I know people that love it and people that hate it. Someone I work with bought an inexpensive Dell desktop and gets a BSOD literally every day. All she uses it for is the copy of MS Office she paid to have installed with it.
I hated 98 with a seething passion so I would say Vista will probably end up being a better experience for you, but mainly because 98 isn’t fit to be on the internet 
Anybody read this article recently? The benchmarking of the upcoming XP SP3…
BSOD == driver/hardware failure. Get the people it came from to look at that.
Dell had some pretty random drivers - that’d be a good first place to check.
As far as I can tell, if you don’t get cheap with hardware, Vista will run ok, but considering a lot of software manufacturers aren’t supporting it, there’s no real reason to jump on the Vista bandwagon. That and Microsoft has an annoying habit of changing things for the sake of change.
Heh what bandwagon?
I bought a new comp over the summer, made sure it had XP from the get-go.
Doesn’t usually happen, although I’d bet it can certainly seem like that to the random outsider. A big part of Windows is third parties, so if there’s some change that could potentially affect anybody else, it’s viewed pretty cautiously.
If you really feel that way, I’d suggest tracking Raymond Chen’s The Old New Thing blog over time. He works at MS (randomly, we’re on the same team now, which I think is cool) and gives great insight to the problems of maintaining extensibility with compatibility along with third party people who try to take shortcuts.
If you’re going to make “changes”, generally you have to sell that to management - if you’re making disruptive changes for ‘the sake of change’, you’ll probably have a VP breathing down your neck pretty quickly because that’s just stupid behavior. 
If i’m gonna get rid of my old A45-S150, what’s a good way, ebay or dealtree? My old toshiba is runing loud and has a nonworking battery.
I am having some trouble downgrading back to XP. The downgrade went fine, XP was installed and working. But I wasnt able to connect to the because there werent any network connections set up, and in my control panel under “Add/remove programs” there wasnt anything. Is this because I need to downlaod all the drivers that would include getting the internet to work? Shitty thing is is that there isnt a driver recovery CD, on a full complete system restore CD that would install Vista again.
Vista’s fine. If you don’t like the differences, you can always tweak services and whatnot to make it run just like XP.
The ARP comes from enumeration of the entries under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall … not sure why that wouldn’t show up.
I take it this wasn’t a formatted install of XP to a blank disk? I generally prefer clean OS installs, but then again I probably do 100x the average number of OS installs compared to the average user.
As regards drivers, is the network card recognized? That’s usually my chief problem when I put a new OS on a clean system. =\
Well I formatted the partition before i installed XP. Install went just fine but the internet wouldnt work at all. So I used the recovery CD and it installed vista again, then the internet worked just fine. Is there a way to install XP without deleting all of the drivers/programs that are already installed?
No, drivers and most modern applications are OS-specific and need to be installed after the OS is, not just copied. Go to your model’s support page and download the XP installers for all of your drivers, burn them to a CD, and then run them after you install XP. Make sure that your network card driver is included in that group.
Yes, and make sure you understand your girlfriend’s handwriting when you try to type in the cd-key for XP, right? Otherwise you might end up looking all over the interwebs for one that works… without success… right, Love?
I’m kidding. I love you!!!
That’s a really interesting blog, thanks for the link.
Not that I know of, but I’m hardly an expert so maybe someone else will prove me wrong. Regardless, do what Preppy said and check to see if the system is recognizing your network card.
I bought the exact same one, and after almost giving up, this happened.