From: "Rich Gauszka" 

 It's going to be a pretty basic laptop if it just ships with Vista Basic.
If you are comfortable with XP Home I'd just look for a laptop that comes
with that as an OEM copy of XP Home will run around $90.  ( see link below
).  I'd put that $90 into better hardware in the laptop as there may be
some nice discounts as retailers clear their XP laptops.  You'll also be
scrounging for firewall software as most offerings for Vista seem to be in
the beta category currently

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16832116056

not really point B. but you may want to see what OS recovery software comes
with the laptop. Most seem to just want to blast your partition away and
have you start over from scratch. I'd be more worried about Vista's
embedded drm but we probably won't see what the ramifications are for a few
months



"Gary Britt"  wrote in
message news:45b6b11f$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> I've got an XP Home based laptop that I use for work.  I have it pretty
> well customized and it works well for me (almost as well as Win2K Pro).
> Probably just the networking of XP Home that is a bit less nice than Win2K
> Pro and the inaccessibility of a few features/interfaces to possible
> settings that is the biggest difference for me.  However, after effort,
> research, and cruising varies places I am able to customize XP Home to my
> liking and full usability.
>
> I was just looking at some computers on a flyer from Wal-Mart and I
> noticed these machines would be shipping preloaded with windows Vista
> Basic.  My understanding is that Windows Vista Basic is basically XP Home.
>
>
> So Here are my questions.  Since Vista Basic is basically XP Home and I
> like XP Home would I be happy with Vista Basic??
>
> A.  Is Vista Basic going to be slower and resource hoggish compared to XP
> Home?  If so by how much?
>
> B.  Does the Vista deactivation features make it impossible to trust and
> therefore unusable regardless of the answers to my other questions?
>
> C.  Any compelling feature in Vista Basic not in XP Home?
>
> So what's your recommendation regarding Vista Basic versus XP Home?
>
> Should I buy an OEM license for Win2K or XP Pro/Home and wipe Vista Basic
> off a new computer?  I'm also considering multi-booting Linux and XP
> Home/Vista Basic as part of a migration to Linux permanently because I
> don't like where Microsoft wants to take me today.?
>
> Gary

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