What OS to get with my new T61?

Well,
I just sold my current T61 and am very close to ordering my new one. One of the things I am confused about is which OS to get. Here are my choices from Lenovo...

Genuine Windows Vista Home Basic
Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium
Genuine Windows XP Professional
Genuine Windows Vista Business
Genuine Windows Vista Business 64
Genuine Windows Vista Ultimate

Here are some things that I am considering:

• 
  I plan on dual booting this machine with Kubuntu Linux. As far as Windows is concerned I plan on using it to play some of my games and surf the web.

• I would like to put a full 4 GBs into the machine, but 32 bit OSs only see 3 GBs.

• If I put 4 GBs in the machine and ran a 32 bit OS, would the OS ignore the extra 1 GB or would it crash the machine?

• 64 bit OS would not be able to run my games, correct?

• I would have stayed with XP, but I hear that support will be dropped in 4/2009, which is not a long time away. Then I would be stuck with a XP License while everybody is using Vista.

What should I do/get???

 

Vista x64 plays games just fine ( might have problems with real old games but curent games should be fine)...just have good 64bit nvidia drivers. The 32bit OS will not crash because you had 4gig instead of 3..it just won't see the full 4gig.

 

+1 for a 64-bit OS.

No, it would recognize the 4GB but only show ~3GB or so. If it crashes, then either you didn't properly put them in or they are faulty.

Most games are compatible with a x64 OS. I think if you are playing old school games (16-bit), you're gonna have problems.

Windows 7 will probably be what everyone will transition too.

 

Note that if you get Vista Business or Ultimate, you'll likely get a set of XP downgrade discs with your system. This is why I got Vista Business on my system --for the extra couple bucks it cost me over Vista Premium or XP Home, I got two OSes. I wasn't sure I wanted to run Vista, and this made it easy (note: you'll still need to burn Vista restore discs from the machine, they don't come premade). Business and Ultimate also support joining to network domains, which I needed --Home Basic and Home Premium don't.

XP support is likely to last longer than you think. Microsoft greatly extended support for Windows 2000 and some other older operating systems, and XP is firmly entrenched in the business market. Chances are they will have no choice, and will extend support on Windows XP. Also note that XP is the most solid OS Microsoft currently has, and Service Pack 3 is supposed to only improve things further, even the speed. It is widely speculated that it is this reason that has affected Microsoft enough to make sure Vista's Service Pack 1 was out first, so that Service Pack 3 for XP won't slow Vista sales.

I went with 32-bit Business. I just don't quite trust application compatibility with 64-bit yet, and I run too many things, ranging from my everyday stuff to Cisco Network Assistant and other tools/management apps. I can't afford to have something that won't run. 3.25GB will be enough for me for awhile, and I have a copy of Vista Ultimate (Upgrade) I got for half price this past summer in case I get the urge to change.

 

Very informative post. A few questions...

1.) Do you get XP downgrade discs with either 32 or 64 Vista Business?
2.) Are the XP downgrade discs XP Pro?
3.) A comment. I think that I have excluded Vista Basic and Ultimate from my choices.
4.) I don't mind spending a couple of extra bucks on Vista Business but it is missing some things that Home Premium has like Windows Media Center. I found this kind of aggravating. One of the things I use a lot with Windows, believe it or not, is to listen to audio content in .wma format, like the sample audio files at Amazon.com. Without Media center, would this functionality be lost? With XP pro it was like Home with more on top, Vista seems to be different.

 

Here is Lenovo's page regarding the subject:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=VSTA-DWNGRD

You get XP Pro, because Vista Business/Ultimate are considered business operating systems. And I listen/view plenty of media content on my T61 just fine --in fact, all of my DivX/Xvid video library and my MP3's are on another machine on my network, and I connect to it and play them back with Windows Media Player all the time. Streaming content off of websites works just fine too; your Amazon.com stuff will be fine, and I myself stream video from NBC's hulu.com website.

Media Center mainly benefits you if you're DVR-ing shows with a TV tuner of some sort, or storing all your content locally on your notebook and serving it up to a Media Extender box (or XBox360) hooked to your TV.

 

Oooooooooooooo.... I got Windows Media Center confused with Windows Media Player. I see now. I went to Microsoft's little chart about what has what, and got confused. So, now I agree with you. It is really worth it to go to Vista Business. So now my decision has come down to 32bit Business vs. 64 bit Business. It looks like Microsoft doesn't even put any energy into promoting Vista 64. Their main Vista page doesn't even mention it.

 

So, for someone who doesn't have Vista in any iteration, what are the supposed advantages of going 64-bit over 32-bit? Are the "advantages" so great it's worth the incompatibility issues? I ask this because I read in a computer magazine a short article by a very tech savvy guy who gave up on 64-bit. He cited stability at first, then when he got that worked out he had problems with crashes on suspend and resume operations. HE said performance felt moderately better on applications that can use more than 2GB of memory
but his benchmarks didn't show it and over all it just wasn't worth the hassle.
This was Will Smith in MaximumPC.

 

Will writes some good stuff. I don't always agree with him, but I respect him. The issue is a bit more complicated than that, but in the end, I agree with his conclusion.

The major benefit of a 64-bit OS is that it can support a 64-bit processor's ability to address more than 4GB of RAM. 32-bit Windows has an additional limitation --if you are maxed out at your 4GB of RAM, Windows is designed to use 2GB for kernel usage, and 2GB for applications. You can tweak this to allow for 3GB for apps and 1GB for kernel usage if you know what you're doing, but it can cause incompatibility with some applications that are coded with the original 2GB applications limit in mind.

The downside is that by going to a 64-bit OS, you're giving some things up. Due to Microsoft's reluctance to remove backward-compatibility, application developers aren't moving rapidly into the 64-bit world, so many applications are still 32-bit in nature. Limited deployment of Vista 64 has also slowed driver development, since companies often only want to make drivers for operating systems that have significant market-share. This is furthered by Microsoft's requirement that signed drivers be used in Vista 64 for security, so that no-one can engineer a rogue driver to take a system down. Driver signing costs money, so few open-source developers can afford it, and it makes it harder to offer beta drivers to the public as well to try things out.

Currently, there are some people who truly can justify Vista-64 --if you run serious 3D apps like Maya, or LightWave, a 64-bit CAD app, or if you do professional video editing, you're probably one of them. Otherwise, I'd stick with 32-bit and wait to see if Microsoft pushes a little harder for 64-bit-only when Windows 7 arrives in a couple of years.

 

big LOL at people that say "only 3bg" ..

duh

 

Not sure why you are laughing. Vista Home Premium needs 2 GB just to run smoothly. 3 GB will become common place very soon. So for people wanting to keep their machines longer, the higher ram capacity helps. If you were talking about Linux, that would be another story....