Why do you want Vista? I'm looking at getting another (refurbished) XP machine. There's nothing wrong with XP imho, and most large businesses won't touch Vista. My PC / network man says don't touch Vista. He finds it a pain to work with compared with XP.

I use Vista on my main laptop and it is not as bad as many make out but I still query why you want to upgrade an existing machine.

Many things in Vista are meant to be easier for the inexperienced user but power users will have to learn new ways.

File copying though easier to do is significantly slower.

Vista requires more RAM to work well - my laptop has 2GB but I wish it could take more.

Stability in Vista is not as good but not as bad as some would have you believe. I reboot my laptop about once a week, but other machines can run for months at a time.

The bitlocker HDD encryption system on Vista Business and Ultimate works very well and IMO should be on every laptop.

Optimst, Seymour I've heard Mircosoft will soon stop doing updates for XP so thats one of my main reasons

I want to stream my videos, music files to my tv by wireless thinking of getting either a Netgear EVA8000 or PS3 any other ideas???

Looking at either upgrading my Acer Aspire desktop AMD Sempron 3100+ to a Core2 Quad Q6600 which would be cost effective new motherboard cpu and memory or new pc

Any good deals at the moment 250-450

There is only one choice for good hardware, the Intel I7.

It's still in short supply and a bit pricey but coming down already. I can't remember when a new proccessor offered such a performance advantage over ALL it's predecessors.

"Any good deals at the moment 250-450"

I used ComputerDoctors on the recommendation of Exec.

I have no idea whether they are the ultimate in megs per buck - but that was not my priority. I wanted good solid guys you can trust and having been twice to their base near Northampton I feel comfortable with the two PC's I bought from them.

What I took was essentially their basic offer - but I'm sure they'd add bells and whistles if you asked for them.

TP

My tuppence worth: Vista is slow compared to XP & not really worth paying the extra, imo. I will certainly wait now for a new operating system, but that could be years before all the bugs are ironed out & the price comes down to a realistic level.
If you buy Vista now how long will the support continue when a new system is released? If you are happy with XP, stick with it. I think you will be disappointed in Vista, which as Optimist says, is user friendly for the novice.

With regard to updates on XP, I can't imagine that MS will stop security updates for several more years.

Anyone used or has views on the Brother MFC-235C printer?

Bought myself a PC on ebay and I want to copy the HD before I use it so can clone it if the HD fails. The software is fully kosher but no install discs, so I want to protect my investment. What's the best software to do this, and would it be best to back this up to my portable HD as it only has a CD r/w drive?

Thanks

SC

All that you need to reinstall the OS on a new disk are the product keys as you can always get hold of a setup disk. The best way to record all of the product keys is to run Belarc advisor and save the output to your printer and an external disk. It may be that the install files are hidden on the hsrd disk.

To make a backup of the hard disk, use a program such as Paragon Partition Manager which will make a copy of your entire disk and save it to an external HD. You will end up with a file of several GB so it will not fit on a CD but may fit a DVD. In any case, save to a hard drive first.

Some versions of Paragon Partition Manager are availible free, although the latest one looks so good that I may buy it.

After you have a backup of the PC, it may be worth rebuilding from scratch as you don't really know what is on it.

Cheers Opti, that's superb and very comprehensive answer.

One solution to 90% of the problems on here.......











Buy an Imac !!

Can anyone tell me where the Firefox favourites file is located so I can copy to a new pc

It's spelt '...orites' not '...ourites' and is actually located within Windows.

Just to make sure they can be seen:

Right Click on My Computer on your Desktop. Select Explore. Select Tools from the Tool Bar. Then select Folder Options/View. Select Show hidden files and folders. Then go to C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\Favorites. Right click/unhide.

brianboru

Or ypu could buy a lawnmower!

;)

ExecLine
I assumed they would be the favorites for IE and the firefox favorites would be somewhere else. Is that the case

Jeff

Firefox refers to Favorites as 'Bookmarks' and this task is generally called 'exporting' or 'importing' as the case may be.

I found this link: http://www.ehow.com/how_1000389_export-save-bookmarks.html

ExecLine
Thanks for the info. I found that the IE favs and Firefox favs are in the same folder.
Cheers

My browser (IE8 & BT/Yahoo) has stopped downloading the latest page when operating, so I have to refresh to get the most up to date page. I seem to recollect, in the dim & distant past, a setting in Internet Options, to always check that the page is always the most up to date or something similar. I can't find it.
Thanks in advance.

Could I just go back to Seymour's post 7641 and Opti's reply please? I have a similar problem and I don't know if I've understood things correctly.

For ages now the hard drive on my laptop has been showing signs of failure and I know that I either need to replace either the laptop or its hard drive. For now I'm just leaving the laptop on 24/7 because I know that if I turn it off, I might not be able to get it going again.

My problem is that I have some software on the laptop for which I can no longer find the installation CD and I don't really want to shell out 700 for a new copy if I don't need to. Would the installation files be buried somewhere on the hard drive? Or could I use one of these partition wotsits to recover it?