which windows brand to get?

[darsunt]

That vista thread is too dense for me. I just want to know if it is unstable. At my old university they installed Vista on all the computers, and then they decided to take it off all of them. Sounds like trouble.

XP would be nice. No one seems to be selling the home version, and I heard XP professional is essential if you do networking.

I plan to use the box for film editing and backup now, and database and networking later.

I was planning to install linux but I'm in a hurry and no good film editing software works on linux!

 

[superdave1984]

I would go with XP Pro.

 

[Osiris]

Well if you are a basic home user, dont know much around the OS and just want it to "work", get XP, if you dont mind working out some bugs, waiting for patches, updates, etc, work with Vista. I dont care what anyone says on here, Vista still has it kinks to get worked out and for those users that are using Vista, the obviously tweaked it here and there or just dont do much on it at all.

 

[darsunt]

I'm persuaded, I'm going with XP pro. I do plan to pushthis computer hard, and I don't know much about tweaking windows (I can tweak linux some). Now I just have to work up the nerve to pay the extra $100.

It's a b**** that you can't transfer window ops to another computer. I'd really like the option at some future date of reformatting this box and using it for something else.

 

[Jorsoft]

You can transfer windows installs to other computers. You can only have one copy installed on one machine at any given time. I've been using the same copy of xp pro for 3 different computers now and I've never had a hitch.
ANd if you're not going to do a lot of account sahring, complicated office-type networking, or anything like that, you should probably just buy Windows XP Media Center Edition. It's basically XP Pro with Media Center installed and it's a lot cheaper. $109+ship at Newegg.
Newegg.com - Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 SP2b - OEM