Windows Vista on Obsolete Hardware

Dec 20 2006

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.

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