Before You Buy A New Computer.......

[mommalina]

From PC World Newsletter

Life of Your Hardware

Buy new computer equipment and peripherals with an eye on the future.
Kirk Steers
Monday, August 21, 2006 01:00 AM PDT

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126815-page,1/article.html?tk=nl_wbxcol

EXCERPTS:

Computers are in transition: Technologies such as the PCI Express bus and all-digital video connectors are supplanting their predecessors. More important, Microsoft's new Windows Vista is right around the corner. Anyone who's thinking of buying PC hardware in the next few months must keep an eye on the future.

If the transition to Windows XP is any lesson, the biggest potential hassle of a Vista upgrade is lack of support for legacy hardware and peripherals. Before moving to the new OS, check with your printer, scanner, and other peripheral manufacturers to learn whether they plan to offer Vista drivers for your product.

To help ease the move, Microsoft has created the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, a free program that examines your system's hardware and attached peripherals to identify possible driver and hardware conflicts, as well as other compatibility problems.



The following tips will help you get the most out of your hardware--current and future--for many years to come.

Leave room for RAM

Avoid PCI cards

Choose SATA, not PATA

Go digital

[kelly]

I attended MS's presentation to the Exton PC Council of Vista and Office 2007. It was impressive. Although as one of the audience mentioned, there is no reason to upgrade from XP. It really doesn't do anything more than XP or the currrent Office ... it is flashy.

Anyway, the presenter was running Vista on a laptop with 2 GHz dual core, 32-bit processor and 1GB RAM. It seemed to run just fine.
- tony

[Dan18960]

Any "current" hardware is already classed for Vista (just don't know WHICH FLAVOR :mad: ).

I had it running on an 865 motherboard with 1 gb RAM, SATA 120gb hard drive, DVD-CD/RW drive, and a 3.0 P-4 processor just fine.

Of course, I didn't get impressed with it and having looked at Office 2007 I am telliing people to stock up on 2003 OR go to Corel WordPerfect X-3. And several of the folks that have gotten their 30 day trial version are now moving to Corel!:D But I am still using Lotus SmartSuite :cool:

Good riddence to M$ Office money pit.

[Tortanick]

I attended MS's presentation to the Exton PC Council of Vista and Office 2007. It was impressive. Although as one of the audience mentioned, there is no reason to upgrade from XP. It really doesn't do anything more than XP or the currrent Office ... it is flashy.

- tony

What did the presenter say?

[kelly]

He demo'd both the new features of Vista and Office 2007. Mostly visual stuff. I liked the variable size thumbnails. In Office, I liked that you could select text and go to the formatting area. Once you clicked on a certain format, say for font and size, it changed it on the selected text, in the background, so you could see what it would look like.

I saw good integration between media - moving photos around into a movie, adding sound, etc.

I also liked a feature where if you has several web pages open you could save them as a favorite group. So in the morning, if you normally go to several site, say maybe CNN, KHW, Yahoo Finance, etc. you could save that so you only have to click on one link for all the pages to load at once.

-tony