New Laptop Advice

[Fay]

I  am thinking it may be a good idea to get a new imaging laptop. Before something happens to my Toshiba, i could get a new one up & running, in my own time.

I am thinking i will finally have to go over to Windows 7. Are all our programs compatible with it?  Being that I have XP, Will all my images etc transfer ok from this hard drive to a windows 7 one? Is it that much different from XP?

Please can you give me recommendations on a new one?

Thanks a lot in advance

[mickw]

Although my W7 laptop is misbehaving at the moment (probably something I did), I managed to install everything I used with XP so you should have no problem.

If you were happy with with the Tosh, why not try and get it repaired first ?
A quick search came up with a PC repair in Bromley
http://www.pcrepairs.me.uk/

Worth giving them a call

[RobertM]

I got mine from Dell Outlet, you can find some good offers there.  I've not had any problems running all my astro programs with the one I got with Win 7 32bit (Pro version) installed.

Robert

[Rocket Pooch]

Hi Fay,

I use Wndows 7 64bit, no issues at all and makes XP look very very slow!  I would recomment 64 bit, our Dell home laptops were £379 4GB, 500GB hard drive from Tesco.

I have AIP4WIN, Photoshop, PHD, Nebulosity, Cart du Ciel, ASCOM, EQMod all running on it with no problems.  The virus scanner is Microsoft Security own.

I have no idea why people still recommend XP, I have this on the Works laptop and its turned a nice quick laptop into an unreliable heap of slowness.

Chris

[Fay]

Robert & Chris, have you both got Inspirons?

[Rocket Pooch]

Hi,

Yes its one of them, don't get a good laptop if your going to put XP on it.

[RobertM]

Mine's a Latitude 5520

[Carole]

The only thing that occurs to me is the drivers.  I've been bitten once before when I transferred to Vista from XP and could not get drivers for my webcam for Vista and had problems downloading PHD to my Vista laptop whereas I had no such problems with XP.  I had to keep two laptops running just because of the webcam, but I've now replaced that webcam so it's no longer a problem.

Other than that, once I got used to Vista, I have had no further problems with it for imaging. 
I know this is not W7, but I guess it's a similar scenario.

Carole

[Fay]

better the devil you know... as much as possible, especially in our game

[Mike]

Vista was undoubtedly Microsofts biggest mistake (Behind IE6 and Microsoft Bob). Nothing worked on it. You would have been better off with Windows 3.1.

In fact, according to Wikipedia, PC World rated it as the biggest tech disappointment of 2007, and it was rated by InfoWorld as #2 of Tech's all-time 25 flops.

Windows 7 is a vast improvement and I have to agree with Chris in that it is an improvement over XP. Unless you are running very very old hardware that may not have had any updates to their drivers for many years then Windows 7 is your best bet and there will be drivers for it. Remember that Windows 7 has now been out for 2 years and XP is now 10 years old.

There are some annoyances with Windows 7, but they can all be disabled (such as the incredibly irritating UAC). Vista put off a lot of people from updating to WIndows 7, but trust me, they are totally different operating systems.

[Mac]

quick question.

can you run 32bit software on a 64bit windows 7 machine?

Mac.

[Mike]

Yes

[Rocket Pooch]

quick question.

can you run 32bit software on a 64bit windows 7 machine?

Mac.

Your having a laugh

[Fay]

not the sort of question Mac would ask, so i would think he is having a laugh.

I have wondered that myself   

[mickw]

I don't think 32 bit programs run on XP 64 bit