one person referred to the appearance of the desktop as "Teletubby land" as a reference to a TV program for very young children. Someone else commented that if it wasn't for the fact it was built on top of Windows 2000 with its inherent speed it would just have been useless.

As it is now I can't imagine not using XP. People will get used to it, though it isn't going to do the computer industry any good. Even before XP when the changes between 95 and 98 were not really noticable by non technical people from an interface perspective you had people worrying about having to relearn things, and wanting to stick with what they had because it was familiar. Now imagine when every version of Windows really is a big change, and how much foot dragging that will inevitably cause. It's just going to confuse people no end.

A lot of the issue is also technical, the old versions of windows were in fact pretty horrendous. Part of the theoretical reason behind Vista being such a huge change was to essentially clean things up, though not having tried it I can't comment whether this was successful. There is just so much rubbish left in there, once an old game I had even somehow managed to make appear on the start menu a folder called "main" and include the old Windows 3.1 file manager lol.

For those who don't know, in 3.1 you didn't have a start menu you just had various windows with the shortcuts in called "program groups". Main was naturally the first window you had with all the Windows stuff in, sort of like the "programs" part of the start menu today.