Dell Extends Desktop XP Sales Comments

How do the TR staff feel about Vista being given ME II status from more than a few critics. Is that label justifiable? Has Vista's weaknesses been blown out of proportion? For me, no matter which way you slice it it's been truly disappointing. I wanted Windows to give us a reason to like them again (fanboys may want to omit the last word).

Do you think Microsoft will lose any significant market position on Operating Systems? The problem that strikes me is a lack of a practical alternative.

Vista was late no doubt. However it does not deserve the abuse it gets. It is streets ahead of XP on almost every level.

Between the two - Vista is the more suitable operating system for EVERY home user out there. Those that complain because it won't run aero on their 6year old PC should not be installing Vista anyway and should stick with XP.

Business users have hoards of custom/in-house applications to worry about - which will cause rollout delays. However, for basic office and portable device users (and for IT Support as I am an IT Manager) again it is great.

Dell along with the 5 NERDS out there who try to justify XP's stay of execution need to stop encouraging this debacle as it just stops the vast number of home and business users from upgrading and getting a BETTER computing experience.

Having used Vista since launch I hate going back to XP - its like using DOS again....;-) (only kidding)

So far I prefer XP because it is familiar, faster, has less compatibility issues than Vista and tells you what to do less. Then there is User Account Control - very annoying, and other things like disabling start-up programs with msconfig will give you an irritating security warning on reboot.

I've used Vista and spoken to Vista home users through my line of work, and cannot find any good reason to change to it.

familiar - anyone who has used XP can pickup vista in seconds

compatibility - Vista has something like double the number of device drivers than XP. Otherwise this ususally fails where OEMs can't be bothered to release new drivers.

User account control, warning messages and other security features are a god send. Windows Vista will potentially end up on over 1billion PC's.... and will probably be used by triple the number of end users - the vast majority of whom are not PC experts. Power users should have no difficulty with this.

there is no reason not to choose Vista over XP on a new PC..
perhaps TR should do a Vista vs. XP feature now Vista has had a chance to bed in?

Having ditched Vista after regrettably installing service pack 1, I went back to the familiarity of XP.

I then tried to use my SATA based twin drive (RAID 1) with it. No joy. I suspect the XP drivers as the graphics card stuff was actually poorer under XP. This is a motherboard based on AMD/ATI's 690G integrated chipset with Radeon X1250 graphics incorporated.

I fortunately had a backup of my Vista system partition pre SP1 (handy hint: keep your data on a seperate partition) which I was able to revert(!) back to.