ASUS G1 - Vista or XP ?

I´ve narrowed down my search for a new laptop to an ASUS G1, should I get it with Vista or XP ?

Anything else I should know about the G1 ?

Thanks

 

If I were you buying one now (instead of 2 months ago like I did) with the option of XP or Vista, I would go with XP and get your free upgrade to Vista to use later on. I know they are starting to iron out a few of the wrinkles Vista has and it is enivitable that if you a gamer, you will use Vista. But honeslty, even for games, there is no reason to use Vista on a laptop. It can not utilize DX10 and never will. Future laptops will, but not our current ones. So the only real reason there is to upgrade to Vista on a laptop is.......um.....it looks prettier?

 

Vista is no good for gaming.You are not getting a DX10 GU either.So if you are getting a "gaming" laptop, it's better to get Vista once it's gotten better.(There are still no proper nVidia drivers for Vista).

 

Your both make great arguments agasin't Vista, also Vista shows an overall decrease in performance, especially in gaming.

However, I would suggest Vista for those who are not going to game, because it provide something new and refreshing. Laptops are refreshed with Vista so you don't have an option, except to have your own copy of XP and install it.

 

A guy I work with claims to have timed processes in Photoshop saying that they are performed much faster in Vista than XP.

 

I agree with you full heartedly. If I were not a gamer, I mostly likely would have installed the Vista disk I have sitting in my drawer. Since I am a gamer, and enjoy my stable and very predictable laptop that plays everything without flaw, I can wait to make that dive.

 

i love vista... its cool

and ive played all kinds of games and they work great...

G1 is a great laptop so I think the performance loss (if there is one) is unnoticable...

btw... the G1 with vista loaded has all the drivers ready to go for you... so you dont have to do any searching for em...

 

I spent 1 week with Vista loaded on mine and decided that was enough of that. Zune would not load, G15 keyboard drivers were not available, and while the gaming performance is okay it is noticably better running on XP. I ran 3d Aqua benchmarks on Vista before I uninstalled it, and then again on XP. There was a 30% increase in the benchmark scores with XP over Vista. Nice to know the difference was not all in my head.

 

Yeah, I think I would use XP and even make a clean install, so I only get what I need, always worked well for me.

 

Since I will be going up in processor speed, I think that the Vista penalty will be largely offset. I don't know what machine you're coming from, but a G1 is well-spec'd.

 

If the question is what OS to use... Vista or XP, I say why not use both?

You can have multiple OS on a single PC...

At least that's what I plan to do with my G1 as soon as I get it.

 

I´ve seen Vista and it looks nice, but I wonder if I dare to use it already, I didn´t use XP until SP2 came out.

 

Even though there's still no Service Pack for Vista, the 100+ megabytes in current Vista updates can be consider almost as a SP don't you think?

 

Vista is a lot prettier than XP there's no doubt about it. but yeah as mentioned, the stability and performance in XP right now is quite a bit better in a lot of apps/environments.

Well I don't know if I agree with this approach, but yes, if you think about it, when a new OS comes out, it hasn't been completely tested. No matter how long MS tested it in their labs, say maybe a million computer-hours, the real world is several orders of magnitude larger with respect to testing, as well as software variety. XP has been out for 5 years basically being tested - a hacker will open up a flaw and MS tries to counter it so that now, yes Windows XP SP2 and Windows XP sans service packs are very different, in functinoality and security (as well as performance). In the end Vista gaming will probably be better just as XP did (which compared with W2K or ME is also way prettier and uses a lot more resources). But right now even with vista gold, if you have this OS you ARE technically paying a few hundred bucks to be a beta tester.

 

If I do plan to get the Vista version of the G1 and just clean install XP on it, are there drivers available for download on the Asus website? Thanks.

 

OK, I got my G1 about a month ago shortly after they released the vista version.

I ran 2 days with Vista home and decided it was totally worthless cause it's so locked down nothing I needed to do would work at all.

So, I had a free copy of vista premium sitting around (complements of MS) and I threw it on. I ran for 3 weeks using Vista premium and can say this. Visually pretty slick but gets old, you'll quickly find that some of the features they implemented that you love still need a few more options, etc. For the most part everything ran ok after I turned off UAC. There were still quite a few programs that wouldn't even install, of just didn't work properly. I had planned on keeping Vista until around the 2.5 week mark the os started to gradually slow and exporer would lock up quite often. At this point I decided to go back to XP.

I put xp back on pulling what drivers I needed from the net, for the most part XP has been a dream, except I still can't get the standby and turn off video functions to work properly.

All in all the only realy useful function I found for vista was the search functionality on the start menu (way ez). However I found a way to mimic this using google desktop in xp and hitting the ctrl key 2x.

So my suggestions... wait on vista until the software and drivers catch up, there is still quite a bit of software that doesn't work with vista.

I would only suggest vista if you are a power user and have the time to spend making it all work the way you need.

 

Yeah, I think so too, I will wait for the first service pack. At least I would have the license, so that´s cool.