Windows XP or VIsta For New System?

[Fyron]

Santiago said:
It is if he's going to plug in peripherals. Printers and scanners are hit or miss with scanners being worse.

Isn't there a totally redone driver architecture in Vista, where hardware drivers can no longer run in kernel mode? I'd except some growing pains with poorly written device drivers under such a change.

[aegisx]

There is, UMDF. However this is not required and Drivers can still be be made the older ways, so I am not sure how many use it yet.

[Santiago]

Imperator Fyron said:

Isn't there a totally redone driver architecture in Vista, where hardware drivers can no longer run in kernel mode? I'd except some growing pains with poorly written device drivers under such a change.

I haven't really dug that far into it. I guess I've reached that saturation point where having the latest and greatest is not that important anymore. I can do what I want to do with what I already have. Depending on how old the peripheral is, there may not be new drivers so it may not work, it may work, or it may run in a limited mode.

My company recently gave me a laptop to use- I had been and still use my own 95%. The only reason I needed it was to talk to some very specific equipment. It's a Gateway 650Mhz running Windows 2K. It's slow and archaic but it has a serial port which a USB/PCMIA to serial adapter can't match. That is it's only importance to me.

Actually I am in the market for a new system to replace an older desktop and a 3 yr old 3.4 Ghz laptop suffering from a graphics card slow heat death. Looking to replace with one system. Laptop, desktop , maybe build my own laptop, haven't decided yet. But I want to be able to plug in my stuff and it works. NOW, not next driver release. Games, photos, movies, video editing and audio. So I'll be going with XP. Just my view on things.