Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic FULL VERSION DVD

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic DVD

User Ratings and Reviews

1 Star Whatever you do, DON'T "upgrade" to this pile of %&#@!!!!
Pathetic performance, near-universal incompatibility with external applications and hardware, and nonexistent technical support; what more could anyone ask?

If you've got Windows XP on your computer already, KEEP IT THERE. If you're getting a new computer, you need to consider buying a Mac (like I eventually did). No amount of tinkering by Microsoft is going to make Windows Vista worth the effort of learning.

This is, without doubt, the techno-turkey of the decade.

1 Star Vista Difficulties
I now have several experiences with this new OS on a number of platforms and can offer a bit of advice/experience from the perspective of someone often asked by friends and family to work on their computers. I generally prefer to build my own systems from parts. However, most of my experience below is on machines that were purchases - 2 HP systems and a Lenovo laptop. I'm still choosing XP when I can.

1. Don't assume things will work in Vista like XP. Driver incompatibility, and differences will slow you down — budget mucho time to resolve these issues. For example, many cite driver and device incompatibilities, some virus and spyware programs work, and some don't. The mature members in my family use Juno over dial-up. Forget this in a web client — dialup is way too slow. The Juno remote client that downloads email for off-line reading in XP doesn't work in Vista. Supposedly, one can configure Windows Mail to do this (Outlook is gone). However, I haven't had an opportunity to try it. I usually suggest taking them back to XP since the look and feel will be similar to what they've had on their Win 98 systems.

2. No matter how hot your box, Vista is slow to start and shut down. I recently worked on a Vista box having a Pentium quad core processor and 3 GB of ram. The system takes several minutes to start and shut down. Vista loads about 2x more resident processes than XP. On the same hardware that translates to about 2x as long for Vista v. XP.

3. Make the restore disks! My daughter's Lenova laptop running Vista stopped booting up. Lenovo service is pretty helpful (Cheers to them in NC)and we had no hardware errors- just a corrupted drive that had to be re-imaged because the onboard restore files were also corrupted. If we had made the restore disks when we first got the laptop, we could have fixed it ourselves from the backup. When you make them, the first disk has to be a CD, then the others should be DVDs or you'll have a huge number of restore disks. Its better to do this when you first get the computer. This is different from XP where I had the disks in hand (ie you don't have to create them).

Summing Up

Vista has a nice look and feel to it. I can navigate it OK from my XP experience, and we prob. will all have to live with it at some point. Understand that its slower than XP to start and shut down, and it may not be the best choice for everyone (esp mature users, those that are challenged). Budget lots of time to work out the incompatibilities and make the backup/resote disks asap!.

Best wishes!

1 Star It is not compatible with Windows XP! And, it uses too much resources!
Windows Vista is horrible software. It should not even be called "Windows" because it is not based on Windows XP or 2000! While its graphical interface looks like XP's, Vista uses a different file system.

SO, NO SOFTWARE THAT WAS COMPATIBLE WITH WINDOWS XP OR WINDOWS 2000 WILL WORK WITH VISTA.

Not only that, but Microsoft chose graphics over functionality: Vista uses 500MB of memory just by itself. After adding Anti-Virus and other software, your computer's performance will grind to a halt.

1 Star Vista, the "new Coke" of Windows
This is a horrible product!!!! I gave it one star only because I don't have the option of giving it no stars. It's extremely slow; I spend so much time looking at that stupid hourglass! And forget multi-tasking! With Windows XP, I could have at least 2 versions of Internet Explorer open at once, along with Excel documents, Word documents, etc. while listening to music on Rhapsody at the same time. Not possible with Vista. Vista is supposed to be more secure, but it's so secure that the person who owns the computer can't use it! Since I am the "computer administrator", I shouldn't have to ask myself "permission" every time I want to change a setting (this feature can be turned off by going to Control Panel, Security Center, Other Security Settings & turning off User Account Control). Also, any audio you listen to (CD's, DVD's, online streaming music) is choppy & sounds like a bad radio with static. Avoid Vista! It's like Windows Me all over again; a big disappointment and a huge mistake for Microsoft! The only "WOW" is when it actually works.

4 Stars Works great for me
I got a PC loaded with Windows Vista Home Basic and I love it. What a big upgrade from XP as far as look and feel and user experience. This version does not have the slick "Aero" eye candy of Home Premium, nor does it have many of the tools and options such as media center, laptop power center, tablet support, etc. However, I wouldn't use any of that stuff anyway so I don't miss it.

Because of the lack of "add-ons" and the memory and system resource intensive "Aero" interface, Home Basic works in a much smaller memory footprint and can be used on PCs with as little as 512M Ram, though I'd recommend 1Gb. Ram is cheap, just buy it.

Highly recommended version!!!!

The only reason I docked it one star is that I would like to have the option of the cool "Aero" stuff in this version. No, I don't want media Center, tablet support, etc. etc. etc., but it would be nice to have "flip-3D" and transparrency. As it is the UI looks significantly better than the hideous Windows XP.

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