Which os would you recommend?

[somerandomlife]

Dear msfn users,

I've a small question, when you look only at my system specs then which windows os would you recommend out of the following:

xp/vista/w7, and which version, pro, home, ultimate etc. etc.

My system specs are:

Pentium IV @2.66Ghz

2GB ram

256MB Geforce 6200 AGP

2 DVD players of which one burner, and the other usual stuff.

Thanks for helping,

Somerandomlife

Edit: I just found out that this actually belongs into the general discussion forum, if anyone move this for me then it would be really nice.

Edited November 24, 2009 by somerandomlife

[MagicAndre1981]

Windows 7 Home Premium

[somerandomlife]

Does windows 7 home premium also work with domains (domain networks)? I forgot to add that, but that's important for me.

[MagicAndre1981]

no, if you want domain join support you have to use Windows 7 Professional.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7...omain-join.aspx

[nathan_s]

Stick with either XP or Windows 7, Vista will eat up half of your resources

[MagicAndre1981]

no, that's wrong. Vista never "eats" something.

[Sl@y3D for my n@me]

no, that's wrong. Vista never "eats" something.

This is excellent news. Now I can be sure that my cat really WAS stealing food from my desk all along.

Sarcasm aside, Vista takes more resources than 7 or xp, for better or for worse is debatable. There is no denying that. Besides which, it has been replaced and there is very little reason to choose it.

Your options are xp pro, or Windows 7 pro. I notice that your graphics card and processor are very outdated, which may cause 7 to slow down a bit, but on second thoughts, I doubt it would make much of an impact on your experience. I'd recommend 7 pro.

[MagicAndre1981]

Vista takes more resources than 7 or xp, for better or for worse is debatable. There is no denying that.

no, this is WRONG!

Vista uses more memory for File caching! This cache is not listed under Cache in Taskmanager. The data from the file cache must be flushed to disk before you can use the memory for other things. To "reduce" the memory usage in Windows 7, MS reduced the usage of the File Cache. That's it, nothing more (ok, WDMM1.1 and the triggered service start reduce the memory usage a bit, but the main cause why Windows Vista use "more" is the huger File Cache)!

[Guest]

XP Pro

I installed 7 on 2 similar systems and it's a pig.

[gUiTaR_mIkE]

XP Pro would better suit your system specs as they are now, if you could add more RAM this may benefit Windows 7.

You could always run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor and see what the software recommends. Windows 7 is the future

but XP is a very worthwhile OS - even after all these years.

[diewo]

XP. But I would like to try Win 7.It seems that it much better than Vista.

[cluberti]

Honestly, this sounds like a good candidate to try Win7 on (the CPU is a little long in the tooth, but it would only really be apparent in heavy CPU-related tasks, and that would be the same in XP as well anyway). 2GB of RAM is more than enough to run the x86 version of Win7, and even the x64 version would run fine (it would have larger memory footprint as all binaries are larger, but not drastically so).

XP is still a good OS however, so you should definitely check the Win7 upgrade advisor to see if you have any drivers or applications that would have problems under Win7 - if not, it's probably worth the plunge. If so, sticking with XP won't necessarily be a bad thing either.

As to the domains question, no, Win7 Home Premium cannot join a traditional Windows domain, you would need Pro or Enterprise/Ultimate for that. However, if it's just a home situation, and the other machines are also Win7, you can set up a HomeGroup that would make it easier to do most of the things you'd use a domain for amongst your Win7 machines.