Digital BW, The Print

Tom, this is another of those areas in which you'll no doubt encounter 
fierce opinions, and while I've no intention of wasting time or energy 
debating the issue, I'll be glad to share with you my experience.

After having used XP since its introduction, and having considered it 
the best ever release of Windows (I've used computers since '83, and 
well remember when major advances in DOS were heralded as miracles), I 
finally, this spring, wound up with two high-end HP laptops equipped 
with Vista.

I'll spare you the horrifying details of the month and a half I spent in 
"Dell Hell", resulting from the obscenely premature death of a 
3-month-old $5,000 Dell laptop, but when it was finally over-- at least 
until my proposed national holiday, "Put-A-Bullet-In-A-Dell" Day, gets 
off the ground-- I went to HP.  The two laptops run very well, but they 
run on Vista, and I loathe it.

I'm convinced that Microsoft designed and intended Vista for people who 
use it to play games, send and receive badly spelled email, download a 
little porn, and perhaps share their truly dreadful photos of their kids 
with other people who take equally dreadful photos of their own 
children.  Inotherwords, the 90% of the home PC-owning population for 
whom the computer is a toy with which to play, rather than a tool with 
which to work. 

The OS is so voraciously power-hungry, and its own absurdly unnecessary 
(but "cool"-- don't forget "cool"!) bells and whistles are so demanding, 
that the standard 1 or 2 gigabytes of RAM with which it's usually 
equipped cannot handle much beyond those minimal requirements placed on 
it by the average user. 

In each of my laptops I have 4GB RAM, and a version of the OS that 
allows every bit of it to be accessed.  Despite this, I have problems in 
Photoshop (CS3) that never occurred with XP.  When working with a file 
of more than 500MB (pretty common) or with more than 50 layers (ditto!), 
there are problems.  Vista also has intermittent issues with all three 
of my Epsons, Corel Painter (the other major graphics app I regularly 
use), and several longtime favorite plugins for Photoshop (which I've 
used since '92) will no longer run at all.  (They worked perfectly in 
XP.)  Although I bought a new Intuos graphics tablet a couple of years 
ago, my older version-- a 9x12"-- will not work properly with Vista, 
despite having downloaded new drivers and a boatload of patches. 

Vista is a step backward, not forward.  Its appearance is slicker, but 
its usability is atrocious, and for someone who places a lot of demands 
on his or her system, it's a nightmare.  The less you play and the more 
you work, the worse it becomes.

Best wishes,

Shoshanna
Gold Beach - South Coast of Oregon
http://www.pbase.com/shoshanna
http://mindworksunlimited.com/shoshannaspeak/







Tom Fielder wrote:
>
> I've noticed occasional references to Vista and also to XP. Does anyone
> have experience with both? Are you able to opine as to which operating
> system is best for photos?
>
> BTW, I also own Macs so let's not open the war. I'm only wondering about
> Vista vs: XP.
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Tom
>



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