I am presently using Windows Vista Home Premium and am concerned about 
Microsoft support in the coming months. Should it be necessary in the future 
for me to do a complete disc recovery will the support be discontinued? In 
the past, I have been able to do such a recovery using the installation disc 
that came with my Dell Computer and later I received the Service Packs as an 
upgrade. If it becomes advantageous to do a complete recovery, will I be out 
of luck without the Service Packs immediately available?

It will be awhile before Vista stops being supported.
But you can download Vista SP1 and SP2 seperately and burn
them to a DVD
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a4dd31d5-f907-4406-9012-a5c3199ea2b3&displaylang=en

peter

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"Gene L." <Camelotscc@tampabay.rr.com> wrote in message 
news:4bf16143$0$12288$9a6e19ea@unlimited.newshosting.com...
> I am presently using Windows Vista Home Premium and am concerned about 
> Microsoft support in the coming months. Should it be necessary in the 
> future for me to do a complete disc recovery will the support be 
> discontinued? In the past, I have been able to do such a recovery using 
> the installation disc that came with my Dell Computer and later I received 
> the Service Packs as an upgrade. If it becomes advantageous to do a 
> complete recovery, will I be out of luck without the Service Packs 
> immediately available?
> 

If Vista works for you it is not clearly a rational economic decision to do 
the paid upgrade to Vista SP3, sold to many as Windows 7.
Like a "new" printer model that uses the same ink cartridges as the one it 
replaces Win7 uses the same drivers as Vista: they are, hence, one and the 
same OS for practical purposes.
Microsoft will have to support Vista, and even more so XP, with security 
upgrades for many, many years to come. There are gazillions of internet 
connected machines that will never have their operating systems changed and 
will remain online until the machine dies. These many million machines can 
ever more easily become infected/bot-ized, and contribute to even more world 
wide internet problems if Microsoft does not at least minimally push out 
security upgrades.
Hence XP and Vista service packs, along with other fixes, will remain 
available forever.
Microsoft can make all the noise it wants about stopping support but XP in 
particular is not going away anytime soon and Microsoft is responsible for 
the havoc those machines can wreak. Microsoft is still licensing XP on brand 
new Netbooks, which tells you all you need to know.
Under the hood Win7 has essentially the same issues as Vista SP2 (networking 
and hibernation to name but a few that Microsoft cannot be bothered to fix) 
but has a more pleasant GUI. The upgrade in place from Vista seems  reliable 
and you may want to consider that if you are concerned about short term 
future proofing. 

On Mon, 17 May 2010 14:25:36 -0700, "Anonamoose" <aetoo@hotmail.com>
wrote:

>Under the hood Win7 has essentially the same issues as Vista SP2 (networking 
>and hibernation to name but a few that Microsoft cannot be bothered to fix) 
>but has a more pleasant GUI. The upgrade in place from Vista seems  reliable 
>and you may want to consider that if you are concerned about short term 
>future proofing. 

Are you shiftin me? I'm a "wait for SP1" kind of guy so I have not
tried out win7, but the sleep/hibernate networking issues are still
there?

How's the network transfer performance in real life? Still crapola? 

Many thanks to each one who took the time to respond to my inquiry. I do 
feel better about the situation having read your comments. I appreciate your 
quality input.
Gene L. 

What bothers me is that Vista has been out for what a little over 2
years but every day when you look in these forums the problems never
seem to cease. It appears that MS is *not* making a concerted effort to
fix these continual problems. Yea they may be busy working on Win 7 and
Win 8, but I have no intentions of buying Win 7 to possibly (probably
not) correct some of the problems with Vista because they don't think it
is important enough to continue with real support. 
SGT Oddball you keep posting about all these wonderful new things that
MS is devolping, why not address some of these problems from the real
threads, or have one of your co-workers do it if they *really* wanted to
make a difference, it would certainly be a full time job.


-- 
cwl7454

On 5/22/2010 4:06 AM, cwl7454 wrote:
> What bothers me is that Vista has been out for what a little over 2
> years but every day when you look in these forums the problems never
> seem to cease. It appears that MS is *not* making a concerted effort to
> fix these continual problems. Yea they may be busy working on Win 7 and
> Win 8, but I have no intentions of buying Win 7 to possibly (probably
> not) correct some of the problems with Vista because they don't think it
> is important enough to continue with real support.
> SGT Oddball you keep posting about all these wonderful new things that
> MS is devolping, why not address some of these problems from the real
> threads, or have one of your co-workers do it if they *really* wanted to
> make a difference, it would certainly be a full time job.
>
>
Not everyone is experiencing "continual problems" with Vista. Vista SP1 
was installed on my laptop last year when I bought it. I turned off user 
account controls and haven't had any problems with the OS or malware 
since installation. Vista support should continue past 2014.

I am still running XP on my desktop machine, again problem free. XP SP3 
support will continue until 2014.

And my newest laptop has Win 7, again with no problems.

Bill (who is now worried that one of these computers will crash soon 
after my bragging about not having any problems) <g>