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Microsoft Corporation's new operating system, Windows Longhorn aka Vista is far from just a Vista of goodies, as many have found out. Apparently, they have been in cahoots with Hewlett-Packard (HP) to package only VISTA DRIVERS for the new HP range of Notebooks and Tablet PCs. Forget XP Embedded or Home as most of the drivers don't work for these motherboards. Poor users, as that means only one thing, poor performance as the need for more memory and faster hard drives will make the system more sluggish.

Basic reasons of why choose XP over Vista?
1) Lower need of Memory
2) Quicker loading
3) Easy driver compatibilities
4) Software compatibilities (Accountants please note)
5) Lower cost

XP requires just basic 32MB RAM and 250MB Hard disk space compared to Vista needing 1GB Ram and 10GB Hard disk space.

Even with XP Home at Vista's requirements will do excellent in performance as the OS in itself loads up about 200MB of memory in it's static kernels (kernel32.dll , Explorer, Firefox, Yahoo Messenger, Skype) loaded up.
That is far less than Vista's 800MB memory (RAM) loaded up in it's kernel with the need to have a swap file. Heck even at 1 Gigabyte worth of RAM, you don't need to load any swap file or PageFile.SYS as you won't need to unless you start doing animations or photo editing (Photoshop,Adobe Illustrator etc) or Video Extraction which is sluggish because it takes ALOT OF PROCESSING POWER (CPU) as to the RAM. Also, the hard disk needs to be fast to read/write/rewrite data to the banks.

Windows XP loads up in less than 45 seconds compared to 3 minutes of Vista Basic as it needs to check if you installed any pirated junk and pornography or pedophile related materials so they can report you.

Windows XP too can be tuned up to run at maximum capacity of 20 simultaneous TCP/IP Connections per stack compared to the rigid 5 connections per application. So much for Multi tasking!

Drivers are not so compatible with Longhorn / Vista as most are written for Win32 aka Windows 2000/2003/ME/XP and they are backward compatible as to Vista which is static for them. Mainly it's because Vista is written to the core so that it works with Apple MacBook. Yes.. Vista runs Mac! XP Drivers don't work with Vista and at this edition, ALi, LinkSYS, Asus and some manufacturers older boards and API don't cal for Vista and HP is evil enough to write only drivers for Vista and not XP as they are too lazy! Dell is as evil too as their proprietary hardware won't work on Vista as they try to clear off their old stock of Motherboards. This information is up to date for their Desktops and Mini Servers too. A collegue from DELL MALAYSIA which is round the corner confirms this as the compatibility issues makes Vista a problem child.

Software wise, I was told that QUICKBOOKS and many others are not compatible YET on Vista due to the way the network issues are set up. Security tokens don't work with even SUN Servers. So much for inter-operatability.

Costs? XP Home Stickers can be bought as low as USD25 as they are over the 6mths tie in with the OEM Manufacturer. Vista..is far more. I can't disclose due to the licensing rules.

For me, if all fails, I just stick to CentOS or Debian Linux. It will sure work at base configs! And it's free@! Anyway, Microsoft based their kernels on Linux..so what works on XP or Vista MUST work with Linux. Right? Even Apple MacBook Air works on Linux.

Sorry! This is me.. The Geek!
Any updates will be flashed at http://www.azrin.net/?s=helium
Do look out for the privacy issues too@!

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