You gave advice on shopping for a Windows PC in October 2005. Has your advice changed with the advent of Windows Vista? I need something that will work without too much technical knowledge and will have sufficient memory etc to be good for at least five years. Steve Hamilton
Microsoft is currently testing Windows Vista's Service Pack 1 update, and although many fixes have already been slipstreamed into shipping versions, the arrival of SP1 has traditionally been seen as a good time to buy. In hardware terms, Intel's Core 2 Duo processor now sets the standard. However, you can still buy low-end PCs with Intel Celerons and similar chips, while high-end machines often have quad-core processors.
Vista delivers marginally worse performance than Windows XP SP2, though the Aero interface's fading and sliding menus can make it feel slower than it is. You can speed it up by turning off the animations, and by removing all the free "crapware" that most PC manufacturers bundle with their systems.
Vista does need more memory and better graphics support than XP. Go for 2GB of main memory, if possible, and 128MB or more graphics memory. Check the Windows Experience Index before buying. This rates each PC subsystem out of 5. If the graphics score is less than 3, don't buy it to run Vista, though it would be fine for XP.
Vista requires new drivers for peripherals, which may not be available for older printers and scanners. This was also true of Windows 95 and Windows 2000/XP when they came out. Check the Windows Vista Hardware Compatibility List for an initial guide, and search the web for any common problems with the system and model number you choose.
There has been something of a backlash against Vista, but this has also been true of most new Microsoft operating systems. I'd still recommend Vista rather than XP, especially if you're taking a five-year view. Vista is more secure, more reliable and more capable than XP, comes with better applications (including ubiquitous search), and has a better user interface. The kernel is based on the hugely successful Windows Server 2003 code, and with SP1 will be much the same as Windows Server 2008. It will be a few years before Vista is more common than XP, but it is not going away.
