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Windows Vista
Dick Axtell - 14/6/12 at 03:36 PM

Dearly Beloved's laptop runs on Vista. Runs OK, but sometimes v slowly. Not much stuff on this machine, used mainly for comms. Cannot get Office 2003 to load up, getting some weird error message commenting about "elevation" needed. Is there some kind of downloadable s/ware to make 2003 compatible?

Other option could be to uninstall Vista, and then load up XP, and then spend hours getting it updated.

Which is the recommended course of action?

Apologies if this Q has been posted already.

flibble - 14/6/12 at 03:50 PM

Personally I'd go for XP, Vista sucks

Dick Axtell - 14/6/12 at 03:57 PM

quote:
Originally posted by flibble
Personally I'd go for XP, Vista sucks

Yeah....................I kinda got that impression from other posts on here.

Haven't had too many probs using wife's laptop running Vista, but have only used it for family pics, email, and skyping. Maybe we don't test it so hard.

the engine shop - 14/6/12 at 04:49 PM

Don't use whingjoes myself, But Ubuntu 11.10 (linux) is defo worth looking into for a stable alternative....

monkeyarms - 14/6/12 at 05:02 PM

Put my fathers new PC on Linux Mint last week. Very stable and he seems to like it.

BTW There is nothing wrong with Vista, it was perfectly ok once set up properly and updated to latest service packs. The old "vista sucks, XP rules" is mainly from Vista pre SP1 days, when it was bad. Vista is very hardware dependant though.

David Jenkins - 14/6/12 at 05:33 PM

Windows 7 is much, much better than Vista - and that's coming from a dedicated Linux Mint user! You might even find some deals around, as Windows 8 is due out soon.

But saying that... Linux Mint is free, and really does work well.

britishtrident - 14/6/12 at 06:09 PM

Mint Linux is now apparently the most common flavour of Linux it has come from a one person project to top above major projects such as Ubuntu and Fedora in just a few years. Mint is updated every 6 months it is now on the 13th generation I have been using it since version 3 I usually skip generations and only recently changed from Mint 11 to Mint 13. Everything works and is rock solid stable with none of the long pauses you get while Windows updates itself at every at start up.
Now the really good bit it it is free and come with all the software you will ever need and the operating system and normal SOHO software installs in half the time it takes even to install MS Office. and No Virus problems


Mint comes in few flavours the one to go for is Mate Cinnamon but take care only to choose the 64 bit version if you have a 64 bit computer, the 32 bit version is more universal will work on both 32 and 64 bit processors.

link http://linuxmint.com/

[Edited on 14/6/12 by britishtrident]

David Jenkins - 14/6/12 at 06:27 PM

I feel that I should point out that Linux is a bit different from Windows and there is a bit of a learning curve, especially when things go a bit wrong. However, it's not that much different and can be learnt very rapidly.

What you'll probably find is that you'll get into Linux quite easily - then get VERY annoyed when you go back to Windows and realise just how bad that is!

gremlin1234 - 14/6/12 at 07:04 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Dick Axtell
some weird error message commenting about "elevation" needed.


the elevation is probably that you need administrator privilege to install the new software

D Beddows - 14/6/12 at 08:34 PM

Windows 7 all the way nowadays tbh - gone a bit off Linux tbh, mostly because I use too much software that doesn't work properly with it but I've also had loads of problems getting video to play nicely on it. Even on really old laptops I now use a seriously cut down version of XP which seems to outperform any version of Linux I've compared it to.

David Jenkins - 14/6/12 at 09:18 PM

What really pee's me off with Windows is that every time I turn it on, it seems that there are several huge MS updates to download and install. As I don't turn the Windows machines on very often this can mean that they run with reduced capability for several hours (the record so far is 4+ hours on a quad processor desktop!). I get Linux updates on most days, but they rarely take longer than 5 minutes, often less than 1 minute, sometimes just a few seconds.

the engine shop - 15/6/12 at 05:46 AM

quote:
Originally posted by the engine shop
Don't use whingjoes myself, But Ubuntu 11.10 (linux) is defo worth looking into for a stable alternative....





And not have to see (Windows is not responding) any more was worth learning a new O.S.

D Beddows - 15/6/12 at 08:38 AM

quote:

What really pee's me off with Windows is that every time I turn it on, it seems that there are several huge MS updates to download and install


oh I just turn updates off done it for years! Like you, I got fed up waiting hours for 'updates' to install only to find they'd messed with a setting somewhere and something that worked fine before now didn't work at all As I said, had 'updates' turned off for years and nothing bad has happened at all - every now and again I go and look on the Microsoft updates web page to see if I've missed anything important and maybe download some firewall updates but apart from that........