Operating System

Despite the bad press, in our opinion Vista is the best option for a new PC.

The now infamous windows Vista has had a lot of bad press since its release. A lot of it has been justified, we too have had our bad experiences with it. However more than 2 years on and it finally seems to be a better option to windows XP for almost all users. A lot of the problems in the early days came from a lack of compatible drivers with manufacturers releasing half baked drives which caused no end of problems. For this reason we would still not recommend upgrading an old machine to Vista. It is also a very resource hungry OS, so older machines would struggle to operate at any decent speed.

Vista can feel bloated as times, with so many 'fancy' effects slowing the interface down, however all of this can be disabled to make it just as snappy and uncluttered as XP.

If you do decide to go with vista, make sure you have at least 2GB of memory. Some will say 1GB is fine, but to really get it running as smoothly as XP, you need 2GB. If you can only afford 1GB get XP.

Vista is very easy to install on a new PC when compared to XP and Linux.

XP is still a solid OS though it's now beginning to show its age.

Although more than 8 years old, Windows XP is still the most prevalent OS by far. More than 70% of home computers around the world use it. Being so old it has had almost all of its major bugs ironed out meaning it‘s a solid platform that everyone is familiar with.

However it is starting to show its age and if your building a new system it seems counterproductive to put old technology onto it, particularly as Vista has matured significantly since its troubled early days.

The other thing to note particularly for first time builders is that XP is slightly more cumbersome when installing on SATA drives. You will need a floppy disk drive if your motherboards SATA controller (i.e. the chipset) is made by anyone but Intel.

Linux is potentially very powerful, but not recommended for beginners.

Linux is a completely free open source operating system, which means that as well as not changing for use of the OS, but the source code used to create it is also available for anyone to look at and use.

Linux is not recommended for beginners as it can be quite technical. However using it can be a very rewarding and worthwhile experience and once a good understanding of it is reached it is an incredibly powerful OS.

If you do decide to try it out we would recommend installing it as a secondary OS as well as windows. To do this you need to create a partition on your hard drive and install Windows on the first and Linux on the second partition.

OEM OS's do not have nice packaging, and you can only use them on one computer.

When shopping fro your OS, you will notice that there are OEM versions for a fraction of the price of the full retail version. These versions are aimed at PC manufacturers to sell with new PCs and there is an important distinction between them and the retail versions.

An OEM copy of Windows will only allow you to install it on 1 PC. Once installed it cannot be transferred to another PC, and if you do any major upgrades (e.g. motherboard & processor) to the PC it may become invalid. Sometimes this can be overcome via phone activation by speaking to a customer service assistant and explaining the situation.

Retail copy of windows can be transferred to a new PC but it can only be on one PC at a time. They also come in a nice shiny box.