15 June 2007

Why XP Pro over Vista?

In my previous post I discussed my purchase of XP Pro. Why not go for Vista, you may ask? Is it your dislike of the Redmond monopoly again getting in the way of rational decisions?

In fact, I came very close to purchasing Vista. I wanted to see what the very best Microsoft can do is like. I also felt that a more recent OS would be more secure (and also require fewer changes - I'm not sure how many security downloads my copy of XP Pro will require immediately after install).

But in the end, Vista would have required me setting aside at least 20GB of my laptop hard disk - something that I don't want to give up. (XP should take as little as 5GB comfortably).

In addition, Vista does not work well today as far as I can tell with Virtualisation applications - especially if you also want to use a bootcamp partition. Part of this comes down to the new activation requirements in Vista which are torturous. While legal under license terms to do Virtualisation + Bootcamp (as far as I can tell) with the higher end versions, it is not practical to do so today. Also, the virtualisation solutions do not support Aero yet, so I wouldn't have been getting the full Vista experience except in Bootcamp (and probably quite hard to change between the two).

Finally, Vista is more expensive than XP Pro, and for the amount of use it will get, is just not worth it for me. I would have probably got the Ultimate version (for business use and virtualisation), but not used most of the features.

Coming up - an observation on Vista take-up.

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