OT: installing my copy of Win XP on a replacement PC

[tony sayer]

In article , dennis@home scribeth thus

I think John Rumm's following post sums a lot of it up but to me it just seems --bloatware--, a new operating system for the sake of it or rather so Microsnot can sell more product under the guise that its better.

Suppose its OK if you just want to do very simple things on it but then again I can do very simple things on my WIN 2000 Pro installation and whatever I want to do and set up that does what I want .. it seems I'm forever arguing with the lone Vista PC round here whenever I want to do anything different. Apart from some fancy graphics its no better..

Every fecking time I do use it everything is considered a "security risk" and did I really know the severe consequences of deleting something!. It treats me like an idiot..

OK I suppose you can turn a lot of that junk off but whey should you need to do that ?..

A very poor system and one that I refuse to use. I'd prefer LINUX over that any day. And that seems to be getting better from the user POV.

Theres a small charity outfit around here who got pulled up about software issues on their donated PC's Now they run LINUX with Thunderbird, Firebox, Open Office etc. Initially they didn't like it but now they wonder why they didn't install those programmes first and what's more .. all free:))...

[Lobster]

[snip]

From what I've seen of it so far, it looks a total waste of time and space... out of interest, is it possible still to buy new machines with XP, or is that facility gone? Just that a family member is after a new laptop soon, and the buying decision (and subsequent 'technical support') will essentially fall to me!

David

[Andy Burns]

You can buy a machine with Vista Business or Vista Ultimate and then use downgrade rights to install XP, or you can track down a secondhand XP Retail.

[tony sayer]

*Shouldn't that be an upgrade;?...

[Andy Champ]

The app. I use most is Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

I installed Vista, added VS, and fired it up. UAC.

Bit later, started VS again. UAC. It was apparent that every time I started my favourite app - one written by MS themselves - I was going to get this annoying prompt.

As far as I can tell, it's just prettier than XP, but doesn't run as much S/W. One day some S/W I need will appear that is Vista only, and then I'll switch.

Andy

[Chewbacca]

Dabs still have notebooks with XP for sale.

[dennis]

VS 2008 doesn't do that maybe you could download the free version?

[Andy Burns]

Those are "sub" notebooks like the Asus Eee - there is a restriction on the maximum memory and disk size (and perhaps single CPU core?)

[Andy Champ]

We have a full MSDN licence and we can (and have) installed the non-free version. However, we do not wish to take the cost of revalidating our entire software suite against a new compiler at this time.

It's on the worklist for the new year. We might even move to a newer version of .NET. Perhaps it'll clear that random failure we get, that never happens in debug mode and moves to a different place everytime we change anything. (and fortunately only affects the way it crashes, not whether it crashes - it's something to do with cleaning up unmanaged on-stack objects after throwing a managed exception).

Andy

[The Natural Philosopher]

Vista is the biggest advertisement for Linux ever devised...

[John Rumm]

Yes, but its getting harder... (just trying to find a laptop for a client who wants XP on it).

The simplest way seems to be to get a Vista Business one, and that has downgrade rights to XP pro. Many systems come with the appropriate downgrade media as well.

[John Rumm]

or run it on a virtual machine on XP ;-)