US govt. bans M$ Vista

[Fallen Angel]

U.S. Government Bans Vista, Office 2007

 

Microsoft (MSFT) has run into trouble with a major customer over Vista: The U.S. Department of Transportation has banned Windows Vista, Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 2007, InformationWeek reports. The newly revealed policy forbidding installation of Microsoft's latest software has been in place since mid-January.

[Caz]

Looking at web stats for a couple of my sites I found that Vista was already at 2% - more than Linux at 1%, Can't remember the IE7 count but I expect that it is already climbing fast. So the US government stance is not going influence the "great unwashed" is it?

Amusing? Yes!
Relevant to anyone else? No, unfortunately. 

[Fallen Angel]

I don't know about banning it, but it's gonna take some time before my employers make the switch to Vista. They've only just finished switching everyone over from NT to XP....they think. We had an IT guy coming round the other day doing an audit of what they've got and what they're running. Same thing about six months ago.... *sigh*

I've a friend who's looking to buy a new PC, and after I told her "upgrading" to Vista right now probably wasn't wise, she's now wanting one with XP and doesn't want to pay any more than £300. She reckons everywhere will be trying to sell off all their stock with XP on it cheap. Of course dopey me gets roped in to finding her a good deal. Of course everything's shipping with Vista pre-installed now. After a couple of hours searching I found one at less than £300. 512MB RAM....no good. She wants at least 1GB apparently.

XP + <£300 + 1GB RAM. Chances not good. 

I've suggested trying local computer shops where they build according to your specs.

[MJMoore]

Yep, I was told by someone that all the low spec pcs running XP would be sold off cheaply, but I can't say I've seen one. Surely 512 is ok if she wants XP.. but if not, how about fitting extra? Did you look at ebuyer, btw? They seem to do good deals.

[Fallen Angel]

Yep, the problem is she wants to burn DVDs and stuff so I'm not sure if 512 would be enough if she's planning on doing anything else at the same time, but I did suggest going for a lower spec one and then just getting the extra RAM afterwards - it'd work out a lot cheaper that going for a XP with 1GB one.

[Giomanach]

On the topic:

Banning Vista will ALWAYS be good.  I ran the Release Candidate, and Windows is getting complex, it won't be the simple Operating System microsoft have made their money from in the past.

And for the derailment:

If she wants to burn DvDs she needs to up the ante to about £500.  RAM and OS alone are not enough, you need a fairly decent processor to be able to handle the data transfer.  That, and the old IDE HDDS wont do, you need one with Ultra-ATA (still IDE, but better connectivity, and faster data transfer rate) or SATA2. TO burn DvDs without a problem, you'll need about 2Ghz processor, 1.5GB RAM, and a HDD with at least 150MB/per sec data transfer and less than 5ms read time

[Fallen Angel]

Thanks for the info Gio. She seems to have gone off the idea after I told her she wouldn't be able to get anything suitable for rock bottom prices, but I'll pass that on to her.