Posted by spikeyjac
hi am thinking of buying a new laptop after christmas and have heard about the vista upgrade when you but a laptop in 2007?
is this ture?
am going to spend between £300-£400 on one and wondered if this would come with a free basic upgrade to vista when it comes out?
if not how much will the basic package of vista be?
also for good speeds on my laptop like surfing internet,msn and music at the same same what do i need?
Posted by dougproctor
Hi Jack,
Bought a laptop for £300 from PC World last weekend and their "free" upgrade to Vista kicked in at £400. You need to read the small print carefully. The good news is with Xmas coming up, and Vista about to come out, lots of firms will be offering the upgrade to get you to buy yheir machines.
There is a pricing plan out for the various versions of Vista. Look on MS site and in popular PC magazines.
Even £300 laptops give a reasonable spec for the price. Mine has a 60Gb hard drive, 512Mb RAM and is wireless enabled. The extra £100 will get a slightly bigger hard drive ie 80Gb and/or a slightly faster processor. Get a widescreen 15.4" Xbrite screen as well, they are good.
Someone else have thoughts? Give a good web search before you buy, stay away from eBay unless you know what you are doing, it's rife with rip off dodgy deals at the moment.
Doug
Posted by spikeyjac
wow what laptop you get that sounds perfect lol and i think ill just have to buy vista seperate
Posted by dougproctor
It was one of their web specials but if you ordered it online, you could pick it up in store. They paid the VAT, supposedly, last weekend and because it was so popular, I ordered one for delivery as there were none in the shops. Just keep an eye out for the specials, at this time of year there should be a lot about.
Doug
Posted by spikeyjac
kk well are laptops normally reduced in the sales?
does anyone know how much the basic vista apckage will be?
Posted by dougproctor
Normally about £70-80 if previous versions were priced the same.
Posted by spikeyjac
ok thanks for the info doug
Posted by dougproctor
A pleasure. That price will be for an upgrade though. Full versions will be more, that's guaranteed.
Posted by spikeyjac
yeh i know lol.oh well we'll just have to see after xmas lol
Posted by Cycovision
The retail versions of Vista will sell for roughly £80 to £360 depending on the version.
Don't forget though that the OEM versions are always MUCH cheaper
Make friends with somebody who has a trade account with a computer wholesalers, that's my advice
Posted by fatreg
friends eh cyco?
so how you doing old buddy old pal??
ill be needing a vista and some stage just for shits and giggles.
fatreg
Posted by spikeyjac
what are oem versions?
Posted by Cycovision
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OEM means Original Equipment Manufacturer. Basically, people who build or repair PCs have access to all kinds of hardware and software that is exactly the same as the stuff you buy in the shops, except that it comes without the pretty box, glossy instruction book and added extras. This makes it quite a lot cheaper than the retail versions that you buy in places like PC World
You get quite alot of OEM stuff sold on ebay and similar sites. It's not technically illegal to sell OEM stuff to the public, but you're not meant to really
Microsoft certainly don't like retailers selling OEM versions of their software 
It's not only the IT industry that benefits from OEM stuff.
Posted by spikeyjac
doug what do you mean £400?at laptops over £400?
Posted by dougproctor
I'm sure it was PC World with that offer but damned if I can find it now! This is a link to a computer just under £400 with reasonable specs:- http://www.pcworld.co.uk/mart[....]sku=074717&category_oid=-27751
Will keep hunting.....
[ This Message was edited by: dougproctor on 2006-11-15 20:40 ]
Posted by spikeyjac
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/186712
is this a vista capable pc?
Posted by scottt
Would probably run it but not aswell as other with its small 1.4ghz celeron processor
Posted by spikeyjac
yeh ano but would it run ok lol?
its all can really afford under £400 lol
Posted by dougproctor
Jack,
In the Daily Mirror, they were stating in the PC World ad that any laptop over £400 qualifies for a free Vista upgrade. Trouble is, they jump from £395 to £445 which is a bit cheeky. I'll try and find you the link.
Doug
Posted by spikeyjac
lol thanks:-)
Posted by spikeyjac
what specs are need for using windows vista on the final release
Posted by Johnex
Haha, i am going to have Window Vista Ultimate as soon as it gets out, and from where you say? Getting it free from my university, how is that for an upgrade??
