Railfan Technology > Wndows Vista questions

I see some threads on Vista below, I have a couple questions. I am using XP but have a new Dell PC coming with Vista.

For my photos, I am using Dell Image Expert 2000. All my photos are now backed up, and I plan to load into the new box.

Does Vista have Image Expert, or any photo program installed?

Can I just transfer Image Expert from my storage drive onto Vista without going nuts?

Thank you in advance, have a Happy New Year.

I have Vista Ultimate on my laptop. All it has is a newer version of MS picture viewer.

FYI....I've had very few problems with VU, far less than others with other versions.

DaveL

Image expert seems to be an older program and I doubt that it will work with Vista. Corel® PhotoImpact® X3 seems to be the sucessor to Dell Image Expert.

Jim, I was able to order a new Dell laptop this past summer with Windows XP Pro on it instead of Vista. It is a business-grade laptop. Dell knows that Vista is a deal-killer for some business applications.

John

Dell has quite a few XP machines in the last mailing, from desktops to those 9 inch portables.

DocJohn Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Jim, I was able to order a new Dell laptop this
> past summer with Windows XP Pro on it instead of
> Vista. It is a business-grade laptop. Dell knows
> that Vista is a deal-killer for some business
> applications.
>
> John

Crap, maybe I wish I knew this. The PC has shipped and will arrive tomorrow. Oh well, guess I'll see how Vista turns out. It may improve my drinking.

Thanks for all the comments from everyone.

I have one machine with Vista and SP1. I have not activated many of the new features and it seems to work as well as the other machine with WinXP SP3. I think as some of the 3rd party software catches up to Vista and maybe SP2 comes along with Win 7 things will be just fine, well as fine as the computer industry ever is.

I am running vista home premium SP1 (32bit). I have never had a problem with Vista that I did not create on my own!

I even run the ancient Microsoft Train Simulator with minimal problems. As for photo software, I guess it's a matter of what all you intend to do to your shots.

For basic post processing Google offers Picasa (free).

There is also the freeware Irfanview that is more powerful than Picasa and offers more tweaks. http://www.irfanview.com/main_download_engl.htm

For under $100 there is Adobe Photoshop Elements, a less robust version of the very expensive Adobe Photoshop.

I have used all three of these on my Vista PC, and all worked like a charm.

Rich K

Webmaster . . . The Railfan Gallery

http://members.trainorders.com/richk

Seriously consider sending it back, the grief is just not worth it. Some of the guys at work who have recently bought laptops with Vista have been able turn them on and get them running right away. My grief was over Driver S/W and incompatible Security S/W, not to mention the 'Sleep' feature leads you into a complete re-start, after going through the DOS prompt (not sure how I would recover if I had a password protected Sleep). I did wind up with Norton Anti-Virus S/W and it seems to be ok. Another feature is almost continual uploads (and subsequent re-boots) from either Redmond or any other S/W package on the machine. Learn to love the 'Restore point' feature.
> -----
>
> Crap, maybe I wish I knew this. The PC has shipped
> and will arrive tomorrow. Oh well, guess I'll see
> how Vista turns out.

Windows Vista stinks! Plain and simple, HOWEVER, as time goes on, applications will catch up to it and will eventually no longer support XP. I come to this conclusion based on the fact that if you look at many popular software apps out there, many currently won't run on anything lower than XP, so it's just a matter of time before XP is obsolete as well. I have a computer I use for DJ'ing weddings that I bought almost a year ago. It's a Toshiba Laptop and it has Vista Home Premium on it and after over a month and a half of lots of trial and error and experimentation, I figured out a way to make my DJ'ing program "PCDJ Blue VRM" work on Vista decent enough to be able to DJ a wedding and the guests have no idea that their tunes were being played out of a computer and not from a CD!!! (OK long run-on sentence there, but you get the point!) I'm planning to build a new desktop computer later this year and will unfortunately put Vista on it because that's what's current now. I believe however that I'll be successful with it because I now know how to make it "Behave!".

Maybe Microsofts newest Windows "7"...will be the right OS for the PC crowd

NscaleMike Wrote:
> Maybe Microsofts newest Windows "7"...will be the right OS for the PC crowd

I've been running a Win 7 32bit pre-beta for 3 weeks and it's pretty slick. I like the new window behaviors. I have to say, it installed flawlessly. I didn't have to load any drivers either. I installed it on an old PC with 512MB ram/single 2GHz cpu/20GB HD. The resource usage seems to be less than Vista so that's good news.

I think the main thing is that it uses the drivers for Vista so we don't have to wait for fixes. Of course drivers/software that does't work in Vista might be carried over until the author fixes it. For those that like playing, MS will be posting the official 7 Beta as an ISO today on their website. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/
Beta only works until Aug 1, 2009 FYI.

Ryan Wilkerson
Fair Oaks, CA

RyanWilkerson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> NscaleMike Wrote:
> > Maybe Microsofts newest Windows "7"...will be
> the right OS for the PC crowd
>
> I've been running a Win 7 32bit pre-beta for 3
> weeks and it's pretty slick.


Good info, it would be nice. If it works out in the field I'd like to go with something less complex than Vista, there seems to be too much stuff that I don't need and it just causes problems and then the revisions and uploads. Maybe it's the minimalist in me.

TCnR Wrote:
> Good info, it would be nice. If it works out in
> the field I'd like to go with something less
> complex than Vista, there seems to be too much
> stuff that I don't need and it just causes
> problems and then the revisions and uploads. Maybe
> it's the minimalist in me.

TCnR,
To go really minimal, I attended a Windows Server 2008 launch last summer and got a free server disk for this OS. I installed it on another PC and this OS lacks the flashy Vista stuff and by others. It's not designed to be a desktop OS but there is a niche community running it like this for the 10-15% performance increase over Vista SP1. Just google "Windows 2008 Workstation" to read more. One really nice bonus is the Hyper-V which is one way to allow you to run virtual servers. I will be installing an XP virtual server along with a 64bit Win7 on this 2008 server platform. Along with the Win 7 beta, they are making the Win 2008 R2 available. You might try downloading that and playing with that. Should be really solid.

On the original topic, I have been running Vista 64 SP1 for 6 months and love it. It's been out for a couple years now so many of the original problems have been fixed. It just takes time to learn the differences when coming from XP.

Ryan Wilkerson
Fair Oaks, CA