Vista

It's telling when an operating system requires 77 updates to be able to install its first Service Pack, followed by another 79 to be able to install its second Sevice Pack... and that's not even including any updates after that.

Also: Win 5.3 (XP Pro SP3) -- 1.6 Gb after install.
Win 6.0 Home Premium (Vista) -- 16 Gb after install with no OEM bloatware (20 with).


(For strict OS version number comparison, Mac System 6.0.8 was under 800k and 7.0 under 1.4 Mb for bare bones )

Why in God's name would you even consider installing that bug-ridden pile of crap? Jump right to WinDoze 7 - I've heard good things about that one.

At only 150 Gb hard drive and 2 Gb RAM, I'd sooner go down to XP -- but Zombeh had a heart attack when I tried that route, as it came with Vista.

Bluh. If you've got an Intel chip, I'd sooner advise Hackintoshing it with Leopard.

^AMD.

Annnd, fuck it. I don't want to restore to Factory Default and deal with the HP bloatware; the slimmed down version of Vista can't go up to SP2 for some reason. 7, here I come.

I upgraded from Vista to Win 7 as soon as I could, vista was a monumental failure comprable to the horror that was windows ME. Win 7 is what vista should have been. But not overly keen on the direction of win 8, to me its a glorified media centre.

Calling HP to see if I can upgrade to 7 (64bit) without dealing with driver shenanigans first. Yeah, I'm not chancing another mess.

7

Dammit. HP doesn't support my laptop under 7

They may not support it, but if Vista "works" on it, 7 should work better.

You mean the part where it's dumber than a Venus flytrap? Or maybe the part where it assumes you're dumber than dirt?

I can't do directx 11 gaming with xp or vista.

I found that some Vista drivers will work with win 7, type in your model number into HP's website and it might point you to a place you can download Win 7 drivers. If it will run Vista, the laptop should have no problem with Win 7, I found my PC ran better with 7 than with Vista without changing anything on my PC.

HP doesn't offer anything for 7 for my model. I've seen elsewhere that others have successfully gone from Win 6 32 to 7 64 (seriously; crippling a 64 bit CPU and mobo with a 32 bit version of 6 , HP), so once I've gotten everything stabilized on this reinstall of Vista and the bloatware stripped off, some additional RAM installed... I'll go up to 7.

Why not go straight to 7?

Because he isn't listening to advice, despite not understanding how this works.

Problem with Vista is that even after a brand spanking new clean install, it degrades so quickly compared to win 7 and even XP. I usually do a new clean re-install of an OS every year, with Vista it was every 5 months or so.

Not enough RAM. Can't afford the RAM yet.

I managed to get two years on Vista. o.0

If you've got enough RAM for Vista, you've got enough for 7.

Depends how it is used, I can ke bept on that long but in my experience it slows down and bloats out.

At work we ghost the machines with an XP image. Vista and even the Win 7 machines can be set to XP via ghost. Of course my machine's HD took a shit Thurs, so my new comp is our new Win 7 image.