[jgott]

Hi guys,

I just bought a brand-new laptop this morning (actually, I'm writing on it ), that's Acer Aspire 9414. Up until now, I'm quite glad with it, having used it for a few hours, it looks nifty enough. However, it comes with Windows Vista pre-installed. That's why I've got two main concerns:

1) I have heard that Vista is, literally, rubbish. Specially the DRM stuff, having to do with music and dvds. I heard that Vista monitors you more than it should, thus wasting resources and heating, telling you what you *can* do and what you *can`t* do. Do you know any of this first hand? 'Cause I'm considering swifting back to XP (which is the one I've got on my desktop computer). I'll be working with AutoCAD and other "monster" tools, so speed is important for me.

2) Installing XP. I'm an average-advanced user, so I do know how to set up everything. What I'm not sure about is whether my laptop will be "concerned" about me using another OS. I guess formatting and installing it should be enough, but I'd like to know it for sure.

Hope someone out there can help me out, 'cause I'm floundering in a sea of doubts, really . I just can't start installing apps if I'm not going to keep Vista.

Thanks for your patience and time,

JGott

[Emrys88]

I would go to Xp. If you will be using AutoCAD, you will need all the memory you need.
One of our clients has vista and AutoCAD, and it is soooo slow.

I havn't had first hand use of vista, i'm going to wait till service pack 2 comes out before getting it.

[Hybr!d]

Hearing about problems and actually experiencing them are two entirely different things.

If it isn't broken don't fix it.

[jgott]

To Emrys88,

Thanks for your advice. I'm going to try AutoCAD on the laptop tomorrow morning (fingers crossed ).

To Dave,

Yep, you're absolutely right. "If it's not broken, don't try to fix it". It's just it usually freaks me out a lot when I have to reinstall an OS (you know, you lose all your settings and you've got to start from scratch).

[jgott]

OK, done. For anyone reading this post, downgrading Vista to XP was definitely worth it !

Here's the story, just in case someone is interested in it:

I installed AutoCAD 2007 yesterday morning (I did have some problems unzipping the file, but I guess it had more to do with me using the digital camera card to transfer the file than to Windows Vista itself ). I clicked on the icon and... ta-dah... a shiny Vista window: "You are trying to execute an .exe file... could be malicious... blah blah blah". Well, Yes, I clicked on it so I want to execute it. Ta-dah, second shiny Vista window: "There is a known issue between the software you are trying to execute and Microsoft Windows Vista. Please check for any updates from the software vendor. Would you like more information?". I beg your pardon? Well, yeah, information is mostly always good...

Yet another Vista window: "The issue you're facing has already been addressed... please check the link below [link to Autodesk website]". So, on the link I click. Another Vista Window: "You are going to open a website link. Are you sure?". Well, once again, I clicked on it, so I guess I'm fairly sure about what I want to do... The next thing I remember doing was downloading a 13MB patch. Instead of saving it on the hard disk, I just execute it so I got *three* more Vista windows warning me that I was going to execute a process, could be a virus and so on and so forth.

Well, at least the patch did work I set it up and then ran AutoCAD (after having to confirm yet once again that I wanted to execute such program and grant it internet access...). I loaded a nice slightly complex Sydney Opera house project (it's online, and it's cool) and it loaded really fast, but rendering wasn't appropriate When looking at the building from a 3D perspective there were things missing... (To do with DirectX 10, perhaps? I have no idea).

As well as that, I just noticed that the windows style manager (the one which makes things looks smooth and neat) was consuming 80 MB of RAM, with 4 windows open; and Internet Explorer, with just one (I mean, ONE) google webpage open was eating up to 100 MB of RAM. I had seen enough, so I decided to go back to XP, where at least I knew where menus and control panels were...

No problems at all when installing XP SP2; I just had to change a BIOS setting to force the computer to check the CD/DVD reader before the hard disk.

Now everything looks fine (just a little bit empty... sniff sniff...). I only have to download some drivers from Acer Europe Support page (ie: sound doesn't work), which I'm doing now. And I can enjoy my 2GB of RAM ^_^ (not to mention the OS only takes up a few GBs, not 10 GB)

To sum up, it was worth it, I think.

Cheers for your attention,

JGott

[Cew27]

all the pop ups are user account control i think .... i turned mine off

[jgott]

Yeah, I guessed so :), but what really p*ssed me off was the fact of the "compatibility issues" (or, rather, "incompatibility issues"). I just expected them to happen in some of my oldest and obscure programs, not in such an application (which was updated, by the way; it dates "back" to 2007...).

Windows Vista looks cool and neat, it does; but I don't really think a computer below 4GB of RAM, running several applications on Vista, could cope with it, honestly; and I know I'm being a little exaggerated. Personally, (despite knowing the internals of Vista at all), I think Vista will be a very user-friendly OS for the average family, with eyecatchy and multimedia options; but it will be a nightmare at first for people who, like me, enjoy meddling with it , IMHO. We'll have to wait for Service packs, though.

[Emrys88]

What did i say. Lol

Autocad is ok on vista, just deable caching mode with the under-mapping etc. because that takes alot of memory.

Dan