Your current hardware would probably be a minimum for Vista, and even then you MIGHT 
need yet another new graphics card to run the Aero GUI. Also, Vista won't be available 
at retail till early next year and there are sure to be some updates early on as 
well. I fugure I'll wait till about this time next year before making any switch 
at home, maybe even later. 

At the company I work for, where we do custom software and hardware development, 
we are MSDN subscribers and have all the Beta releases since the original Longhorn 
release. I'm not one of the engineers, but I can still play with the two pretty high 
powered machines we have build 5365 installed on (and I think we have a pre-beta 
2 #5381 in house). It's nice. It's still not ready. It's, well, still Beta!

Your machine would run XP very comfortably and you'd be quite happy with it for the 
next year or more. And by the way, don't be fooled into thinking you need XP Pro. 
Unless you truly need some of the IT administration services built into it for corporate 
environments, XP Home is the same code base (NT 5.1) and still has a lot of stuff 
you'll eventually be turning off/disabling as well. I have both versions on several 
machines and can't tell the difference between them in normal, everyday use. I have 
only 21 tasks running with each and both of them run in about 190 MB RAM at boot 
(512 MB installed). That includes the firewall, antivirus, and Windows Defender Beta 
2.

By all means go for an XP upgrade if you're bored with ME, but do a clean install. 
I happen to like ME by the way, it would be better called Windows 98 Third Edition. 
There's a lot of hogwash out there about ME but for it's time and for the hardware 
available at the time it's a good OS. Here's probably one of the best summaries of 
ME, even though it was written early on:

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/windowsme.asp

If you learn your way around XP for a year or so you'll be better prepared to make 
the transition to Vista, plus you'll have a nice second machine around the house 
after you get your new Vista box!

Just my humble opinion...

Larry







On Wednesday, May 17, 2006 at 5:28 am, Enkel wrote:

>OK, so this question has probably been asked countless times before, but I simply 

>don't know the right terms to put in the search engine to find the answer.  So forgive 

>me ...
  I am currently running Me on a computer that is probably man enough to 

>take XP. (2.8Ghz Celeron D, 80Gig hard disk, 512Mb memory, 128Mb graphics card) 
It's 

>getting to the stage where I should think of updating my O/S - newer programs are 

>either running badly  or not installing under Me.  Question is - should I be patient 

>and wait for Vista, or should I just bite the bullet and upgrade to XP, risking 
having 

>yet another out-of-date O/S within a year?
 Your suggestions gratefully received. 

> Thank you.
Norm 

• Reply or follow-up to this message

• Search this forum
• Start a new thread on a different subject

• Report abuse of the forum