Which windows?

[duckingzebra]

is there any opinions on whichs is best right now? media center? home edition? professional? and whats this X64 edition?

[simple_inhibition]

my opinion is to go with XP home for now and wait a year or so till vista has all the bugs worked out. other people here may say XP pro. either OS is good, but ive personally never seen the need for XP pro for me. X64 is XP Pro with coding to take advantage of 64 bit processors (athlon 64/x2/fx/opteron, pentium 4 5xx/6xx, pentium d, core2duo) supposed to be faster, but i have no experience with them. but im sure some people here have had some experience with it.

[duckingzebra]

if i buy media center i get a upgrade coupon for vista, that way i dont have to buy one now, and then buy vista.

[Hitman]

Windows Media Center has alot of the same networking features that Pro has but also integrates support for multi media products like a TV card. Has its own TV Recorder. I don't know a whole lot about it, my wife uses it.

I feel lost when i try to use Home, I have used nothing but pro since XP came out. I have used x64 a few times, but I still have problems with driver support in that OS.

[Panda Man]

XP Pro has dual core support and more networking options over Home. I'm not very familiar with Media Center, but I have heard that it has a few more bugs and such over XP Pro. However those may have been worked out in updates. Take Hitman's word for media center. If this is for gaming and its not dual core (looking at your sig, it isn't) and networking isn't a problem, go with home. Else, go with pro, unless this a media only PC (music, movies, etc, not really for gaming) then consider Media Center.

[Capper]

If you can, hold off til the end of the month and just buy vista when it comes out, if you can't, buy the Media Center Edition......as pointed out its much better than Home

[yurimxpxman]

I definitely would recommend sticking with XP for the time being. Microsoft's recognized their problems with Vista and they've already started developing a better system (Vienna). Vista will not ever be worth $400, especially considering how closely Vienna is being released from Vista.

Now, as far as XP goes, that really depends on what you need your system for. If you're going to be working with a lot of music and videos, the media center edition would be a great way to go. But if not, I'd recommend sticking with the home edition. While it's true that it does not have as many security and network features as the professional edition, the fact that most of these things can be accessed in safe mode and/or provided for free by a 3rd party makes the extra $100 for the professional edition look pretty outrageous.

And as a side note, I'd also recommend not to rule out other operating systems completely. Both Ubuntu 6.10 and Fedora Core 6 would be great choices. I'd also recommend OS X if their hardware was better, but it's not, and there's no legal way to run it natively on a PC.

[Hitman]

Originally Posted by yurimxpxman

And as a side note, I'd also recommend not to rule out other operating systems completely. Both Ubuntu 6.10 and Fedora Core 6 would be great choices. I'd also recommend OS X if their hardware was better, but it's not, and there's no legal way to run it natively on a PC.

Zip it penguin boy, no Linux propaganda in a Windows thread.

[Tyreal]

Zip it penguin boy, no Linux propaganda in a Windows thread.

Thats right! You tell 'em.

I personally would go with Windows XP Professional. Just my personal opinion....

[yurimxpxman]

I almost forgot; as far as the x86_64 version goes, I'd rule that out completely at the moment. There are a few advantages such as a (small) speed increase and support for more RAM, but there isn't enough support for it yet by the software vendors. Even Linux has better x86_64 driver support right now. It's going to be quite a while before everything's going to be compatible with 64 bit operating systems.