You really want to buy Vista?

[OrangeHopper]

OS X 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, look what you can get in just a few years, no upgrade costs, cheap as chips and each adds hundreds of new features which you would never find on Windows...and did I forget to mention, costs you absolutely nothing to upgrade and is fully backward compatible with all previous versions.

I must have missed a trick here because the latter major upgrades have cost me money! Approximately £100 a pop if I rightly remember.

Generally there have been half a dozen supposed new major features each time, not all of which have been of any use to me. In fact I have turned of the widget stuff altogether. Some of the freebies have also been removed and put into things like iLife.

All that said I will still be one of the first to buy 10.6 because I want to.

Vista looks good and is an improvement over XP on looks alone and in my book that makes for a better work environment considering the fact I sit in front of these things for at least 7 hours a day.

[tim123]

A bit of a pain really. I suspect this is different in the business version of Vista, as the Ultimate one is geared towards home users the majority of which wont be using a domain.

The majority of which (including me) won't even know what a domain is.

tim

[Cowboy Bob]

I must have missed a trick here because the latter major upgrades have cost me money! Approximately £100 a pop if I rightly remember.

I think JB was being sarcastic. However, you get a lot more bundled software with OSX than with Windows and each upgrade tends to include newer versions of that software which, along with the fact the each release seems to run faster on older hardware (unlike Windows), actually makes it worthwhile paying for.

It's also cheaper as well and has no activation so you can legitimately install the new OS onto a different machine (if you stop using it on the old machine), or you can buy a "family" license allowing the upgrade to be installed on up to 5 machines for considerably cheaper than the individual licenses.

[DimPrawn]

Vista has a family license option. You buy one retail box and the family get a the home edition for about £40.

The Mac OS is cheaper argument is bollox.

Windows comes out every 5 years, and you pay one big fee upfront.

Mac OS upgrades come out every year and you pay a small fee to upgrade.

Total cost over 5 years? About the same.

[Cowboy Bob]

Total cost over 5 years? About the same.

Total features added with the upgrade - a hell of a lot more. Which is the point I've been driving at all along. Added to which there's no such thing as a "home" edition of OSX, it's all the full version and is not restricted in anyway. It's a hell of a lot more expensive if you're talking about upgrading 5 "enterprise" licenses.

[marcus2704]

Ahh, that's a proper report.

So, from reading your post I see you've paid £130 for an updated GUI, some networking problems that you didn't have before, an HDD that is constantly churning (no doubt shortening its life), 800Mb of RAM used up just by running it, the requirement to upgrade hardware to watch HD content properly, and the inability to install it on a new machine should you wish to.

Bargain...

Yup, it looks nice though.

[portseven]

All the 'new' features that Vista offers I've already had for the past 2 years in Linux / KDE without all the annoying sh1t.

I've never had a problem with drivers and considering I use my Linux box to drive my recording studio which is pretty demanding, I find no need to actually spend money on any Microshaft product.

Jump in here and froth at the mouth any time bogeyman.

Same here, Linux has been doing it for years

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYgV2GlsufI

[Joe Black]

I think JB was being sarcastic.

Moi?...possibly, though I'd prefer to think an attempt at satire, in the same vain as Apple's "Hello I'm a Mac, hello I'm a PC and I'm dumb" ads.

"However, you get a lot more bundled software with OSX than with Windows and each upgrade tends to include newer versions of that software which, along with the fact the each release seems to run faster on older hardware (unlike Windows), actually makes it worthwhile paying for."

So, with a Mac there's a [paid] upgrade almost ever year, there's newer versions of existing software, but these are not available as a [free] download if you wish to keep your current version, but each upgrade does "seem" to run faster, unless of course you have a Mac from more than a few years ago, in which case you can't install the OS at all.

Maybe Vista is really OS X 10.6 in disguise...