Re: Anyone running Vista?

"Frenchy" <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As this is a good eclectic group, is anyone running Vista yet and if so how pleased? About to get a new 'puter with this installed and the Vista newsgroups are full of trolls crapping all over it. Installed it on Grandson's computer in the weekend and what I saw looked great. Unbelievably the Vista machine was nearly twice as fast at downloads than my WinXP connected to the same ADSL Modem in a home network. If that is generally for real, Vista will work for me!

Unlike the others, I am running Vista, the Home Premium edition on a new computer. I am very satisfied with it.

I would not get Vista to update an existing computer. It's probably not worth the risk, and you might have to go through a lot of trouble to update your software or drivers. And your computer might not be powerful enough (speed and memory) to run it. The time to get Vista is when one gets a new computer.

My old computer was getting pretty ancient. It was 7 years old and I had upgraded it a bit over the years, putting in a 30 GB disk drive, a CD-RW drive, and bringing it up to 256 MB memory. It had a 500 mHz processor.

The thing that pushed me into getting a new computer was the flash ads one encounters during web browsing. They had proliferated to the point I couldn't avoid them. If I disabled flash, so many legitimate web site functions wouldn't work. If I enabled flash, then the ads took over my computer. So many ads are badly written. The dancing bitch on the roof for lower_my_payments.com was particularly bad. Basically a compute bound ad when running on a 500 mHz computer. If it wasn't for these flash ads, my old computer was still basically fast enough for my uses.

So I got a new computer. Some of them are really cheap these days. The one I got has a dual core processor running at 2.8 gHz, 1 GB of memory, 250 MB disk, DVD-RW, 19" LCD monitor for about $650 after rebate. It's far from the fastest machine out there, but it fits my needs well and should last me a while.

My recommendation would be to make sure anything new you get can run Vista Home Premium and not just the Vista Home Basic. If it can't run the Premium edition, it means the computer is already well on it's way to being obsolete. Some low end machines currently offered can't run it.

I'd make sure anything I got had two cpus these days. They are marketed as "dual core" and "X2" or other such mumbo jumbo. The one I got (Pentium D 915) was not specifically marketed as "dual core", but it is two cpus. It has two cpu chips on a single carrier, rather than two cpus on the same chip. Not as advanced and consumes more electricity, but it gets the job done at a good price.

If you have stuff to transfer over, it can be a pain. I had no software or hardware I really needed to transfer. My laser printer is a network print server, so there is no software or drivers that I needed for it on my computer. I really only had to transfer over my personal files, and I did have a problem with that for some reason. They want you to do it with their special "Easy Transfer" cable. I didn't want to buy it. I tried over the network (supported), but it consistently bombed. I also tried it via CD (also supported), and that bombed too. I finally set up file sharing and transferred using the Easy Transfer application to a shared location (also supported). I could find no trouble reports in Microsoft's knowledge base that were similar to the problems I was having.

In terms of DSL speed, my lowly 500 mHz old computer was able to transfer up and down very close to the rates advertised on my line. That is 3.0 mb download, 768 kb upload. I got about 2.8 mb download and 650 kb upload. The new computer does about the same. The difference is the old computer was close to compute bound when downloading big files, whereas my new computer is barely idling.

.

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