So…we bought a new desktop last night from Dell to replace our broken, and to be honest, lemon of a Toshiba Satellite A60 – I would not recommend one of these!
The stats are – 320gb hard drive, AMD (a client) 3800+ dual core processor and 2gb of RAM running at 667 mhz with2 DIMMS.
Not fancy but should be enough for emailing, blogging and media play. One thing got me a little spooked though this morning. The View.
1. Will the pre-installed Vista play nicely with iTunes (no pun intended)? All my music is in iTunes…
2. How will Vista cope with Firefox and will I still be able to download all the Firefox plugins I have? While IE7 is alright, I’m not a huge fan and would rather keep the fox…
Any answers gratefully received!
**UPDATE** – Thanks to Joe Thornley‘s comment, I’m confident iTunes and Firefox are compatible with Vista. People are also recommending switching to a Mac but I’ll have to leave that for a couple of years…
**UPDATE 2** – Apparently Mr. Thornely is having…issues with Vista. The same sort of issues that Armand was having. I’ll cross my fingers.
Ed Lee's Blogging Me Blogging You | @edlee 
Ed, I haven’t gotten into Vista yet, but my general advice is:
Anything to do with OSs, especially MS OSs, is never ‘quick’.
Ed,
I’ve got Vista installed on my Dell Latitude laptop. Happily playing iTunes and using Firefox to read and post to my blog.
So fear not. Load up your favourite software.
Ed,
I cannot stress enough the importance of what I’m about to say: Once you go Mac, you never go back.
I know what you’re thinking: they’re so expensive. But you get what you pay for and everything works. This iBook of mine has survived Californian hipsters, Vegas nights, and Canadian winters, and it’s still hanging in there. Even this Norther climate can’t make it freeze up.
Besides, we’re talking about hardware from the people that made iTunes.
I see the Macolytes have descended. Fair enough. but since you have already bought your replacement, I am looking at the more practical advice from Joe– also, I did notice specifically that the latest iTunes upgrade had some mentions of Vista among the release notes, so not surprised that’s working.
In all, you are brave to be an early Vista adopter. I am wary of being among the first guinea pigs for any MSFT release. Good luck.
I am curious to hear what Vista does break for you– that’s the sort of productivity killer I can’t stand (iTunes 7.0, I’m still mad at you).
Sorry – I’ve come late to this party. iTunes and Vista, for me, have not worked well at all. I have a large music library – 12,000 odd songs – and about 15-20 video podcast subscriptions. My Vista install was fresh and should have caused no issues on my hardware (and hasn’t elsewhere) but iTunes hasn’t played well.
iTunes glitches graphically, quits at random, has ludicrously poor performance, and has almost completely been abandoned in favour of Winamp.
Hope you’ve had a less painful experience! Also: don’t ever use the Windows ‘remove hardware safely’ thing with your iPod under Vista — it reportedly causes corruption…
Hmmm, so good, bad and downright scarey.
My iTunes library is, thanks to my trigger happy girlfriend, not as extensive as Armand’s. The install should be “native” from Dell’s side and I’ve gone for the 2GB of RAM that is recommended for Vista. So I guess I’m hopeful right now.
In terms of being “brave”, I don’t think Dell gave me much of a choise on which OS to use. Although I see if we had waited we may have been lumbered with a Linux system, putting us at the mercy of the freetards 🙂
As for the Mac suggestion, as soon as iStudio becomes a Mac shop, I’ll look into it. Right now we’re strongly biased to MS based development.
Thanks for all your suggestions, warnings and quips (Bob)!
Ed