Hello!

Christmas is coming, my computer is too old and slow for new games, I bought it 4 years ago , and I would like to buy a new one.
I searched a little and found that here in my country (Brazil), the good shops (big ones) only sell computers with windows vista. I would like to know if its a good idea to change to vista or stay at xp!

The computer I am aiming to buy has this features:

CPU 2.2GHz
RAM 2GB
HD 250GB
GPU 256MB

Thank you

Oh crap. What have you done?

AFAIK you can't get a legal copy of XP anymore. Microsoft wants you to stay on the upgrade treadmill.

[EDIT]
http://gizmodo.com/384368/dell-to-sell-xp-after-june-30-microsoft-to-pretend-theyre-selling-vista-to-save-face

I think Vista is a lot better than people let on. Why not accept the Vista you seem to inevitably be about to get, give it a decent shot and switch back if you don't like it? For games the DirectX 10 has to be a benefit?

I haven't had...many...Vista specific problems. Well, I've had some driver...um...

Vista isn't that great. It isn't a bug ridden monstrosity, but it certainly has problems. I'm sending in my computer for the second time, this time for pixel artifacts and a noisy fan/harddrive. I'm not sure if the pixel artifacts are a software problem, but it had a ton of driver issues earlier.

Before these problems, it was hanging and etc constantly. The RAM got replaced, and that cleared up.

Sure, those problems all seem hardware related, but I'm pretty sure it is due to Vista/hardware incompatability. As more drivers are released for Vista and the bugs are worked out, it should be OK for a computer.

More on topic: it sucks RAM, so you might want to spring for a little more RAM or turn off...everything while playing a game.

I find Vista is just a little bit better than XP. Sure, everyone says it sucks but mostly those are people who would hate anything MS produced. It's more stable and has more features in MHO than XP. I've only seen a few bluescreens when I stupidly overclocked my cpu to try to get more FPS out of A5 . And in the whole time I was developing the D3D driver for A5, messing with stuff and making mistakes constantly, I couldn't get it to an unrecoverable state which I am impressed by.

Erikster, what I have done? Nothing I guess...

Others, thanks for the replies! So, should I get more RAM? 4GB? I like to stay with a lot of softwares oppened at same time

2GB will be enough but more never hurts, if you can afford it.

More RAM is always better (until you hit 3GB on 32-bit, above that may be wasted RAM sadly)

I dunno, I get all my ram in 32bit linux with a "bigmem" kernel.

edit: I just upgraded to 4G

This really only seems to be a problem with older hardware. A new computer shouldn't have driver problems.

That's Linux.

Unless 32-bit Vista has PAE support, I doubt it will see more than 3.25-3.75 GB of RAM (depends on hardware installed, I lucked out on my computer at work as I see 3.5GB)

Is MinGW still a PITA with Vista?

I would recommend you build instead of buy personally, but that is just me.

I was hesitant and didn't think I'd ever switch at first, mostly feeding off all the FUD people spread about it (people who seem to think it wastes memory or CPU or hard drive or whatever). Then XP ran like snot on my new system, mostly due to shitty drivers, so I took the plunge and haven't looked back.

You can still get legal copies of it unless they've changed that in the last 2 weeks.

You're another one of those, dare I say it, vistaphobes that blame all your problems on Vista. I'm throwing you in the same category as my grandmother who hates Vista because it automatically downloads updates. Noisy fans, hard drives, pixel issues, etc all sound like hardware issues. Bad RAM is in no way caused by Vista, it is a hardware problems. Sounds like you bought a huge piece of shit computer, and that is your problem, not Vista.

It doesn't suck up much more RAM than XP, and if you're that concerned then disable Aero and the fancy effects. Most of the used RAM is for disk caching, which it actually does well (as opposed to XP, which was awful). If I shut down my computer and take 3 gig of my RAM out, my memory usage will drop. I will lose about 3GB of disk caching, but Vista will be using less. If you want to be one of those idiots who goes on Digg and brags because their Vista uses 200MB of ram, you can always disable superfetch and family, but then you're just stuck with wasted (empty) ram and low memory usage.

