The Zone

For all its worth, being at the cutting-edge of technology is a slow and excruciating torture process on your wallet and I for one, couldn't resist the hype around Windows Vista, since its so cool (that's my #1 reason) and my not-so-legit downloading machine at home is using an *ahem copy of XP (the #2, real world reason), so I bit the bullet, forked out the remainder of my ang-pow money and bought a full-fledged legit copy of Home Premium.

While that made my personal finance manager yabble for the whole of the journey home from her office, the reaction on her face when she saw the freshly-installed OS was priceless. 

At least they delivered on the "WOW" promise.

Anyways, after installing damned thing for two hours (which included drivers, AVG, and updates), I came to realise that my once-powerful rig isn't really up to the job of running Vista smoothly. For instance, with specs as below:

AMD Athlon-64 3500+ overclocked to 4000+ specs

Foxconn nForce 6100 mobo (with SATA 2 goodness)

2GB (4x 512MB) Kingston Value RAM DDR400 CL3 @ 410MHz (ya I'm a cheapskate)

 X1800XT 512MB running at stock speed

19" Viewsonic widescreen monitor 

and 160GB SATA 2 7200.9 Barracuda and 80GB IDE133 7200.7 Seagate hard drives

I find that running Aero is a chore, with over 25% constant memory usage, even with ReadyBoost activated (870MB on a 1GB flash drive) and the whole system gained 'only' a 4.3 rating on the Windows Vista Experience Index blablablabla. Surprisngly, that low score is due to the 'substandard' processor, with the graphics hardware gaining 5.9 for Aero and 5.8 for gaming and memory and storage recieving 5.something each (I wish I hadn't forgotten to bring the screencaps today).

This shows that while Microsoft said that 'yeah you can run Vista Premium with a 2.0Ghz proc, with 512MB of RAM and a graphic card yadda yadda', that's nearly making it a lie. And to make matters worse, playing the C&C3 demo made the PC crash TWICE, even with Vista-certified drivers all-round. Turns out that the video settings I used in XP (ultra-high) caused the crash and subsequently used High for in-game graphics. That kinda sucks. 

Surprsingly though, I gained 1GB of video memory which was taken from my own physical memory. Not that it helped gaming, but why couldn't you use that extra gig for my programs, you blithering idiot?

So, lesson of the day; Get a faster machine than mine if you want a smooth Vista Experience. Minimum specs would be a dual-core proc, 4GB of memory, 2Gb of ReadyBoost and preferably a X1900 or 7900 graphics card. At least my financial officer forgave me when she saw - and heard those lovely sound effects. 

Still, I wonder how people running the X1050 and X1550 cards will fare?  Drop me a comment, I'm curious on how Vista performs on your machines! :D