Vista...

[Jakemaster]

...so, what can I expect besides headaches from Vista when my laptop comes?  

What I mean is, how much extra crap will there be that I can get rid of and replace with resource light free stuff?  Is there free anti-virus/spyware for Vista?

Oh ya, even though I can figure it out on my own I might as well ask:  Is Firefox compatible with Vista?  I truly hate IE7, Firefox 2 is nice, I like Opera but I'm starting to get back into Firefox.

Oh, and I assume FS9 will work with Vista (in other words, I HOPE FS9 works with Vista, I might kill myself if it doesnt)

[Ashton Lawson]

for performance, i dont know much, but heres a site that'll help:

www.tweakvista.com

the other website was www.tweakxp.com which helps XP a bit, but i dont know much about Vista.

as for free antivirus, theres Windows Defender, which is free from MS themselves.

[Gunny04]

Vista is quite decent, At least ultimate is (Just installed it last weekend) For surfing etc its quite fine and IE7 isn't all that bad, its simple and its always there to use. I looked at the hardware thread and you are getting home premium edition of vista, which doesn't have all the extras Ultimate does. The only problems you'll have are trying to figure out where everything is and getting used to aero (Still getting headaches from all the funny colors etc) You shouldn't have any gaming issues because you have a decent Video card in the lappy as well. My Vista ultimate idles about 700-800mb of ram, thats with a 495MB ram leeching 7300LE, so I don't think you'll run into any issues at all. As for programs and support for vista, it's not quite here yet as far as I can tell. You'll most likely enjoy vista once you get past the erm... learning curve?

Gunny

[Jakemaster]

Vista is quite decent, At least ultimate is (Just installed it last weekend) For surfing etc its quite fine and IE7 isn't all that bad, its simple and its always there to use. I looked at the hardware thread and you are getting home premium edition of vista, which doesn't have all the extras Ultimate does. The only problems you'll have are trying to figure out where everything is and getting used to aero (Still getting headaches from all the funny colors etc) You shouldn't have any gaming issues because you have a decent Video card in the lappy as well. My Vista ultimate idles about 700-800mb of ram, thats with a 495MB ram leeching 7300LE, so I don't think you'll run into any issues at all. As for programs and support for vista, it's not quite here yet as far as I can tell. You'll most likely enjoy vista once you get past the erm... learning curve?

Gunny

I'm not really concerned with RAM usage too much, I can probably get rid of some processes and I have 2GB (graphics has its own RAM)

[dcunning30]

One of the first things I did was to configure my Vista setup for performance.

[Jakemaster]

My issue with Vista is so far I've heard nothing GOOD about it, and when I've used it in stores I was disappointed.  It's pretty, but I like the simplicity of XP.  I thought the little gadgets you can have are cool especially that one that shows RAM usage and CPU usage.

I've been reading some stuff, it seems like it is a lot like XP in the sense that you can turn off all the extra fluff like window transparency etc that should really take it easy on the computer.  Not only do I want it for performance but battery life, I get a sense that the less resources I use (especially graphics) the longer the laptop will last without being plugged in, which will be nice when I'm at school if I want to use it somewhere that an outlet just isn't convenient.  

[Gunny04]

I installed my ultimate copy with nothing extra and I ran 44 processes..... Have fun turning those off, the entire system relies on them from what I can tell, I run 64 bit so I might not be able to be much help in telling you how it is, I can be honest about my gaming compared to XP, and that is it sucks, But then again thats my fault.

Gunny

[freedomhays]

I bought a Dell lap top and it came with a lot of extra crap on it,

[MWISimmer]

Grisoft AVG works the same as it did in XP, and is still free  :)