I have never heard of anyone loading Vista or W/7 on their existing
machine. It is generally a machine sold with that OS bundled in it. I
assume they would use an adequate machine.
*I* loaded Vista on two existing machines. I was an official beta tester
for MS in those days. I never had serious problems with Vista.
The Windows 7 laptop is also a HP Pavilion, similar in terms of speed
and also has 4Gb of RAM. It has an Intel processor (forget which) and
is also a 64 bit machine. The big advantage of it over the Vista (for
me) is that it can view and process MP4 videos directly. XP and Vista
cannot deal with MP4. You have to convert them.
VLC player (free) has no problems with MP4 files and it will run on
W/98 if you want. You must be talking about Media Player. The only
files I have associated with that is WMV. VLC plays damned near
anything.
Generally "new" features in a microsoft OS are things that were
available before but not from MS. They either buy them out or they
simply reverse engineer a similar ap.
I started using VLC player close to a decade ago because it plays the
MPG files that my ReplayTV saves. That is the fastest way to get video
onto your file server. If I know I want to keep something I DVR it on
the Replay and transfer it to the PC.
The Sat/Cable DVRs won't let you do that. (Sonic Blue was sued out of
existence because it was so easy to do things with the content)
The iMac is a bit faster in terms of processing audio recordings that I
do but it's not *that* much faster to make it a major selling point. It
also has twice the RAM (8Gb) than the Windows machines which probably
accounts for it's slightly faster speed.
Anyway, I guess my point is that I think it depends on what kind of
computer you are using and what kind of applications you use often.
For e-mail, word processing and other non-demanding applications just
about any computer and OS will do the job.
My point exactly. In fact, you have to work pretty hard to find
something that needs that blazing speed. Most of it is simply churning
hard to feed the bloated OS code.