Windows Vista on Obsolete Hardware
I’ve been testing Vista out for a few days now, and I have to say, it’s not too bad really.
- You definitely need 1GB of RAM to operate it as comfortably as Windows XP. 2GB definitely recommended. Office work is fine on the 512MB I have, but … more than that and you’re pushing the limits of what the human mind can withstand when it comes to waiting for applications to catch up.
- UAC, or User Account Control is annoying, much more so than Ubuntu’s way of handling Linux’s restrictive environment.
- Aero Basic isn’t bad at all. Quite a bit better than XP to be honest.
- Windows Calendar, Contacts and Mail are nice enough for normal office use.
- Explorer has a lot more ‘rich’ views — contacts, etc. Also, it’s blazingly fast when loading up system views like Control Panel
- All my stuff works, except for … well all of it works. I had an interesting experience with drivers — I installed an XP audio driver and it failed, but then Vista was like
Would you like to install that with recommended settings?
and it worked afterwards. Nice.