Windows 7 has essentially kicked Vista into the down, but you still have options to install XP in a lot of machines
If you are buying a machine from a store, be it in real life or online, it’s most likely for their to be a OS installed on it already, and it doesn’t really take much guessing over what it’s going to be; Windows. Whilst Dell experimented with putting Ubuntu on machines, with a few notebooks still appearing with a form of the distribution on it, it’s not very prevalent at all. There has been some weirdness in terms of the way manufacturers deal with OS’s, thanks to the rise of 64bit and of course the Windows XP issue.
First of all, the majority of machines that have been relatively recently released all have Windows 7 on them, as it’s essentially the OS that Vista should have been. For starters, it’s a lot quicker in terms of boot speed and general operation, with a far less invasive User Account Control system (the thing that asks for admin rights all the time) and generally works a lot better on a wider set of machines. As well as that, it supports the (admittedly few) multi-touch displays and some other novelty gubbins. I recommend against getting Windows Vista, purely based on using it for near enough a year, I’ll give you a pro tip- It’s not very good. Whilst it’s for reasons that have been bounced around the internet a lot, it simply doesn’t perform to well, factors in graphical niceties over responsiveness and the way it’s been abandoned probably pays to that.
Whilst it can sometimes take a little bit of work, Ubuntu is becoming a great alternative to commercial OS's
That’s not saying Windows 7 is perfect, and the old war-horse of Windows XP is still occasionally being pre-installed on machines, and being bundled with quite a lot of machines as an option install disk. For those who have fully moved on, XP is beginning to feel a bit legacy now, but if you’ve only been using that OS, then you perhaps won’t notice the difference too much. The benefits of using XP is that it is much less tough on system specs and applications can therefore use fewer resources to run, which is why games often have a “1GB RAM for XP, 2GB for Vista/7″ recommended spec, for example. Whilst Microsoft are slowly discontinuing all support for Windows XP, if you feel comfortable with it, there is no need to feel you have to change to Vista or 7.
You could choose to install another OS, such as a Linux distribution, onto your machine. Whilst there are literally hundreds of choices about this, the majority of users go with Ubuntu, which is largely thought to be most user-friendly (read: n00b friendly) and most compatible distro out there. I tend to install Ubuntu as a dual-boot, primarily because I find I can boot it very quickly and get working, compared to There are many alternatives, but rather than me, being un-informed and all, try to muddle through it, take a look at this post to see Stevie’s reasons behind it all.
If we haven't bored you, here is some more:
Josh Dean
Josh came to Game-Engine after running several other “web destinations” into the ground with constant re-designs and feature sets. After founding a website based about games, which again, suffered the fate of a perfectionist, yet poor, designer, Game Engine was created as a way to channel those energies in the direction of a poor, vunerable website. Afer co-founding Game Engine on a historic moment in intergalatic history, Josh turned his attention to web development yet again, muddled through it, and then started to “write” about what is probably his most normal interest, video games. Now Josh has expanded into poorly recorded screen captures and talking into cameras with painstaking conviction, as well as keeping up playing a lot of video games, then claiming that they are either ‘awesome’ or ‘rubbish’.
