Laptops and Vista
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I found a pretty good deal on a laptop during CompUSA’s three day clearance (or some such), so I went and picked it up to replace Mindy’s aging Averatec (which has been a trusty old thing, but is, as I mentioned, getting some gray hairs). Unfortunately (or not, depending on how you look at it), it came with Vista Home Basic preinstalled.
Before buying it, I spent some time researching the downgrade clauses in the various Microsoft EULA for Windows Vista. According to everything I could find (and I’d post links if I wasn’t so lazy), the OEM EULAs do NOT include any sort of rights to previous versions of Windows, so if you were planning on that, don’t.
First impressions of Vista, however, seem to mirror what everyone’s told me: slow and annoying. The laptop came with 512MB of RAM, about half people said I’d want, so that’s part of it. But all of the confirmation popups have nothing to do with hardware.
All in all, though, after switching back to the “legacy” interface and removing the desktop background, I think it’ll be manageable. Although I am considering installing Ubuntu…
Nice blog theme. 😉
I’ve noticed that laptops (and computers in general) are coming way down in price.
I’d highly encourage you to watch sales for memory, and then swoop in and pick some up. Kyle (my college roommmate) and I both ended up upgrading our school-issued laptops to 2GB. 512 to 1GB will be an even bigger difference.
And Ubuntu’s very user-friendly these days… Get Mindy hooked while it’s new. 😉
I’ve especially noticed the prices of desktops plummeting through the floor, although notebooks are as well. We got this laptop (15.4″ dual-core Intel with 512MB of RAM and a DVD burner) for $400 after rebate, which is extremely reasonable.