More than a bit hacked off!
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Hey I was meant to be buying a new bike today, but my laptop has packed in and I go back to uni on Monday so I have to buy a new one today and the bike will have to wait - gutted. The thing is most laptops come with Vista (the one I want does) now is it possible to use a Windows XP updrade disk to revert back to XP or will I need to buy a full copy of Windows XP Pro? I have only had a mess about with Vista but didn't like the interface (appearance and usability). I am sure I could get used to it but I am writing my final year project this year and from what I have read Vista is very restrictive and may cause difficulties in permissions for my code. So are the difficulties I have heard about easy enough to avoid? If so shall I stick with Vista Home Premium or get XP Pro? Thanks Dan
Word of advice: before buying a laptop with thoughts of downgrading to XP, ensure that you will have ready access to all of the drivers. We purchased a new laptop at work, Vista preinstalled; downgraded to XP because we are not ready to fight Vista yet, and, XP couldn't identify many of the devices... not the least of which was the new controller for the hard drive. Last I checked with the people working on it, they still had 3 unidentified devices. Tim
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DanB1983 wrote:
I am sure I could get used to it but I am writing my final year project this year and from what I have read Vista is very restrictive
Fairly sure Word still works ;P
Nnamdi Onyeyiri wrote:
Fairly sure Word still works
Do you know how long it took me to find the damn spell checker in Word 2007? Marc
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Hey I was meant to be buying a new bike today, but my laptop has packed in and I go back to uni on Monday so I have to buy a new one today and the bike will have to wait - gutted. The thing is most laptops come with Vista (the one I want does) now is it possible to use a Windows XP updrade disk to revert back to XP or will I need to buy a full copy of Windows XP Pro? I have only had a mess about with Vista but didn't like the interface (appearance and usability). I am sure I could get used to it but I am writing my final year project this year and from what I have read Vista is very restrictive and may cause difficulties in permissions for my code. So are the difficulties I have heard about easy enough to avoid? If so shall I stick with Vista Home Premium or get XP Pro? Thanks Dan
DanB1983 wrote:
but I am writing my final year project this year and from what I have read Vista is very restrictive and may cause difficulties in permissions for my code.
I actually would make that part of your final year project. Security restrictions are a reality that we're going to have to deal with, and so I personally think that would be a valuable contribution to your project. Marc
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Nnamdi Onyeyiri wrote:
Fairly sure Word still works
Do you know how long it took me to find the damn spell checker in Word 2007? Marc
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Ed.Poore wrote:
Seriously, you're a programmer who doesn't use shortcuts ?
I use shortcuts exclusively with VS. In fact, I have the stupid toolbar turned off. But Word--I don't actually use Word that often (I do most of my writing in FrontPage), so I've never learned the shortcuts. Knowing a bunch of shortcuts for one bloated tool is enough! Marc
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Hey I was meant to be buying a new bike today, but my laptop has packed in and I go back to uni on Monday so I have to buy a new one today and the bike will have to wait - gutted. The thing is most laptops come with Vista (the one I want does) now is it possible to use a Windows XP updrade disk to revert back to XP or will I need to buy a full copy of Windows XP Pro? I have only had a mess about with Vista but didn't like the interface (appearance and usability). I am sure I could get used to it but I am writing my final year project this year and from what I have read Vista is very restrictive and may cause difficulties in permissions for my code. So are the difficulties I have heard about easy enough to avoid? If so shall I stick with Vista Home Premium or get XP Pro? Thanks Dan
DanB1983 wrote:
Vista but didn't like the interface (appearance and usability)
It's different to be sure but once you get used to it it's quite nice to work with. I've got a "hard-dual-boot" (if that's a term) between Vista Ultimate x64 and Windows XP SP2, i.e. they're on two separate disks, installed with the other disk unplugged so to change OS I manually flip the boot-order in the BIOS rather than having the boot-loader deal with it. However at the moment there are 4 disks connected to the PC, 120GB with Vista (1 partition), 120GB with XP SP2 (2 partitions (60GB each I think), SYSTEM and DATA) a 500GB data disk and a 500GB external USB disk for backups and ISO images etc.
DanB1983 wrote:
writing my final year project
Shouldn't have a problem with that, as mentioned Word etc work flawlessly (but then I am using the 2007 edition, I'm pretty sure 2003 would work as well).
DanB1983 wrote:
cause difficulties in permissions for my code
What kind of project are you writing? If you're dealing with restricted areas of the file system / registry you might have problems, or interfacing to hardware. I've been writing Windows.Forms, ASP.NET, WPF and stuff for embedded systems quite happily on Vista.
DanB1983 wrote:
If so shall I stick with Vista Home Premium or get XP Pro?
How about getting Vista Home Premium and running a virtual machine for actually writing the code? Will give you many other benefits as well, personally I prefer VMWare Workstation and find it well worth the $100 or what ever it is. Virtual PC I think is completely free but VMWare has better support for non-Windows OSs. I've done development work for an embedded system by simply creating (at the time) a Windows 2000 VM and installing the compilers on that. I've also done embedded work inside a VM for Linux etc. I don't have an issue running the VM with something like Visual Studio 2005 / 2008 inside XP SP2 with effects turned on and running at 1680x1050 but the PC can cope with it, dual core with 2GB RAM and as mentioned 3 disks so the VM is on a seperate disk to the system.
