Quote:
Originally Posted by Astrod00d
...My HP notebook is no more... It suffered a spectacular accident on Sunday and is a write-off... 
So I need a new notebook computer. Where do I start? There are so many choices out there, it's confusing.
I guess I start with a 15-16" screen, optical drive, good battery life, a few USB ports. Then work up to things like memory card readers, HDMI video and so on.
...Is Windows 7 practical yet, or should I stay with XP Pro??
...Any suggestions from IIS, based on experience?
It will be nice to have a shiny new notebook... every cloud has a silver lining huh? 
Cheers... Rob |
Hi Rob
If you want to get up and running quickly there are plenty of cheap laptops available now. My biggest priority would be battery life having had the pain many times of running out of power at a critical time.
If you fiddle with programs and try new things avoid Windows 7 like the plague. It will take you weeks to get it to run like you actually own it. There are still laptops around with XP. I have no problem putting XP or Windows 2000 on the latest computers but Windows 98 is no longer an option.
If you can afford it a Mac may be a better proposition with a virtual drive installed (or two or three) to run your old stuff.
If you must have Windows 7 get VMware and install a virtual drive that you can configure and use XP set up as you formally had it.
I do run Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit on a multi boot computer that I had got to run quite nicely after about a month of fiddling, with VMware using a virtual XP installation. However the HDD crashed before I had made a proper backup image. I had to reinstall everything from scratch. Took a week. Windows 7 does not have the facility that XP has to repair an existing installation (or at least my copy didn't).
Barry