Computer questions about Vista,

[RayP.]

Anybody ever make the jump from s Win98 computer to a Win Vista SP1 computer?,I spent almost 5 days trying to get this piece of modern MicroSoft technolgy to work,and it don't and won't,normally computer problems during set ups and so on are the fault of the user,but not this time,fortunately my oldest son was in town yesterday,he's a former programer,found there's a hitch in the mail program of Window's that is also effecting the ISP's mail program,conflicts with anything that's http:// related,I lost all my mail files and a whole bunch of stuff,flash stick wouldn't work on this PC so I couldn't save anything before hand,tired of horsing with it so I fired this old PC back up,tell you how crazy it is,no user manual with new PC,it's an electronic manual,and one trouble shooting answer they give is "if you can't connect to the Internet,go to your ISP's website and look for a download fix",that would be a good trick,I'll play with this this thing for another week and if it don't work I'll give it to one of the kids and look for a Win SX.

Ray

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[0311Shooter]

I believe that with most new computers today you can get them with XP instead of Vista. I know you can buy XP to install. If it was me that is what I would do.

Luckily all my computers still have XP. I have divorced myself from Microsoft, stopped the "updates" which were slowing mine to a crawl. Installed a free Virus checker and free Firewall from PC Tools and they update themselves to new viruses.

If/when the day comes and I have to build a new PC, it won't have Vista.

[Gundog 64]

Check and see if you have a preloaded security program. Mine came with McAfee and there is a compatability problem with Outlook Express and the McAfee. I had to remove the McAfee and went with AVG. It is a free program. Do a Google search it is easy to find and works well. McAfee told me their program will work fine. Microsoft told me about the compatability problems. Since the change I have had no more OE problems, so I guess someone was not telling the whole story.

John

[RayP.]

Check and see if you have a preloaded security program. Mine came with McAfee and there is a compatability problem with Outlook Express and the McAfee. I had to remove the McAfee and went with AVG. It is a free program. Do a Google search it is easy to find and works well. McAfee told me their program will work fine. Microsoft told me about the compatability problems. Since the change I have had no more OE problems, so I guess someone was not telling the whole story.

John

Came with Norton preloaded,I used Norton for a few years on another Win98 PC and this Win98 PC,Live Update had problems on both,no problems with Out Look Express mail on this PC when I had Norton but always had to imanually run live update,also some other problems,I have Avast on this old PC now for about 4mths or so,no problems yet,thought about closing Norton and loading Avast on the new one.
RayP.

[RayP.]

I believe that with most new computers today you can get them with XP instead of Vista. I know you can buy XP to install. If it was me that is what I would do.

Luckily all my computers still have XP. I have divorced myself from Microsoft, stopped the "updates" which were slowing mine to a crawl. Installed a free Virus checker and free Firewall from PC Tools and they update themselves to new viruses.

If/when the day comes and I have to build a new PC, it won't have Vista.

Loading a copy of XP sounds like a good idea,I'll look into that.

RayP.

[Ramboueille]

Anybody ever make the jump from s Win98 computer to a Win Vista SP1 computer?,I spent almost 5 days trying to get this piece of modern MicroSoft technolgy to work,and it don't and won't,normally computer problems during set ups and so on are the fault of the user,but not this time,fortunately my oldest son was in town yesterday,he's a former programer,found there's a hitch in the mail program of Window's that is also effecting the ISP's mail program,conflicts with anything that's http:// related,I lost all my mail files and a whole bunch of stuff,flash stick wouldn't work on this PC so I couldn't save anything before hand,tired of horsing with it so I fired this old PC back up,tell you how crazy it is,no user manual with new PC,it's an electronic manual,and one trouble shooting answer they give is "if you can't connect to the Internet,go to your ISP's website and look for a download fix",that would be a good trick,I'll play with this this thing for another week and if it don't work I'll give it to one of the kids and look for a Win SX.

Ray

Ray,

Computer hardware and drivers built for Windows 98 is a long way from Vista hardware requirements and driver requirements. Vista 32 or 64 bit runs fine if you have the hardware to run it. What are you trying to install Vista on?

[RayP.]

Ray,

Computer hardware and drivers built for Windows 98 is a long way from Vista hardware requirements and driver requirements. Vista 32 or 64 bit runs fine if you have the hardware to run it. What are you trying to install Vista on?

Not installing,it's a brand new Toshiba Lap Top,Vista SP1 came pre-installed.

RayP.

[mdoerner]

You could also run LINUX like I do, and forget Microsoft entirely. Of course, it does not run Windoze apps, but it does come with similar software suite. I prefer Novell's OpenSuSe distribution, but you could also download Ubuntu, or Red Hat's Fedora, or Debian, or whatever floats your boat.

pros: Free, can cruise Internet w/o Issue w/ Firefox, no need for any anti-virus software

cons: hard to get support, Sun's Open Office Suite isn't as good as MS-Office, Windows apps can be emulated in Linux but I haven't gotten it to work yet.

Here's a link, if you're not sure which one to chose, start with the 32-bit version, it will run on anything except Intel Itanium processors.

http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org

Mike Doerner

[Quarks]

Anybody ever make the jump from s Win98 computer to a Win Vista SP1 computer?,I spent almost 5 days trying to get this piece of modern MicroSoft technolgy to work,and it don't and won't,normally computer problems during set ups and so on are the fault of the user,but not this time,fortunately my oldest son was in town yesterday,he's a former programer,found there's a hitch in the mail program of Window's that is also effecting the ISP's mail program,conflicts with anything that's http:// related,I lost all my mail files and a whole bunch of stuff,flash stick wouldn't work on this PC so I couldn't save anything before hand,tired of horsing with it so I fired this old PC back up,tell you how crazy it is,no user manual with new PC,it's an electronic manual,and one trouble shooting answer they give is "if you can't connect to the Internet,go to your ISP's website and look for a download fix",that would be a good trick,I'll play with this this thing for another week and if it don't work I'll give it to one of the kids and look for a Win SX.

Ray

We did exactly that, jumped from Win98 to Vista SP1, the 64-bit "home premium" edition. New hardware, obviously, the old Win98 machine couldn't load & run Vista under any conditions.

We have had no problems with it other than the learning curve of figuring out how things are done differently between the two OS's.

We copied everything from the old hard drive to DVD & then created a "Win98 DVD folder" on the new hard drive & copied the DVD's down & have direct access to everything that was on the old machine.

Dumped McAfee (came with the machine) & have Norton 2007 running. Again, no problem with that combination.

Internet access is slow but then we're running 56kb dial-up so it's gonna be.

No huge fan of MicroSquish but, thus far, Vista has been OK.

[RayP.]

We did exactly that, jumped from Win98 to Vista SP1, the 64-bit "home premium" edition. New hardware, obviously, the old Win98 machine couldn't load & run Vista under any conditions.

We have had no problems with it other than the learning curve of figuring out how things are done differently between the two OS's.

We copied everything from the old hard drive to DVD & then created a "Win98 DVD folder" on the new hard drive & copied the DVD's down & have direct access to everything that was on the old machine.

Dumped McAfee (came with the machine) & have Norton 2007 running. Again, no problem with that combination.

Internet access is slow but then we're running 56kb dial-up so it's gonna be.

No huge fan of MicroSquish but, thus far, Vista has been OK.

That's part of my main problem,no disk burner on this old lap top,can write to the small floppy disks,this pc is a early win 98,I only paid $399 for the new lap top,2gb ram x 160gb hard drive Vista SP1,can't see putting all kinds of money in to it when I could probably return it and get a diff. one. Or maybe find some place to export the files to from the old pc and then import them into the new pc.

RayP.