Need some advice on Windows and Photoshop usage. please.

[artandrevolution]

I just bought a brand spanking new laptop and I am wondering how fellow PC users are experiencing Photoshop on VISTA. My old computor was just that. Old. Im a little behind the times on technology but trying to catch up.
my debate is if i should take Vista off and load XP onto my new computor for optimal virtual memory usage. Vista alone with no open programs takes nearly 1GB of RAM. I currently have 2 GB that is expandable to 4.

Any advice on if i should switch or not would be greatly appreciated. thanks.

[dougj]

I'm using CS2 on a Vista desktop box, but with more RAM. I've read that 2GB is about the minimum. If you haven't cleaned up all of the preloaded junk software, you could do it and give Vista & PS a try before loading XP.

[rileypm]

RAM is cheap. Upgrade to 4gb and use Vista. Mr. Gates won't support XP for long.

[karld]

Maybe a little off topic slightly but have any of you heard this?

Maybe it's just one of those rumors but I think I've heard that PC's loaded with Vista might also include hardware that makes it very difficult to strip Vista and go back to XP.

The reason I ask is because I'm tired of being a beta tester every time something new comes out. Personally I'm ready to hop all over an XP version off the rack for my next PC while it's still available.

Anybody heard anything along these lines or is it just one of those things that's "out there"?

[marxz]

Maybe a little off topic slightly but have any of you heard this?

Maybe it's just one of those rumors but I think I've heard that PC's loaded with Vista might also include hardware that makes it very difficult to strip Vista and go back to XP.

The reason I ask is because I'm tired of being a beta tester every time something new comes out. Personally I'm ready to hop all over an XP version off the rack for my next PC while it's still available.

Anybody heard anything along these lines or is it just one of those things that's "out there"?

it's true/not true depending on how you look at it

makers of new hardware that's coming out post Vista are usually not sending their XP drivers to Microsoft for including on new XP install disks

as such some new machines will not run, or even install, XP unless you can get the drivers for some hardware before you even start installing.

for us, where I work it's Toshiba's new "M" series Techra Laptops, they use an SATA bus that looks like a IDE RAID controller to XP installer so loads the wrong driver or just says theirs no hard disk controller.

As we are not using Vista we need to install them to XP Pro

But to do that you have to download the appropriate XP driver from Toshiba's website and burn it to CD before you format the drive to go back from Vista.
(the real bummer is that we thought we'd only have to do this once per model and then just use Altiris to push a perfect copy of the "new" XP install on to the 30 or so laptops we buy a month, then Toshiba change the SATA adaptor on us with out notification and we have to start from scratch on a new base image)

this is just one example other manufacturers are certainly doing the same thing.

It's not "anti XP" or "can't run XP" but just that they believe the hype from redmond and can't be arsed properly supporting XP Users ... ....another reason a lot of my staff are wanting to move back to Apple laptops and more are adopting Linux.