Could I get some advice/suggestions please. Long story short. I purchased hubby an Alienware M9750 quick ship for christmas. He is military and travels abit. FSX is his favorite item to pass the time away from home. The laptop has vista home premium on it. Would it be better to have xp pro instead?
Many thanks and I will watch for your answers.
Nowadays I can't think of a good reason to go with xp over Vista on new and fast system. Plus with Vista you have the benefit of DX10 (slightly fancier graphics-not sure whether the card(s) in that system are dx10 capable or not) At this point the people who are putting XP on new systems generally either : have a slow system (probably not the Alienware you are buying) or simply hate Vista for some illogical or personal reason (there are many of those too.) So ya Vista Home Premium sounds right on. Additionally you may want to consider the Vista 64 bit version. I use it and it runs great and is recommended especially if you are using 4 gigs RAM or more.
http://www.alienware.com/product_detail_pages/Area-51_m9750/area-51m_specs.aspx#pdp-nav
Windows® XP Media Center
Windows® XP Professional
Windows Vista® Home Premium < for future apps 😕
Windows Vista® Ultimate
Processors, Chipset & Memory
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processors (4MB Cache, 667MHz FSB) < whoo 😀
Intel 945PM + ICH7M-DH Chipset
Up to 4GB Dual Channel DDR2 at 667MHz < need that for vista 😞
2 dedicated SO-DIMM slots for Dual Channel DDR2 Memory
Graphics & Video
DirectX 9 Enabled Graphics
Dual Graphics Cards
512MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX GDDR3
NVIDIA nForce 100 with NVIDIA® SLI™ technology
DirectX 10 Enabled Graphics
Single Graphics Card
512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT GDDR3 < humm, little better 🙂
Dual Graphics Cards
512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT GDDR3
NVIDIA nForce 100 with NVIDIA® SLI™ technology