Microsoft Windows Vista Business Edition (Upgrade) (PC)
£178.19
- The Microsoft Windows Vista operating system has been designed to make life easier for PC users
- Whether you are a home user, professional, novice or experienced user, there is a Microsoft Windows Vista edition for everyone! Microsoft Windows Vista enables you to fully enjoy your multimedia applications, entertain yourself and manage a large number of data software as well as surf the Internet in complete safety!Flexibility, versatility and stability: this is all brought together in Microsoft Windows Vista
- Microsoft Windows Vista Business enables you to take advantage of many features ideal for your business
- Stay functional thanks to its automatic back-up modes, improved security tools, simplified network feature and optimised local search motor
- Combine Microsoft Windows Vista Business with Microsoft Office 2007 to get the best from your tools and create attractive documents, facilitate partnerships and organise your schedule more effectively
Absolute Rubbish and a waste of money - I had the opportunity to try out Vista Business and what a load of over featured rubbish, how can anyone do any work with all that going on? Even if you set the options to look like XP you might as well stick with XP and save your money. I am a home user but I hate gimmicks and soon despatched the sidebar stuff. The new Mail program is confusing and I do not like WMP 11, much prefer WMP 9 which I use with XP Professional. I tried it on a Virtual Machine first and was disappointed and thought it might be the limitations of that so decided to run it properly and after creating an NTFS partition to dual boot with XP Pro Setup was very easy and you felt shut out and my first thoughts were hey even an idiot could do this setup and then I found that when you do a defrag you don t get to see what is going on and as someone who has done MCP courses I like to know exactly is going on with my computer. Wonder why the Windows Boot Manager just refers to earlier version of Windows instead of identifying the other OS on the boot screen options like XP has ceased to exist!You cannot run decent screen savers, the ones which come with Vista are absolute rubbish with big footprints including Mystify which they have really made look horrible and if you import the earlier version it runs the same as the Vista version and many older Windows screensavers won t run.I will stick with XP thank you. The whole thing is getting on my nerves including the much heralded Aero which certainly does not wow me. Like has been said already I do not like my computer being taken control of and I feel that by releasing Vista M$ are one more step toward ruling the world.
Waste of money - Doesn t do anything that XP Pro can t do faster. Too many problems with security and Digital Rights Management. Painful to use for some simple operations - 6 clicks where one was needed before. New file manager is hopeless and the User Account Controls are so obstructive as to make people swear out loud in the office.The new interface significantly slows the machine down and believe me, you will need a well specced machine to run this OS anyway!For the business user, this upgrade does not offer anything not currently available in XP Pro.
Horses for Courses - I bought a new business laptop which had Vista Basic as the standard OS. I had been using XP Home on a previous laptop for most of my applications but needed to share files with the Office PC using XP Professional and this was said to be difficult with Vista Basic - hence the upgrade.As this was the first thing I did - a clean upgrade - no problems and everything went OK. I had bought a magazine (The Ultimate Guide to Vista from PC Pro) which described how to set up the network with an XP machine so I don t know how difficult it would have been following the Windows instructions. I have even shared access to a printer which I hadn t been able to do before. A bit fiddly to customise all the power settings which is a new feature - initially turning off just sent it to sleep which is not a good idea for a laptop!Only problem is that one of my applications (pdf creator) doesn t have a Vista version yet but not difficult to copy to the XP machine for creating pdf. I can see that people with lots of applications and hardware connected may have a lot more problems with this - or have to pay out for upgrades.Not used it very much as it is only a secondary computer for use outside the office but seems to do what it says - I like the desktop appearance, being able to customise the side bar and being able to set it in presentation mode which disables the screensaver - but I definitely won t be rushing to upgrade my 2 XP PC s
Why All The Fuss?! - I ve been running Vista Business in a Virtual Machine on my MacBook Pro for some weeks now and so far have found no reason why a user would want to upgrade to this from XP. The additional security is actually very intrusive. For example, I doubt anyone with admin rights would ever switch on the User Account Control. It just bugs you for passwords for every change you want to make and - guess what - if you switch it off it bugs you to switch it back on. Whether business users really want security built into their operating systems, I m not sure. With their history, I m not going to trust MicroSoft with my PC s security am I now?! So I have independent security packages installed which makes the additional security features something of an overhead.GUIs are always a matter of taste and take some time to get used to. My first - and so far lasting - impression of Vista is that we have finally entered the realm of assuming users are complete and utter idiots and therefore we treat them as such. With each release of Windows I, as a user and - here s a thing Microsoft - the person who owns it and wants to tell it what to do rather than have it dictate to me, I find control more and more being taken away from me. I have little clue what it s up to now and no apparent way of finding out. From a user viewpoint (there might be hidden values for IT to upgrade, I don t know) it s nothing special and, of course, appears to run slower than XP does on the same hardware. They have changed things which didn t need changing. If Windows Explorer is your main way of locating and opening files you will now find yourself faced with an unfamiliar and unfriendly mess. Why would you want to change that? It was one of the great things that the original Windows actually gave to users - easy access to their files without having to use the command prompt or a proprietary tool like XTree. Why can t I be trusted to organise my own data?So far I have found quite a few changes from XP and I don t like them. I will persevere, but if this is the future of Windows computing then I m increasingly pleased I decided to buy a Mac last time around!
I am trying to like this.... but can t! - I have 2 pc s at home. My main PC and a PC downstairs for multimedia stuff. So I thought I would upgrade my PC downstairs first. Installation was relatively straight forward, however I must point out that if you buy an upgrade version you cannot perform a clean installation from scratch, you MUST have your previous version of XP installed first.Once installed Vista looks stunning, and I like the new feel to folders and my computer etc. But then when you starting getting into it, it is not all it is cracked up to be. Drivers do not work correctly. EG. Roxio Media Center which is supposed to be Vista compatible, which it was until the latest patches for Vista, now every time I reboot I get an annoying message saying that the DLA drivers are not compatible.One of the latest patches failed to install on my PC, and I have been getting a blue screen on boot up, which does sort itself out but increases the boot up time.Then I tried the new Sync folders option, which I thought would be a great feature to synchronise my music folders with my main PC, well, this virtually brought my PC to a standstill. Every time I rebooted the search facility would eat up 75% of my CPU performance, rendering the rest of the PC virtually useless. Then I decided to remove the sync from the folders, this was a near impossible task, many of the folders would not remove the sync option, others failed. Then only way I could get it back to the way it was, was with a system restore. (which does work well!)Then there are the annoying pop-ups. An added security feature, but VERY ANNOYING. Every time I tried to install anything a pop up would appear asking me if I wanted to do the install, this happens for every patch, every piece of software and every system change. So I decided to turn it off in the User account section, after I did that I got annoying pop ups saying that the UAC facility was turned off!! STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO Mr. Microsoft!!On the plus side, networking is a lot easier in Vista. Wireless networks are straight forward to set up ( if you know how to configure you firewall) and once set up the connection speed is improved slightly.So like I said I really have been trying to like Vista, but I just can t and will certainly not be putting it on my main PC for a while yet. The other thing I have realised is that I really do not need it, for the money you really are not getting much more (that works) than what XP can provided.