I have 4GB in my box now, which stupidly is 4 1 gig sticks. Someday I'll spend another $100 to buy 8GB of ram to toss in, and sell the 4 gigs I have now to a friend. But yeah, I wouldn't bother with more than 2GB unless you're going to install a 64-bit copy. I'm running 64-bit copy just fine, and you'll be fine as long as you don't have any hardware older than a few years or so.

I don't even know at this point, but in all honesty I'd skip MinGW completely. It's so outdated and nobody seems to care to get it up to date. I personally would grab Visual Studio Express to use over it, but if you're obsessed with C99 or something similar it may not be for you.

Not with gcc 4.*. With gcc 3.4.5, the latest "current release", you still have to add a directory to your path.

Damn, I was honestly trying to be pro-Vista. I have had a shitton of problems on my computer, but none of them have really seemed like they came from Vista itself.

My computer had more problems than I can count. (that's a lie, it's had about four serious problems and ten minor ones) It's going to get sent in again, and I expect it to break again when I get it back. I'm not blaming it on Vista, I'm blaming it on nVidia and HP.

I hate sending in my computer so much. This laptop constantly sounds like it's trying to save the internet to disk and it randomly freezes for a second and spews the characters I had been trying to type. I don't trust it to compile code, and the few internet games I play and irritatingly slow. If only my computer wasn't a PoS...

When you're using C as a portable assembly language to implement another language, some gcc extensions become really handy (and allow your output to go a lot faster). Of course, you shouldn't use them normally.

Good to know.

C99 is not an extension If there is a latest standard, so why not use it? Plus, MSVC is not compliant to standards it is supposed to support anyway... If you are developing solely for Windows, by all means use it. If you want cross-platform code, I'd suggest ditching it.

Fixing MinGW 3.4.5 takes 30 seconds if you follow the plethora of tutorials online for it (there are two separate ones on Allegro wiki even). Haven't tried 4.1 yet... I don't like developing in Windows anyway.

Vista has been a mixed bag in my case. It's File Explorer is terrible, but the Uninstall Programs is great. The write protection on the Program Files makes many of my older games not run all that well. UAC isn't all fun either (disabling it is not an excuse, to stop all you Vista apologists). It's icon theme is bad too. In my mind the Uninstall Programs thing has been the best thing about it... compared to XP's it's awesome. I really like Vista's Uninstall Programs thing.

Unfortunately, due to the drivers situation, using XP now is no longer wise... you are pretty much stuck with Vista at this point. Either suck it up, or switch to Linux.

But using GCC extensions are no more portable than MSVC extensions, the only difference being gcc works on more platforms.

UAC keeps idiots who shouldn't be using a computer a little safer, in theory. I naturally don't need it, so I disable it.

(Note I never suggested C99 is a gcc extension.)

I just had a look. One suggests putting mingw/bin on the PATH. I don't understand. That's standard practice even on non-Vista systems. If that's all there is to it, the problem I had (about a year ago, can't remember it exactly) must have been fixed.

I had a friend that, just yesterday, had their computer die because of Vista. He had the automatic updates on of course. I hate systems that think they know what they are doing and then screw things up more. The funny thing was that on rebooting the system, windows tried to roll back to a previous known good state...and that failed as well. Windows can't even get that right. I'm not totally against the big M, but I wish they would fix a LOT of crap...or at least open it up more so we could fix our computers. I guess there is always Linux. I uninstalled Vista on my laptop and installed my copy of XP pro on it. I did it a long time ago, but the manufacture just recently started providing XP drivers for the motherboard and chipsets. I got tired of my software (which some was made by Microsoft:o) not working with Vista.:-/ There are a lot of cool features in Vista...I guess it just needs some time to mature more.

For the most part, automatic updates should work fine. Sometimes there are problems though, and thats why people get paid to fix them. They do fix a lot, even though some is ignored or whatever. Not like Linux is much better, there is a ton of issues over there. Windows is fairly open, just not open source. And in all honesty, the people who will hack source to fix the problem are in the minority. Have fun on Linux, I'll stick with my OS that is commercially backed and pushed.

