Dell has taken the unusual step - for a PC vendor of its size - of toning down its sales pitch for Microsoft's Vista operating system and warning businesses of the migration challenges that lie ahead for them. The step is particularly unusual because one of the issues the hardware vendor is warning business about is the extra hardware they will need to buy.
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Member since:2006-07-26
Member since:2006-01-25
For me it's mainly system-wide search and filtering (i am in publishing and it speeds work up very much), quick sleep/wake, new mediacenter and multimedia functionality, Explorer with giant thumbnails (I find files much quicker this way), Wi-Fi connectivity without constant nagging, and many little improvements like per-app volume (invaluable!) drag-n-drop customization of favorite folders in Windows Explorer. Those aren't killer features, but simplify things a lot. There is no known virus for Vista yet, and it's as fast (or slow?) as XP on both my computers (not exactly top notch - A64 3k+, 1,5 GB RAM and GF6600 and laptop P-M 1,7G, 1 GB RAM and X700). I have no problems with HW (even specialty like Cotour Shuttle for my video editing) and most SW. Your mileage may vary.
Member since:
2006-11-30
Had an Athlon64 3200+ (s939), 4x256MB DDR 400Mhz, ATI X1300 and Vista ran like a charm, even the beta ones. Even played games quite normally (Quake 4 for instance).
)
Although I admit there were minor hickups sometimes opening windows, but nothing all to bad.
There are three things that can really hurt vista on older hardware:
1) 5400 rpm HardDrives
2) Crappy motherboards and drivers (mind you I have seen plenty of motherboards which cause 100% CPU usage even under clean installed XP during idle -> some sort of physical error on some cunductor probably...)
3) Slow RAM (< 400 Mhz).
In my experience you get roughly the same usablity for the following RAM ammounts:
256 XP = 512 Vista (do turn off AERO here
512 XP = 1024 Vista
1024 XP = 2048 Vista