Moving from XP to Vista

Pansy Potter

A friend of mine bought a Dell Pc earlier in the year just before Vista became standard on all PCs. The PC uses XP. He was sent a Vista disk soon afterwards, when it was officially released.

If he instals Vista from the disk will he lose eveything already on the PC - Word documents, Excel sheets, photos etc.

Is it worth moving to Vista at all? Are there pros and cons to moving?

Any help appreciated.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

Personally, I can't see myself every moving to vista because IMO, it's superfluously bloated with completely OTT visuals, and is not really an exercise in efficiency at all. It uses ridiculous resources when laying idle.

To that end I would advise your friend to stick with XP until Microsoft stop supporting it with regular updates and the like.

If he is moving, tell him to backup his documents onto CD or DVD and do a completely clean install of vista.

Chumpski

He was probably sent a vista upgrade disk that requires your version of XP to be installed so you can't do a clean install. I am in the same situation. I got a new PC around March and i got a vista DVD soon afterwards.

Im not bothering with Vista until all those driver and hardware compatibility issues are sorted out, middle of next year id say before vista is reasonably stable. To be honest i might not even bother installing it unless i have a good reason. The only thing i can think of at the moment is directX10 and games thatd make me changeover.

Tell him to make sure he creates his Windows XP recovery disks if Dell didnt send him any first. This is the most important thing so he can reinstall XP if hes not happy with Vista. Then backup his documents to a DVD/CD. Its likely that the hard drive will be wiped during installation so all programs he had he will be gone.

lodgepole

You can install Vista as an upgrade to XP quite happily without formatting the drive. The only backing up i'd recomend you do is to move things out of the user folders (stuff stored on desktops or in my documents) in case Vista replaced those folders with new, empty, ones. It probably doesn't, but better to be safe.

As for the merits of moving to Vista... It has plenty. I like it very much, and have had no issues with hardware or software (Far Cry took a little bit of nudging to get working right, but it works perfectly fine now). It seems to me as if the people saying to stick with XP haven't actually used Vista for any extended period because their apparent experience is vastly different to mine.

ethernet

Pansy Potter wrote:

A friend of mine bought a Dell Pc earlier in the year just before Vista became standard on all PCs. The PC uses XP. He was sent a Vista disk soon afterwards, when it was officially released.

If he instals Vista from the disk will he lose eveything already on the PC - Word documents, Excel sheets, photos etc.

Is it worth moving to Vista at all? Are there pros and cons to moving?

Any help appreciated.

If he uses the official Dell upgrade DVD, then no. I advise the documents and backed up anyway. Just burn to CD/DVD or copy to an external hard drive. A clean install is better where the hard drive is formatted. It's best not to be taking junk from a previous Windows install into a new install.

Sabre0001

If he is going to upgrade he shoul;d back up everything anyway, just to be safe...

I personally would not advise upgrading yet - not compatible with many games & doesn't really have any significant benefits that I can see yet.....

BKtje

With many games?

It's compatible with every game i tried that would also work on XP. That said i obviously haven't tried every game available.

Whether you think it is worth moving from XP to Vista is entirely down to the individual. If you have a lot of old scanners/printers/ whatever then chances are that you won't be able to get drivers for them for vista. Best bet would be to check first.

Vista has an awful lot going for it imo but thats for a different discussion i guess/has been done countless times already.

CptSternn

Suggesting someone should NOT upgrade to Vista is insane. Everyone has to upgrade. XP will stop being supported in 2008, like Windows 95, no one will be running it after its not supported.

If you don't upgrade, you will be open to attack from hackers and what not, since there will be no new patches developed to protect you.

Also, all the new games coming out are all made for Direct X 10. Overlord, Shadowrun, and others that have hit the markets in the past weeks all require DX10 which means you have to have Vista if you plan on playing any new games.

As far as upgrading, Vista can be upgraded with little or no issues. I have installed it as an upgrade, and done a fresh install.

Unlike previous version of Windows, Vista has a cool feature that when you install it as a fresh install to a drive with an older version of Windows present it gives you the option of formating the drive, or the new feature I like, it will move all the old files (all the files in your c:\Windows\, C:\Program Files, and C:\Documents & Settings) into a folder called C:\Windows.Old, so you don't have to back up anything - everything is there in the Windows.Old folder and you can access it after Vista boots up the first time.

Capt'n Midnight

CptSternn wrote:

Suggesting someone should NOT upgrade to Vista is insane. Everyone has to upgrade. XP will stop being supported in 2008, like Windows 95, no one will be running it after its not supported.

If you don't upgrade, you will be open to attack from hackers and what not, since there will be no new patches developed to protect you.

Also, all the new games coming out are all made for Direct X 10. Overlord, Shadowrun, and others that have hit the markets in the past weeks all require DX10 which means you have to have Vista if you plan on playing any new games.

As far as upgrading, Vista can be upgraded with little or no issues. I have installed it as an upgrade, and done a fresh install.

Unlike previous version of Windows, Vista has a cool feature that when you install it as a fresh install to a drive with an older version of Windows present it gives you the option of formating the drive, or the new feature I like, it will move all the old files (all the files in your c:\Windows\, C:\Program Files, and C:\Documents & Settings) into a folder called C:\Windows.Old, so you don't have to back up anything - everything is there in the Windows.Old folder and you can access it after Vista boots up the first time.

Oh boy where do i start ?

Everyone doesn't have to upgrade. If your compter does what you want you don't need to go through the learning curve again.

Windows vista may well be the first microsoft desktop OS that can survive for more than 15 minutes on the interweb without getting owned. But in the past many vulnerabilities have remained hidden for up to 15 years , and the natre of the continued patches microsoft release mean that you need third party anti-malware apps and/or external firewall to be safe REGARDLESS of which version of windows you use.

New games direct X10 , fair enough , if you are a gamer.

Windows upgrade, little no issues. These are words that don't really belong together. No one recomends an upgrade over clean install, and that's not just windows, for linux too a clean install isn't a bad option.

ALL versions of windows have given you the option of installing in another folder and the default was dual boot if you didn't put it in the same one. Also the "my documents" folder location has changed more often than it's remained in the same place so you could argue that this was also present in earlier versions. Windows 3.x also had the nice trick of looking for all you currently installed programs and creating icons for them.

Bottom line, if the what you have does what you need and you don't wan't bells and whistles or the learning curve then don't up grade. If you can't afford downtime or risk loosing a working system don't upgrade. If there are features you want or will in the future then upgrade, if you don't mind doing a clean install or want to learn the new OS then upgrade.

Don't blindly upgrade for the sake of it. Most corporates won't touch Vista until the first service pack has been out for a month or two ( the final service pack for NT4 is called 6a not 6 ) so for business users the jury is still out. Also since the license is downgradable the number of copies of Vista business sold doesn't mean that most aren't changed to XP.