That's a lot hypocrisy and ignorance right there, BAF; it's dangerous to put so much of it in a single post. Spread it out more next time

Damn, I'll try. In all reality though, Linux isn't really in any better situation, sure it's open source, but for their supposed target audience (average users), nobody gives a rats ass. They just want it to work, which Windows does more often than Linux, at least last time I tried it out.

The vista/gcc thing may be fixed. If not all you have to do is add c:\mingw\libexec\gcc\mingw32\3.4.5\ or whatever directory cc1.exe is in to the path.

So, MSVC is Windows only and GCC is multi-platform, yet somehow GCC extensions are not more portable than MSVC extensions?

I wish people would stop spouting this nonsense. I don't care about average users. I'm not an average user. Are you an average user? Do you want to be treated as an average user?

I think the usability situation of Windows vs. Linux is evolving; Windows' main advantage anymore is 1) its widespread initial-install status on new computers, and 2) its widespread name recognition and reputation for being more usable.

++vista;
Vista has been stable, and reliable for me.

--vista;
1. Obnoxious unresizable dialog windows that make it annoying to read text.

2. Search feature is grossly inaccurate. I use grep for searching file contents, and 'dir /s' for finding files, both of which work perfectly.

3. File extension program associations needs work. In the file explorer right click context menu 'open with' option dialog, it doesn't recognize SeaMonkey to open .txt files when selected as the program to do so. It just ignores me. Also in the 'open with' dialog, an older version of CodeBlocks is on the commonly used program list for opening files and when I select the new version of CodeBlocks as the program to use, it ignores me.

4. Automatic updates isn't as smart as it thinks it is. I automatically disable this and run Windows Update manually because it recommends drivers that are either out of date, or not recommended for use with the laptop. If I had it enabled, who knows whether it would download the out of date drivers and install them or not.

5. Windows Genuine Advantage Validation blah blah annoying hoops to jump through. WGAV is necessary to download most Microsoft software, and I had to update it once :

I had to use Internet Explorer , download an ActiveX control , and the information bar that lets you install the control doesn't show up until several minutes after the page is done loading. So in reality the page is still loading even though it doesn't tell you that and so I ended up doing it about 5 times before it worked.

6. More Explorer.exe problems :
a. Folder view states are often forgotten even when the setting to keep them is explicitly on.
b. There are some kind of implicit folder "types" that have their own settings like for music files / image files / whatever else they built into Explorer, and I can't just set a default view for all the folders on the disk to 'details' and sort by 'type', but I have to set it for each invisible folder "type", and I keep discovering more types of folders than I care for.
c. Forced auto scroll in the folder view pane of explorer that always scrolls exactly when I don't want it to, which is basically all the time.

7. The audio stack in Vista has changed for the worse from XP to Vista. In XP, all the available channels and their level settings were easily available. In Vista, the channel only shows up when you actually use it, and some settings are obscured / not easily found for working with a microphone and sound input.

So, other than all that, after you learn to avoid the "features" and annoyances that Vista has, it's a fairly good operating system. Like I said, it's main operation has been stable and reliable for me.

Don't get me started on the junky integrated SigmaTel audio though. Avoid it at all costs.

Oh yeah, Vista or XP? I say go for Vista. It's overall look is nicer than XP's plainness window wise. I still like XP alot though.

One last gripe about Vista though, the Control Panel takes forever to open up from the start menu, and the madness with the My* folders has got to go.

I use mingw, what is the problem about it on vista?

I may resume that I should try vista?

There's really nothing wrong with MinGW 3.4.5 on Vista - like Trent said, all you have to do is add a directory to the folder with the files cc1.exe and cc1plus.exe in it.

As for versions of MinGW > 3.4.5, I don't know. I tried to install 4.2.1sjlj, but the directory structure of the archives doesn't work the way 3.4.5 did. (You know, nicely, and in the correct places. ) I would try 4.3.0 but it looks like you have to use their downloading installer to do it, and that annoys me, so I won't try it just yet.

I have vista and I like it. Sure it's frigging annoying having to ask permission to fart every 10 seconds but you can turn that option off.

Everything has worked fine for me until very recently when I tried to install two bits of software that failed to work: hamsterballs and a plugin thing called igLoader which is required by some games on miniclip.com.