Vista
After avoiding it since its inception, I have finally bought a copy of Windows Vista.
I avoided it before because I didn't think my current computer would cope with it. However, as I recently built a new, shiny, super-powerful machine I decided I'd buy Vista to go with it. Can't stick in the XP Dark Ages forever.
The problem with Vista, was that XP was good. It worked. It was stable. When XP came out most people had Windows ME. The problem with ME was it was utterly crap. The most unstable OS I'd ever used. The only thing that worked quite well was the System Restore function, which was fortunate, as you had to use it a lot.
So there wasn't much call to upgrade to Vista. It was slow and unreliable, according to most sources. Therefore, I avoided it.
So it was with some trepidation that I installed it onto my new computer. I'd bought one because the old one was getting slow and a bit past it. Therefore the last thing I wanted was to install Vista only for it to slow the machine down to the sort of speeds the old one was running at. Frankly, that would make for a waste of £500 and all sorts of ear-bashing from my beloved, who authorised the purchase.
To start with, it didn't look good. It crashed. A lot. Not totally convinced it was Vista at fault, I ran MemTest86 on it which confirmed there was some memory errors. I slowed the memory down from 1066Mhz to 800Mhz (although it should have run fine at 1066) and the problems completely went away.
And now - I'm impressed. I'm running the Aero interface and the computer is still very, very quick. Ok, the computer is powerful (quard-core processor at 2.87Ghz), but it's not top-of-the-line. The graphics card was quite cheap (but still more powerful than the old one, and has 512MB of RAM which helps). It's currently running 2GB of RAM but will be running 4GB soon, once dabs.com decide to actually get some customer service and replace the faulty sticks they sent me. I would expect performance to improve further when that is installed.
A couple of bits of hardware don't work, but I can't blame that with Microsoft. Logitech in particular loses much future business from me for refusing to provide a driver for my webcam.
Overall - I like it!
I avoided it before because I didn't think my current computer would cope with it. However, as I recently built a new, shiny, super-powerful machine I decided I'd buy Vista to go with it. Can't stick in the XP Dark Ages forever.
The problem with Vista, was that XP was good. It worked. It was stable. When XP came out most people had Windows ME. The problem with ME was it was utterly crap. The most unstable OS I'd ever used. The only thing that worked quite well was the System Restore function, which was fortunate, as you had to use it a lot.
So there wasn't much call to upgrade to Vista. It was slow and unreliable, according to most sources. Therefore, I avoided it.
So it was with some trepidation that I installed it onto my new computer. I'd bought one because the old one was getting slow and a bit past it. Therefore the last thing I wanted was to install Vista only for it to slow the machine down to the sort of speeds the old one was running at. Frankly, that would make for a waste of £500 and all sorts of ear-bashing from my beloved, who authorised the purchase.
To start with, it didn't look good. It crashed. A lot. Not totally convinced it was Vista at fault, I ran MemTest86 on it which confirmed there was some memory errors. I slowed the memory down from 1066Mhz to 800Mhz (although it should have run fine at 1066) and the problems completely went away.
And now - I'm impressed. I'm running the Aero interface and the computer is still very, very quick. Ok, the computer is powerful (quard-core processor at 2.87Ghz), but it's not top-of-the-line. The graphics card was quite cheap (but still more powerful than the old one, and has 512MB of RAM which helps). It's currently running 2GB of RAM but will be running 4GB soon, once dabs.com decide to actually get some customer service and replace the faulty sticks they sent me. I would expect performance to improve further when that is installed.
A couple of bits of hardware don't work, but I can't blame that with Microsoft. Logitech in particular loses much future business from me for refusing to provide a driver for my webcam.
Overall - I like it!
posted by Nej at
2:33 pm
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