Should I put XP or Vista on this T60 or T61?

I'm going to end up with either a T60 or T61 standard screen in the next month. It will have 2 gigs ram, 2 ghz processor with 4mb cache, probably 1 gig robson flash ram if it's a T61 and definitely 7200 hard drive. Having said all that, if it doesn't open applications and reliably multi-task as my wife's awesome good ole T42 with XP it really wouldn't be worth my time to go current with Vista even with fancy graphics, but of course I'd love the latest and greatest. Now I've seen postings of people complaining that even souped up T61's with Vista Premium don't run as well as their XP did, is that unusual?

So question:

Should I have them put XP on the laptop order and fore-go the 1 gig robson flash ram and do Vista in a year as an upgrade? Or will vista work well now if I order it with a system like what I've described?

Thanks,
S

 

Interesting dilemma.... When I recently purchased my T60 there was no downside to sticking with XP and waiting for Vista's first service pack to iron out all the newbie OS problems (bad drivers, lack of drivers, software incompatibilities, etc...) Do you need a "low maintenance, up and running (currently faster than Vista by most accounts) OS that doesn't need to be tweaked and coddled a bit to iron the kinks out? Then stick with XP and forego the robson flash. If you have a bit of time and patience, by all means jump on the Vista bandwagon, get the new technology and don't look back. In time, all but the most diehard of us will be joining you (linux devotees excepted)....

 

I personally don't think Robson is that big of a deal right now. I think I saw somewhere that Vista Business and Ultimate include the right to downgrade to XP Pro if you can get an Windows disc.

 

Vista does have a lot of background applications, but you will be able to turn these off with a little tweak. Initially, I was forced to switch to Vista at work and noticed that it was running a bit slower than XP on certain apps (loading usually), and many of the OS reviews on the market have indicated this as well. However, I think they continue to work on improving this as it was meant to work with flash memory module unit for improved performance. Only time will tell, but if you are not using anything too fancy on your notebook, I am sure choosing Vista will not hurt you as most of us are not in such a rush to load apps.

 

Thanks for all the replies. I think I'd like a system that will at ship and arrive at least by end of June preferably, but I could wait if need be (it would really stink if that T61 standard screen that was promised June 5th does NOT come out and I'd lose the opportunity of the T60 they are offering now. Not likely though.)

I suppose just after using the T42 with the XP on it and also selling the iMac with OSX I was using this past year that ran so smoothly (I just would prefer a Thinkpad to Macbook, better keyboard and less heat) I would feel silly if Vista ran like molasses in comparison, in spite of throwing so much hardware at it.

 

I have looked at Macbooks, but I just can't get used to the new keyboard (I have had 3 Powerbooks) and I really don't want to spend $2000 for base Powerbook either. I love how Mac OS performs (on one of my Powerbooks, it has yet to crash in 2 years of ownership), but as XP did, Vista will become a good OS as they are working to improve it.
Also, I guess I was getting sick of compatibility issues, as I only use Windows on my desktop and only used Mac OS X on portables.

 

The consensus on these boards seems to be "Vista is too slow now but it will get faster in time." I don't believe this is true. I am sure that some aspects of the OS will benefit from speed boosts as programmers work out bugs and improve their algorithms; however, I wouldn't expect these to be dramatic. It's expensive try and tweak algorithms when all Microsoft has to do is wait a little while for the next generation of hardware to come out. Your also assuming that the 5+ years of development work in the OS was shoddy and all the algorithms can easily benefit from significant speed boosts... If you don't believe the T60 or T61 is fast enough with Vista today then I wouldn't expect it to be fast enough in a year from now; only new hardware will solve that problem.

That said I have not used Vista much yet, the first few times when I was setting the laptop up it seemed VERY slow shutting down (~5 minute) and just generally sluggish. It got better with time though. I think this initial large decrease in speed was due to the OS indexing all my files for the quick search feature. If it seems slow at first give it some time and it should get better.

If you want fast go with XP as it works well enough today... if you want some cool toys to play with and a better designed core OS (at least from a programmers perspective) go with Vista.