Will you upgrade to Vista?

[Harrison]

With the release of Vista at the end of January most, if not all, new PCs will be sold with the new OS pre-installed. But for those of us who already have PCs of a current good spec, will you be upgrading to Vista, sticking with XP or deciding later?

For me personally I am waiting until I build my next PC which will probably be later this year in the autumn once all the bugs are ironed out if Vista (see my topic on Vista and Multicore for more on this), and also once the next wave of CPUs are released from AMD which should be later in the year.

[Puni/Void]

I'm going to wait a bit until I build a new machine, so I'm not ready to jump on the Vista wagon just yet. I'm more worried about by finding the right motherboard and gfx-card.

[Demon Cleaner]

I'm more worried about by finding the right motherboard and gfx-card.

You have to wait until the last moment you'll buy a new PC. It does not avail that you look now for a mobo and a gfx card if you're going to buy a PC in 6 months.

[Puni/Void]

That's totally true, Demon. Things change quite fast these days, no doubt about that.

[Harrison]

That is very true. Computer technology moves forward at a very fast rate and hardware prices fluctuate a lot even from one week to the next. The best time to start researching the best hardware to purchase is just as you need to buy it. You will know your budget and can then match the hardware to fit what you can afford.

Obviously some of us do keep up to date on current hardware so can easily advise you closer to the time.

Personally I say it is currently best to wait until DirectX 10 based graphics cards are standard and have fully taken over from the current DirectX 9 cards still currently the norm. This should have happened by the summer when more affordable DirectX 10 cards should have taken over the market, instead of at the moment where we only have a single nVidia card that has DirectX 10 support.

The other thing I recommend waiting for is AMD and their next wave of CPUs. At the moment they are dragging their feet releasing chips based on the older AMD64 cores compared to Intel's newer Core CPUs which are currently winning the benchmark battles.

AMD's Athlon 64's are still my preferred CPU, even with the Core Duos showing better results in many benchmark tests, But look at AMD's latest Quad core release. In the case of Intel they have packaged two dual core processors into one single CPU package that requires a single slot and a single heatsink and due to the low power consumption of the Core Duo it still pumps out less heat than the older Pentium D range did. AMD's solution on the other hand is to supply a matched pair of dual core FX processors which require a special dual CPU motherboard, dual banks of ram, and a lot of heat, power consumption and noise thanks to also needing two heatsinks and fans. I'm waiting to see what AMD have waiting behind the scenes as this is a clear case of getting something into the market to compete against Intel whilst they finish off the true successor.

[Stephen Coates]

The only OSs I plan switching to in the future are AmigaOS 3/4/MorphOS/Linux.

[TiredOfLife]

Only looking to upgrade to OS4.0 in the near future. (Hopefully anyway)

[FOL]

I will not be upgrading to Vista, simple fact is because compatability sucks. Also i dont like being held randsom. I was looking forward to halo2, and its released as Vista ONLY.

M$ are complete AR**S.

[Harrison]

I will eventually end up using Vista as my main OS at some point, but not yet.

It does have some very nice changes such as the new search facilities, and I like the new way directories work with a Directory Opus style navigation system. And some of the new features such as the games area is a nice idea, although developers will need to directly support.

I can see the logic behind everything that has been done with Vista. There has to come a time when you have to launch a new OS and leave some of the past behind and move on. They have done that with Direct X 10, as well as the ideas for Live! support for PC games, creating a proper central gaming network for PC gamers rather than the current fragmented one with different games using different networks.

It's just going to take some time for everything to be ironed out and for developers to catch up, and for consumers to move on.

And we still have XP. It's not like it has just vanished with the launch of Vista. Dual booting or even running XP as a virtual machine on a dual or quad core equipped Vista system are other options to maintain compatibility.

[Stephen Coates]

Does anyone here have a copy of Vista that I could errm, borrow?

I am certainly not switching to Vista, but I do want to try it out, mostly because I could do with trying out some Mac emulators and comparing them to XP/2000.