microsoft vista

Page may contain affiliate links. Please see terms for details.

Danny

Legendary Member
Location
York
If you can wait, I believe that microsoft are offering an upgrade to windows 8 from xp/vista/7 for £30. It's a limited running time period till Jan I think.
Machines that had Vista installed will be quite old by now. Will they be able to run Windows 8?
 

marinyork

Resting in suspended Animation
Location
Logopolis
Machines that had Vista installed will be quite old by now. Will they be able to run Windows 8?

It depends what you mean by 'quite old'. My laptop was manufactured in early 2007 during the cross over period (to Vista) and it can easily run windows 7 or a beta of 8.

Even 7 runs on older systems than people think, I was looking through the official nvidia drivers recently and it went to way back cards that would run on a friend's machine from 2005. And their machine was particularly problematic as it doesn't have PCI-express and therefore not easily upgradeable. It'd still run 7 though. Less sure about 8 but a similar principle would apply (drivers allowing and over time).
 

ushills

Veteran
Put Ubuntu on it and ditch windows, which specific windows applications do you need as Ubuntu is more reliable and secure for 98% of stuff.
 

Danny

Legendary Member
Location
York
MY - thanks.

ushills - I'm not an Ubuntu fan, but more to the point the PC I'm concerned about is the one used by my 86 year old mother and she is not going to want to change from Windows to unix. I suspect an upgrade to Windows 8 would confuse her to will probably either stick with Vista or just upgrade to Windows 7.
 
Er so what's the problem with your mothers pc ? Windows 7 wouldn't result in any major changes in interface to vista but then most casual users don't go outside of applications anyway so a lot of the discussions about how the various os work is actually irrelevant to them compared to say the browser.
 

marinyork

Resting in suspended Animation
Location
Logopolis
MY - thanks.

ushills - I'm not an Ubuntu fan, but more to the point the PC I'm concerned about is the one used by my 86 year old mother and she is not going to want to change from Windows to unix. I suspect an upgrade to Windows 8 would confuse her to will probably either stick with Vista or just upgrade to Windows 7.

The cheap deals were on 7 on launch and similarly now. So it probably isn't worth you upgrading to 7. The only real reason I mention it (as opposed to the imagined reasons by two other posters on this thread).
 
Imagined reasons ? I wanted to know why they were asking as they didn't say beyond querying whether it would run on older systems. Installing 7 would provide little in the way of additional functionality to a casual user and if it's speed then a cleanup of the computer with say ccleaner or a complete reinstall of vista or more memory might achieve the same thing.
 

marinyork

Resting in suspended Animation
Location
Logopolis
Imagined reasons ? I wanted to know why they were asking as they didn't say beyond querying whether it would run on older systems. Installing 7 would provide little in the way of additional functionality to a casual user and if it's speed then a cleanup of the computer with say ccleaner or a complete reinstall of vista or more memory might achieve the same thing.

A fresh install would certainly do the trick and more memory for vista in a lot of cases. However people don't actually necessarily behave like this in the real world. People don't bother reinstalling and often justify what is 'effectively' a reinstall by buying a new OS. I would hope that people understood that I'm not advocating paying 'full price' for windows 7 (or 8 for that matter) for the sake of it. However £30 for a quality of life improvement I'd say is as good a reason as any for going along with this madness. Or they could buy an SSD. And so on.

Vista was crap (in the sense that people said so at the time). That's not picking on vista, a very similar thing happened to XP, it's just again like vista people had it for such a long time that it worked out in the end due to faster machines, very major service pack updates and various other issues. It's just that over time revisionist history came in and XP was seen as the best ever OS :biggrin: written on stone tablets and all that twoddle. Vista is now suffering from the same kind of revisionism.

The feel of 8 is very different and leads some people cold, but that's exactly what people were saying about Vista.
 
I had no problems with Win ME neither^_^ I suspect most of the problems are dodgy system tray widgets, printers lacking updated drivers and trying to use old software, very old software.
 
Top Bottom