the best place to buy a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium online

[crmpicco]

Can anyone recommend the best place to buy a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium? WV Home Basic seems quite poor, but I have a P4 512MB RAM 80GB HDD Samsung Laptop and think I could get Vista on there? Any thoughts? Should it be ok? Is there somewhere I can buy it online - cheap as possible?

Picco

[ghell]

scan.co.uk (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Products.asp?CatID=37&Category=Software&ThumbNails=Yes&FilterKeywords=&FilterMinPrice=&FilterMaxPrice=&FilterCategories=67&FilterCategories=310&OrderBy=3)and ebuyer are pretty good for getting vista in the UK. I got my OEM copy of Vista Ultimate x64 from scan (I also built my pc at the time, which is why I got OEM not retail.)

Assuming you have an actual graphics chipset on the laptop (not an "Intel Accelerated Graphics 945 or whatever, something from nvidia or ati") because without a real graphics chipset you wont be able to run much more than home basic anyway I would reccomend upgrading to at LEAST 1GiB of ram (2GiB if possible) before putting vista on. I have 2GiB in my laptop (Toshiba Satellite Pro P100) running Buisness x86 and 2GiB of 800MHz 4-4-4-12 ram in my pc running Ultimate x64 and neither of those are really enough. They take 700MiB of ram just to idle. I have seen vista buisness n running on a pentium m laptop with 1GiB of ram with only intel accelerated graphics and, well, it wasn't a nice sight.

Edit: Also assuming that your P4 is half decent, I used to have a (decent, for the time) P4 laptop that was 700Mhz when on reduced power mode and 1.4GHz on full power. It also had a Mobility Radeon 9000 which isnt good enough for vista. My girlfriend left it on the bed and the graphics chip fried in it anyway though ;)

Oh by the way unless you use your pc as a media centre pc, or ever want to connect an xbox 360 to it etc, you might be better off with buisness rather than home premium. The difference between buisness and buisness n is that buisness n comes with no media player etc (which may be fine, I assume you can still use VLC etc :p) and possibly no aero.

[marek_mar]

n versions are without WMP only, though you can install anyway.
You might also consider not buying Vista at all and wait these ~1.5 years for the next windows.

[ghell]

What makes you say the next windows is coming out in 1.5 years?

[oracleguy]

Microsoft "says" the next version will be out in 2009ish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_%22Vienna%22

[ghell]

Ok, cool. I doubt Vienna will actually be released by that date though, judging by the windows track record.

[crmpicco]

Aye, i'd be really surprised if Windows 7 is out in 2009!! More like 2011, more realistic. :-)

Is there a cheap upgrade I can buy? Just to move from XP Home SP2 -> Vista Home Premium.

Picco

[ghell]

The "Retail Upgrade" is more expensive (£130 for Home Premium) than a new OEM copy (£70 for home premium). Note that the OEM copy you have to choose whether you want 32bit or 64bit when you buy it. Retail comes with both on the disk.

The difference between OEM, Retail and Retail Upgrade is that OEM legally needs to be purchased with hardware (and you may need a system builders licence from microsoft, I don't know.. it comes with a booklet about system builders licences), Retail is just a normal copy and Retail Upgrade you need to have the previous version installed (or maybe just need a licence key from a previous version, I haven't tried using upgrade.). I'm guessing vista retail upgrade is just an upgrade from xp.

By the way, asside from XP, most successive windows releases took about 2 to 3 years.

[Inigoesdr]

That is interesting. But the article that article links to has been taken down. :(

[effpeetee]

That is interesting. But the article that article links to has been taken down. :(
Yes. I have removed the info as it is a bit dodgy. But it does work.

Frank