by Andy Turner
Coastal Computers & Design

More families these days are deciding to buy a budget end computer to replace an aging system rather than spending more to get a higher spec model. In itself this is a good idea as the lower end models these days are more than capable of performing the majority of tasks expected of a modern PC – with the exception of high end gaming and video editing work.

Unfortunately, the options commonly available are limited at the moment due to the fact that the vast majority of ‘PCs’ – as opposed to Apples – come with one of the Vista versions. In my opinion, I have yet to see a budget PC running Vista Home Basic (which is all these systems can be expected to run) that performs nearly as well as a similar spec system running Windows XP. I have serviced some Vista computers over the past year that run so slowly as to be virtually unusable.  Many customers tell me that they are so sick of waiting for something to happen on their new shiny PC – that promised so much in the showroom – that the whole computing experience is just so frustrating that they don’t know why they bother using it at all. A memory upgrade, a new video card and removing the ’security suites’ and other junk that comes preinstalled on them provides some improvement but on the whole Vista is a major disappointment.

Netbooks are becoming very popular but you won’t see Vista on one of these – it’s one area that manufacturers have managed to get Microsoft to agree to continue providing XP – it was either that or leave the market wide open to Linux to exploit.

Now, hope is on the horizon for PC users in the form of the upcoming ‘Windows 7′ which looks to be a very impressive operating system. Seems that Microsoft has listened to the criticism and finally seen that the speed of Vista on lower spec systems is not satisfactory and the crippling security features just aren’t impressing end users at all.

* Windows 7 Preview running on a netbook *

Unfortunately though, late 2009 or sometime in 2010 is the expected release date of the new system – so what to do until then if you need a new PC but can’t afford a higher end model? Buy a computer with Windows XP! There are still some retailers (like me) that have access to XP and a modern Celeron computer with 2Gb RAM and a decent sized hard drive won’t break the bank and they run beautifully with XP – Home or Professional versions (I prefer the Pro myself but Home is satisfactory for most users).