One good point for Vista, but...

[Ned]

I've been running Vista on my old 2.8GHz machine for about a month. The one thing I haven't seen mentioned in any review is how sharp the screen text is. If you're not seeing it on your PC running Vista, hook up a recent LCD monitor using the DVI connection. For those of us over 50, the quality of the screen is a major point for moving to Vista.  No previous Windows or the Linux config I'm running on the same box can equal it.  Really nice.

That said, if my business depended on it, I'd stick with XP Pro.  Don't move to Vista until at least Service Pack 1, which is gonna be out Real Soon Now.  If your household has non-Vista machines, buy either Vista Business or Ultimate so that you can adjust the V-Box to play well with others.

My main desktop is a Vista/Ubuntu dual-boot, and I'm using Ubuntu whenever I can.

Ned

 

[Dave Ronyak]

I'm running VISTA on a Dell Inspiron E1505 that I purchased new less than a year ago, and for which I paid extra to get a non-glare screen.  I find the screen display to be inferior to that of the 4 year old Dell Latitude PC running XP 2000 Professional that my company provided to me, both of which are greatly inferior to the display of either my son's iMac (large desktop model) or my daughter's little Apple laptop.  Maybe I degraded the image when I chose display settings to give me a larger text size.

Dave R.

 

[eweber]

I'm running VISTA on a Dell Inspiron E1505 that I purchased new less than a year ago, and for which I paid extra to get a non-glare screen.  I find the screen display to be inferior to that of the 4 year old Dell Latitude PC running XP 2000 Professional that my company provided to me, both of which are greatly inferior to the display of either my son's iMac (large desktop model) or my daughter's little Apple laptop.  Maybe I degraded the image when I chose display settings to give me a larger text size.

Dave R.

I recently got a new iMac at work and the quality of the display seems superior to my 4 PC with LCD displays including a high end 24" (no bragging intended).
I don't think that it is only the quality of the screen per say that is excellent but also the actual rendering of the text that is great.

Emmanuel

 

[Ned]

Maybe I degraded the image when I chose display settings to give me a larger text size.

Depends.  As long as you stuck with the screen's native resolution (say, 1600x1200 or whatever) and got your larger text size by adjusting font size with "DPI Scaling", you wouldn't have made the screen sharpness look worse.

If on the other hand you made the text larger by choosing a screen resolution less than the LCD's native one, the result is likely to look less good.  Changing the screen resolution works on CRT technology, but isn't the way to the best LCD image.

The difference is significant enough that it's worth checking.  If you'd like a hand, Dave, PM me.

Emmanuel is right to mention the rendering.  Every aspect contributes to the effect, but for my situation researching the details isn't that useful.  All I'm saying is that a decent (Planar 2011M) LCD, using the DVI connection to a decent video card (512Mb Radeon), and run at the LCD's native resolution, is significantly clearer when run by Vista than by Windows 2000, XP, or by Ubuntu Linux 7.10 without tweaking.  On Windows, the DPI Scaling is set to Large (125%).

If this were a hardcore contest between Windows and Linux, it would be necessary to point out that (apparently) better drivers are available for video cards other than ATI's Radeons, and so better Linux results may be possible with a different video card.

I don't know what effect the non-glare screen would have.

Note that I did not compare screen quality to a contemporary Mac in my original post.  I don't see new Macs often enough to make that comparison.  As we see so often in the tool threads, I'd be happy to compare them if anyone would send me a new Mac. 

Ned