Quote from fearless9:
I am about to buy a new laptop next week.
Should I accept preloaded windows vista or insist upon an XP disk as well.
regards
f9
Definitely go with XP Professional - Vista is just not ready for primetime - there are countless non-supported things, driver issues, needless slowdown of your machine CPU for useless "checking" for illegal stuff, incredible resource waste of memory and CPU cycles compared to XP Pro for no real benefit. Vista is kind of like the old "Millenium" version - it is worthless in its current state and you will be counting the days until the next real upgrade so you can ditch it. Much better to stay with XP Pro and just wait until Microsoft gets the job done correctly on a future Windows release.
My wife got a new laptop from Dell earlier this year. We ordered it under "Small Business" since it was for her business and there was a good special discount then.
I noticed that under Small Business they allowed us to pick "XP Professional" instead of Vista, and they included the actual "XP Professional" full CD when we received the laptop. Do not be fooled by the $10 "disk" option - if you select that under personal as I did with a previous system from Dell, they will send you nothing but a "restore disk" which is not the same as the original XP disk.
If you order the machine under Small Business, there will also not be the sh*tload of bloatware auto-installed on the machine that fills your desktop with useless icons, 6-month trials for AOL and other useless stuff and then you have to waste time deinstalling and decontaminating your system to get back to vanilla again.
