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Loading ...Vista v XP?
khenry
During my upgrading odyssey of the last month, I installed Windows XP Professional and Media Centre twice and Vistas Business and Home Premium once each. As covered twice by the magazine my old machine could run Vista but why bother. That’s staying on XP.
Vista’s insistence on enforcing upgrade rules with Vista HP is irritating if understandable - the company wants to preserve revenue, so from a clean installation my upgrade refuses to activate and the Business version was only ever a total replacement for XP, or a springboard to purchase a new key direct from Redmond UK. However, there’s another angle to making people install the old version of Windows in order to get to Home Premium. On my new build, Media Centre installed with no errors for the first time in a year. On Socket A and/or Nforce 2 hardware, MCE refused certain updates and the bundled 2005 update CD refused to work - you had to obtain the very same patches from Windows Update. That didn’t happen last month on the new gear.
I’ve enjoyed XP Media Centre on the new build without any problems at all. Even if I’ve used Acronis True Image to make a proper backup of the installation as it’ll fit on a DVD-R, I’m in no hurry to try Vista again. That’s the risk of requiring a full and activated XP installation - users might be reminded of why they liked XP in the first place (even with three year gaps between successive Service Packs) and stick with it.
It’s not practical to treat OS like the latest Harry Potter - one big seller out now and then flock to the next - which I detect in the attitude of the “just get Vista and move on” crowd, none of whom would dig in their pockets to buy your replacement software for anything incompatible. Even if Vista only takes 20 minutes to install, that doesn’t take into account the service pack and then any patches on top. To be absolutely fair it wasn’t Microsoft’s fault that some incredibly slow software developers, some of whom were tardy with Vista support at launch, found problems with Vista SP1. The update must have been through extensive testing, probably via the Release Candidate programme just like the OS so there’s little excuse if you were late with Vista support, to not be ready for the patch (yes you, Zone Labs).
To stop software programs getting in the way of my eventual upgrade though, I’ve loaded up Audacity and will use that to edit audio, which will also work with Vista when the time comes. The open source program can at least act as a stopgap until I feel like buying the latest Vista-friendly version of Wavelab.
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