OS To Buy for 3 year Timeframe

Howdy,

We only have 4-5 seats of SW, but the time has come in our buying
cycle to get new computers. I'm looking for advice on what you would
buy, XP or Vista if you were going to keep a computer for 3 years that
you run SW on. From the searching I've done on this group, most
people say don't mess with SW Vista yet, and probably wait until SW
Vista x64 comes out, which could be sometime in 2008. Unfortunately,
we can't wait until 2008 (or realistically 2009) to buy new
computers. If you had to buy a new computer now, would you just go
with XP and install SW 2007 and forget about the whole Vista thing
until 2009?

Thanks in advance.

~pope

 

No question, this is an easy answer. For now buy XP Pro SP2 (& be
sure to be guaranteed to get the CDs or DVD, for when you need to
reinstall). It may be SP2 in Vista before people want to trust a
switchover. I used Win 2000 until SP2 came out, and I didn't miss
anything.

SolidWorks is working as hard as they can on VISTA edition, but still
that doesn't say anything about how long it takes to get SWks running
like a clock nor about add-ins and when they would be ready.

Better to deal with the devil we all know here on this Usenet group
rather than the one heading into Wild Indian Territory, where
workarounds will be the norm for quite awhile.

In two years, the world will have changed a LOT.

Bo

 

Hi there,
See if you can find a PC vendor that will supply with XP loaded and
agree to upload Vista when you're ready for it.
There's a PC supplier in the UK called Scan (www.scan.co.uk) making
that offer.
Regards,
David

 

XP. Tried and true.

1. OS is stable and well known.
2. Hardware is available
3. Vista doesn't add any gotta have capability
4. Support for VISTA isn't well developed (I am talking about general
knowledge here or elsewhere)
5. Cost of retraining for VISTA

And one bit of FUD which I am sorry to say I have to add

Since SW is so tight with MSoft the possibility exists that they will
give future releases priority on VISTA instead of XP. This could mean
orphaning XP versions. On the other hand, if what you have gets the
job done why keep up subscription?

Since you are looking at a three year time frame the above risk is
probably minimal especially if you use SW a year behind current
release.

TOP

 

Or...if you are indeed wishing to test yourself to see how VISTA &
SolidWorks progress, you can have the computer delivered with Win XP
Pro on one hard drive, and have a copy of VISTA on a separate 2nd hard
drive when you want to start testing it.

Thus you keep your testing really separate from daily work.

Bo

 

Ok, I'll throw in my perspective as well. The cost of switching to Vista
later is less than the costs that will likely be incurred running SW on
Vista now. There is no performance reason to be using Vista, in fact the
current situation is very much the opposite. Specifically, video drivers
are not ready, and SW for Vista is still in pre-release.

In the past, SW has supported previous the MS OS until MS stop supporting
it. SW only recently dropped support of Win2000 (one of the 06 SP's IIRC).
MS will be supporting XP for several more years.

 

Howdy,

Thanks for all the feedback. We don't do subscription, we typically
buy the latest working version, update it to the last SP we can get
from our VAR, then repeat the process every 3 years. Which is why, I'm
embarrassed to say, we are on SW 2004 right now. However now we are
working with a vendor who uses SW 2007 so that is probably going to
push us to get SW 2007 so we can share assemblies. This makes sense
anyway because it's about time in in our 3 year cycle to upgrade our
computers and SW version.

I'm going to recomend a XP rig that we will install the SW 2007 on and
hopefully that will keep us going for another 3 years.

Thanks for all the feedback.

~pope