I thought I would post a little on here about switching operating systems. I am certain that the majority of folks on here run some version of Windows. I run XP,2k, 98 and even 95 on various machines. These are not primary machines though, for that I run a PowerMac G5 dual 2ghz PPC and as a secondary desktop I run a custom built Linux box.
So the point of this post is to hopefully answer some ?'s about the different OS's. I am doing this because the impending release of Vista has my phone ringing off the hook. First, don't think that you must upgrade. I have family and clients still running win98 even though MS stopped supporting it. My father still has machines running Win 3.1 and even plain old DOS.
So what should you do?? MS will tell you and try to persuade you into upgrading to Vista. I tried Vista and my test of the beta version was running on a 2.6ghz processor w/ 512mb of RAM and a decent graphics card. I had issues getting the most out of the system and it hogged more than it's fair share of system resources.
So should you upgrade? I have been recommending to my clients, no, not unless you must have the latest and greatest. First Vista is new and it still has bugs. Second although they did attempt to make it more secure, it is not as secure as other OS. Third, unless your current system is pretty powerful you will have trouble getting the most out of Vista. Fourth and final is cost, the price of the basic version of the OS is more than I would pay for any OS. Consider this, if you need to upgrade your system, look to add 300+ plus $'s to the cost just for the OS.
What are your options??? This is the second most asked question. Well you can continue using what you have. MS has not stopped supporting XP so if that is what you have, use it. If you are looking to upgrade your hardware soon, you can switch OS's contrary to what MS will have you believe, the average home/small office user can do everything with OS X that they could w/ windows and much more. Mac OS X out of the box (currently the OS cost around $130) offers more then XP plus several hundred dollars of software gives you. Mac's just work, there is a learning curve like all things though everything is pretty straight forward. You can get MS Office, Adobe PS,Dreamweaver, Flash and many more apps that run on multiple OS's. The best part is that if you use a program that runs only on Windows, you can now run Win on a Mac.
If you don't want to upgrade your hardware but would still like a faster, more stable OS. I recommend Linux. I no longer recommend SuSE or any other Novell product (read a previous post for that). I do recommend (especially for new users) to use RedHat(Fedora for the free version w/out support), Kubuntu, or any mainstream version that runs the KDE desktop (redhat fedora runs gnome). KDE is very user friendly and fairly easy for Windows converts to master. There are hundreds of distrobutions of Linux out there and many are free. I have switched many clients to Linux after MS dropped support for win98. Their hardware was still good and they didn't want the expense of an upgrade, so after the switch and some training they were up and running, the downside is that I get a lot less service calls from these clients now.
So if you are wondering what to do, don't feel pressured to buy a new system that is "Vista Capable" unless you have the money to do so. If you want get some new hardware, look into Mac. You get a commercial OS that is supported, the hardware is extremely well designed and if you compare what you get and the amount of time saved by not having as much downtime due to crashes, Macs are right in line with any off the shelf windows machine. Not to mention upgrading OS's (at least currently, not sure what leopard will cost off the top of my head) with mac cost much less then Windows.