Thank god for computer science courses!
Posted by Cycovision
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According to M$ you need at least:
A "modern" processor (at least 800MHz)
512 MB of system memory
A graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable
They recommend:
1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of system memory
Support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum), Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel (in English, a cheap AGP, PCI or PCI Express graphics card)
40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
DVD-ROM Drive
From my experience of running the beta versions on various machines, I'd advise at least a 1.6 Ghz Pentium 4, Centrino, Athlon XP, Turion or better processor (not celeron or sempron), definately 1 Gb of RAM and DEFINATELY not on-board graphics!
Posted by awave
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these above are for the Vista Basic edition? I thought that there was two sets of minimum specs. for Vista --- one for the really Basic version (looking like windows xp?) and one for the ultimate / higher up / more expensive edition (requiring more ram / cpu clock speed etc.)
my advise, would be: stick with windows xp. it's getting to be quite stable (not quite yet imo though...) and as soon as a new version comes out microsoft basically does there final beta testing, testing it out and fixing it at the expense of their first customer's data and time.
This is why when I buy a laptop, I am going to make sure that it will work totally with linux. There are only a couple of things I have come to not like about ubuntu linux (such as the fact that it: doesn't have too much support for videos when browsing / flash player / macromedia player and also the fact that i dont like having to really eject my flash drive (usb) every time i want to take it out, as it writes the data then and there when you eject --- the result being that when yu copy and paste it is faster.) but other than that it totally rocks
- oh...and for the microsoft office fanatics, you can either use the brilliant openoffice.org or pay $30 out for a crossover licence.
-|- awave
Posted by Cycovision
You're absolutely right, it's Aero that needs the graphics horsepower so if you're happy with the basic windows interface in Vista, you won't need an additional graphics card.
But I still maintain that for decent performance, you need a reasonably fast processor and 1 gig of memory. This is because even without Aero running, there's still tons of background tasks chugging away. Celeron processors just don't cut the mustard, the L2 cache being the main problem. Semprons fare a little better, particularly the 64bit Semprons with the 64bit edition of Vista but again their not ideal. I came to this conclusion by real life tinkering by the way, not PC enthusiast websites and magazines!
Posted by spikeyjac
what about this one then?
does this:
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/mart[....]=null&sku=186712&category_oid=
or this :
http://www.shopacer.co.uk/ses[....]8LX%3D252EA5105%3D252E671%3D29
meet the specs?
Posted by Cycovision
Yes, they both meet the specs
Maybe I should make it clear that my suggested specs are for a computer to run Vista Premium with the fancy Aero graphical interface and all of the other bells and whistles at a decent speed.
M$'s specs are fine if you don't expect a blindingly fast PC
Posted by spikeyjac
so with both of those pc's vista shoul run fine?
would it be really slow or ok?
Posted by Johnex
@awave: dude, try xgl on umbutu or on gentoo linux, with compiz or Beryl.
Here is a screen of Compiz:
And here is Beryl:
It is like running osx on the pc with linux as the environment, but you can do all the fancy window flips that you can do in osx.
. When you drag the window, it even wobbles
Posted by Cycovision
It'd be OK on both of them. Definately not slow, but not lightning fast either if you know what I mean
It'd probably run better on the PC World one with 1024Mb (1 gig) of RAM rather than the acer with 512Mb of RAM despite the fact that the acer has a better processor. I'd go for the acer and upgrade the memory to 1 gig if I had enough money left
_________________
If your life seems dull and boring, that's probably because it is.
[ This Message was edited by: Cycovision on 2006-11-17 19:19 ]
[ This Message was edited by: Cycovision on 2006-11-17 19:21 ]
Posted by spikeyjac
lol £400 is the max ic an afford lol so which one would you recomend going for with tht budget?
Posted by Cycovision
Personally I'd go for the acer, save up, and buy more memory before I save up to buy vista
Posted by spikeyjac
kk well ill see how much money i get for xmas etc and then see how it does.
probably end up getting the cheaper one.
thanks 4 evry1s hlp.
if i have ne more quaestions or fine more laptops ill post em here
Posted by spikeyjac
hat do ppl think of this laptop:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Acer-Tr[....]eNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
looking to spend around £300 and hoping that it will b able to run vista lol
is tht possible?