Should I go to Vista?

[Godly Paladin]

When I bought my laptop I was able to snag a free copy of Vista Home Premium. My dilemma is if I should ditch my beloved XP Media Center, which has been my faithful companion for six years, or should I go ahead and leap to Vista? My #1 concern is that it will decrease the performance of both my games and general tasks. There are certain tantalizing things about Vista, like DX10 and using flash drives like slow RAM.

Attached are my specs. If anyone could peruse them and tell me realistically (not Microsoft's official propaganda) how Vista will affect my performance, that'd be great.

Help me decide, guys.

[AGITA]

With your specs you should have no problem running it. I've ran it since microsoft gave us a copy back in October. Drivers are not a big issue as everyone makes them out to be. And your games will not be affected that much, nor will your applications take a hit. Looks beautiful and the waters fine.

My real suggestion is to partition (be careful!!!) and try it out. If its not right for you kill it and resize your partition.

As well I don't think your laptops videocard will support DX10. sry dont know for sure.

[Jingo Jaden]

Geforce 8800 gts supports direct x 10. However, most vista laptops I have seen had vista already installed in it. So you might want to ask someone who works in a local computer store or something similart to that.

Speaking of vista, it gets a workstation after the summer. Sort of a major patch. A friend of mine who works with Vista says that will most likely bring major improvements to a already strong system such as vista.

However, Vista is a very strong operating system, you might want to consider XP pro if the laptop is not all that strong. XP pro is a pretty decent system, and does not have half of the instalation problems that useualy occur when one install vista. *at least to my knowlegde*

Word of advice, if you are going to install vista, I would recomend that the files that are already on the computer will be copied into a external hard drive. Just for safety, some people have even gotten to the point where they have to clear the files on the computer. And have some professional that is skilled in terms of vista, that would be smart I think.

Btw, if you get vista installed, tell me how it is

[Warrior4Christ]

Very few video cards support all the features of DX10.
I think your video card can support Aero. Just.

You could dual-boot with Vista and XP, like I'm about to... (and Ubuntu for me).

Your laptop doesn't look 6 years old. And Acer was very forward-thinking when they gave you a free Vista upgrade voucher with the laptop 6 years ago.

And I think the ReadyBoost flash drive memory expansion thing isn't guaranteed to work with every USB flash drive. Only ones that have a response/access time less than a certain value. I think.

[Godly Paladin]

LOl, no no... I've been using XP on various computers for 6 years. The laptop is only a year old.

[AGITA]

Thought so with DDR2

[Mitsukai]

I've been told that Vista in it's current state is a real dog, and that unless you are buying a smoking hot computer, it would be best to stick with a stable version of XP until the first critical bugs are fixed and a service pack is released.