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Nnamdi Onyeyiri wrote:
Fairly sure Word still works
Do you know how long it took me to find the damn spell checker in Word 2007? Marc
Umm.. no time? Since word, by default, highlights words that are misspelled, and you can right click on them to select the correct word? Or.. I just opened word and thought.. Hmm.. Spell checking, that should probably be on the review tab, since i'm reviewing my document. And there it was, the first item.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
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Hey I was meant to be buying a new bike today, but my laptop has packed in and I go back to uni on Monday so I have to buy a new one today and the bike will have to wait - gutted. The thing is most laptops come with Vista (the one I want does) now is it possible to use a Windows XP updrade disk to revert back to XP or will I need to buy a full copy of Windows XP Pro? I have only had a mess about with Vista but didn't like the interface (appearance and usability). I am sure I could get used to it but I am writing my final year project this year and from what I have read Vista is very restrictive and may cause difficulties in permissions for my code. So are the difficulties I have heard about easy enough to avoid? If so shall I stick with Vista Home Premium or get XP Pro? Thanks Dan
You can disable most things on Vista that will annoy you. You can go back to the classic UI, you can go back to the standard menu. You can turn off UAC. Especially with laptops, you are likely to have problems finding drivers for XP on the absolute newest models. The fact of the matter is, Vista is a lot more "unix-like" in that you are restricted to what your account has access to. A lot of people don't understand why they can't just plop files into some folder at the root, until you realize that Unix is like that too. You work mostly in your "home" directory, which in Vista has sanely been put under a simply named "Users" folder rather than the old kludgy "documents and settings". You'll get used to Vista, and except for a few small issues, you will probably even grow to like it.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
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Hey I was meant to be buying a new bike today, but my laptop has packed in and I go back to uni on Monday so I have to buy a new one today and the bike will have to wait - gutted. The thing is most laptops come with Vista (the one I want does) now is it possible to use a Windows XP updrade disk to revert back to XP or will I need to buy a full copy of Windows XP Pro? I have only had a mess about with Vista but didn't like the interface (appearance and usability). I am sure I could get used to it but I am writing my final year project this year and from what I have read Vista is very restrictive and may cause difficulties in permissions for my code. So are the difficulties I have heard about easy enough to avoid? If so shall I stick with Vista Home Premium or get XP Pro? Thanks Dan
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Yeah but Dell seem expensive at the moment compared to the big stores, and thats where I got my old laptop from and as soon as the years warranty was up everything stopped working. Its like they have a big red break laptop button that gets pressed when a warranty runs out as it happened to quite a few people I know. Dan
Hahahaha I got a 2 for this - seems daft I am voicing a genuine concern and stating that Dell are relatively exepnsive - should have just gone all the way, grown a pair and 1'd it. May have been more constructive countering my opinion that way we could have had a genuine discussion. Oh dear I just replied to my own comment - does this mean I am talking to myself - yes it does, wait no it doesnt :-P Dan
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Hahahaha I got a 2 for this - seems daft I am voicing a genuine concern and stating that Dell are relatively exepnsive - should have just gone all the way, grown a pair and 1'd it. May have been more constructive countering my opinion that way we could have had a genuine discussion. Oh dear I just replied to my own comment - does this mean I am talking to myself - yes it does, wait no it doesnt :-P Dan
"Dude, you're gettin' a 2!" Yeah, I don't know what 2, 3, and 4 are good for either.
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"Dude, you're gettin' a 2!" Yeah, I don't know what 2, 3, and 4 are good for either.
Yeah I know its like at schools how they promote its not the winning that counts - anything other than a 5 or a 1 means you are an actual loser - ie - 4 - yeah your not worthy of a 5, 3 - your average 2 - you suck but you arent even worthy of a 1 :-P Dan
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Ed.Poore wrote:
Seriously, you're a programmer who doesn't use shortcuts ?
I use shortcuts exclusively with VS. In fact, I have the stupid toolbar turned off. But Word--I don't actually use Word that often (I do most of my writing in FrontPage), so I've never learned the shortcuts. Knowing a bunch of shortcuts for one bloated tool is enough! Marc
Marc Clifton wrote:
I have the stupid toolbar turned off.
True, I do the same, the only ones I leave are sometimes the Standard when doing normal stuff (I think it looks odd without a toolbar :~) and the Debug and Debug Location when debugging.
Marc Clifton wrote:
I don't actually use Word that often
Neither to I but I used it enough for projects to know the shortcuts I used frequently, e.g. styles mainly and inserting TOC, links and pictures.
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Umm.. no time? Since word, by default, highlights words that are misspelled, and you can right click on them to select the correct word? Or.. I just opened word and thought.. Hmm.. Spell checking, that should probably be on the review tab, since i'm reviewing my document. And there it was, the first item.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
Spell checking, that should probably be on the review tab, since i'm reviewing my document. And there it was, the first item.
So it is. Well, when I looked, the "review" tab was not my first choice, because I'd been using "review" strictly for reviewing and making edits to a book I'm editing for someone. It is NOT obvious to me that spell check should be under "review". However, I did go through all the tabs thinking, geez, should be somewhere obvious. I guess this is why I like text better than meaningless icons. On the other hand, this was 10 at night, I was tired and dealing with a crisis that a teacher was having emailing a document to her daughter. Yeah, yeah. I'm making excuses. Marc