OS's that replace Vista Basic

I know quite quite a bit about computers. It's just that I have a 132GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM I think and fucking Vista is slow. I was aiming for something quick, so I could get back to work faster.

xp or 7. xp works great on old crappy computers since it was made to run on them.. vista is a resource hog.. you need at least 1.5-2gb ram to run it.. and then 4gb to run it well.
7 has been made a bit lighter than vista i think, i believe the minimum specs you could use would be like 2.6ghz single core with like 512mb ram.. but who has that in their pc now a days *raises hand* q.q

The simplest solution is to get more RAM on a desktop. On a laptop though... well, maybe still getting RAM, but it may be expensive. With just 1 GiByte of RAM I recommend either XP or some flavor of Linux. Beware though, that some laptops can't be used with XP as there are no drivers for their chipsets (sound, network, wifi, etc). If we're talking about a laptop and you decide to go with XP, be sure to check whether there are available drivers before you install the OS or you might have a nasty surprise.

The number of features has nothing to do with the speed or resource usage of a program. Optimization, development time & focus does. It's a good rule of thumb, that feature rich programs will tend to be more resource intensive, but this is because such programs tend to be for professionals whose demands are way above what the average user needs. (Ie. Virtualdub vs. Adobe's Studio products, Paint.NET vs GIMP or Photoshop)

There's also a thing called *feature creep* which means that ever more features get crammed into a programs specifications during actual development. This delays deployment and take away time from optimization and debugging.

However Windows 7 was about *polish* & *optimization* first, rather than cramming in even more features, so these comparisons hold no water.



People hated UAC in Vista since it kept interrupting their normal work-flow and was annoying as hell. Windows 7' UAC is a lot better, *because* it's a lot less visible as things have been streamlined a lot more.



Until Windows Vista, Microsoft had an excellent track record of maintaining software compatibility. This took an immense effort, but both developers as well as users loved them for it. Unlike Linux, upgrading your system or system components could never break compatibility with a program you used.

Granted there are *some* things you couldn't run, but these were due to switching to NTVDM for running Win9x and DOS programs when Windows 2000 came out, but even then compatibility with legacy programs was excellent. MS developers often went and inserted an application/game *specific* compatibility code (like they did for SimCity that was doing some nasty tricks with memory management).

...when Vista came out MS abandoned a long tradition of support that endeared them to their users and made developers stick with the firm even through trying times.

You can torrent windows 7 ultimate for free. I did it and it works great and bill gates will never know nor ever find me. :|

Ubuntu is nice, but unless you're willing to dedicate time to learning how to do simple things like installing packages I wouldn't recommend it. I haven't tried playing J games on my ubuntu pc, but I don't believe you can even with apps like wine.

Actually the built in Synaptic Package Manager is a breeze to use. Just click install, and that's it! For people moving to Linux from Windows I actually recommend KUbuntu (Ubuntu with the KDE GUI instead Gnome) as it's a bit closer to what they're used to.



I live in a part of the world where pirating the OS is the "norm"... however I doubt that same's true for where Soma1230 lives. If you're in higher education, Microsoft should have some form of cheap/free license available for you to acquire Windows 7 legally.

EDIT: Ah, here you go
https://www.microsoft.com/student/en/us/windows/buynow/default.aspx - 30$, provided you're a student in the US.

I run on a Desktop. It's like 2 years old, and slower than my Itouch 4 so It bewildered me how something smaller can preform better. Needed touching up anyway, and I knew the Fakku community knew their shit. Just throwing some extra info on why this is important.

Knoppix it is a live Debian based OS like Ubuntu but with persistence.

I can attest to migrating from Vista Basic to 7. If your computer supports it go for the 64-bit version.

If you feel the need to try linux.. Ubuntu, Linux mint, or Fedora are good ones to try out.