Do it Yourself Mojave
section: windows, for your questions: KezNews forum, 12.8.2008
Yup. I’m now a Vista user. As I mentioned in a previous post, circumstances have recently required that I buy a new desktop PC.
It’s not that I wasn’t happy with my old PC — it was a generic ASUS M2N32 Athlon X2 5000+ with 4GB of RAM and an ATI HD 2400 graphics card and various removable disks that I had pieced together for various different types of application and OS testing. I ran XP SP3 and various distributions of Linux on it, and I was more than happy with how it performed. I had a number of various quirky problems with different permutations of Vista on the box over the last year or so, and could never get it to run properly — but interestingly enough I was able to get Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V running on it just fine. For the most part, I simply avoided using Vista for most of my software testing, except in the case where I could virtualize it on my servers which had plenty of RAM and CPU to spare — I didn’t have the desktop horsepower to really run it correctly. I also had no business reasons for using it, the applications which were designed for it such as Office 2007 ran just as well on XP, and quite frankly, I’m a server/mid range OS guy and most of the glitz and fancy features of the OS just don’t appeal to me.
Nevertheless, fate intervened. My wife, Rachel, has been using a 4 year old HP XW4100 Dual Pentium 4 for several years now. Rachel has been part time real estate agent, restaurant consultant, and general queen of the household — she keeps track of the bills, takes care of my appointments and some of my press correspondence, and in general, functions as my unpaid admin. That system running Windows XP with 1GB of RAM and Office 2003, Firefox, and a number of her other favorite programs had been running pretty well and fit her needs accordingly. In the 4 years since she’s been using it, it had a second OS re-install, because like many of my testing machines, it gets a lot of abuse.
Recently, the machine which was upgraded in the last 6 months to 2GB of RAM has been less than responsive with the more demanding applications she wants to use. It was time for Rachel to get a better machine — so I decided to give her my existing desktop, fully cleaned up, with a new XP SP3 install with all her applications re-installed and her data migrated over. She’s now up and running, and happy as a clam.
Of course, this left me without a desktop computer besides my work laptop, which I had dare not do any software testing on — my ThinkPad is to be treated like an acropolis, because without it, I can’t do most of my job-related work. So I searched the Internet for a moderately priced machine that would be more or less equivalent to what I had before and I wouldn’t care too much about if I had to junk it in 3 years. I picked a Dell Inspiron 530 from COSTCO’s web site, which is currently on sale for $599 without a monitor. The Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard disk was more than sufficient for my purposes, and I’d be hard pressed to build a cheaper machine from OEM parts myself that was as well integrated and had a 2 year on site support warranty. It also came preloaded with Vista Premium.
I contemplated wiping the machine and throwing Ubuntu and XP on it, which is my preferred workstation OS dual boot combo. But after hearing all the news of the Mojave Experiment, and reading the various TalkBacks to several of my arguably “anti-Vista” posts on this blog, I decided to run my own little usability study — I would stick with Windows Vista for at least a month as my primary productivity and workstation platform. Linux would be relegated to my virtualized server OSes which I could console in remotely.
My Inspiron 530 arrived this week, all shiny and new. I thought I would be able to use it as-is out of the box with Vista, but to my surprise, the Quad-Core 4GB machine barely would run my most favorite Windows applications adequately with all the Vista bells and whistles turned on. It performed like a slug, to put it gently. Sure, I could have turned a bunch of the effects off, but if I was going go use a machine designed for Vista, why wouldn’t I want to run it with its most optimal settings so I could experience it as Microsoft had intended it?
source:
blogs.zdnet.com
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Comments(18)
hey dumbcunt,
why don't you talk you head out of your arse? you are "full of
shit" and merely spreading fud. get a life
hey stop trying to bash vista, i swear i dont even believe your using vista cause im
running vista on an old pc with 2 gigs
and 1 p4 processor and its working super fast
i want to believe you, but your article didn't make sense.
most people who
complain about vista's memory usage don't realize that vista actually "caches" more
applications in memory and uses memory more effectively. of course, no one argues that
vista requires more memory, but my experience is vista with 3gb or more ram and a middle
of the road dedicated gpu is happy computing.
in xp, i have 4gb ram and my
peak commit charge rarely comes close to 1gb, so what's the point of having gigabytes
empty space in ram chips other than heating the computer?
my point is vista is
ready for prime time now and performs good with current hardware and ram. ram is cheap
these days.
however, stay away from 64bit version for another year or two as
there are some apps not so happy with 64bit os.
i completely agree with kernelkraft, what good is ram if nothing is using it. sure you
can say that i have 4 gb of ram and run xp cause it uses less ram, but whats the point of
having that much ram? you bought it to use it, so put it to work.
i dont believe what your saying, if your using a quad core with 4gb and its running like
a slug as you say you must be doing something wrong or yor talking crap im running a dual
core with 4gb and its got plenty of speed.
im running multiple computers, some self built others oem.
asus g2s
hp 6910p
dell 820
and a core 2 duo running 4 gigs of ram all of which are running
ultimate to its limit beautifully. i think you have alot of oem bloatware. do a clean
install and give that a try.
dude, i've been using vista for 2 years now on 2 laptops, 1 has 1 gb ram ddr1 and a
1.7ghz centrino processor, 64mb geforce gpu, and its running aero with no problems at all,
the other 1 is intel core 2 duo 2.0 ghz, 2.5 gb ram, and a geforce go 7400 256 mb gpu, and
its super fast, i open 20 programs and its using only 45% of ram.
so dude, double
check ur processors, maybe theyre made in china, or maybe the whole thing was just a dream
and ur still using ur crappy 5 year old laptop.
why can't the vista retards see it for what it truly is. a piece of crap even with sp1.
this is why they're hurrying on to windows 7 now and want to put vista behind them. my
problens with vista wasn't the drivers, but many other things.
the only
driver problem i had was having to wait to get compatible drivers for my microsoft livecam
from microsoft itself. how "lazy" of them [rollseyes]
seriously, guys, stop posting this blog crap, waste of our time - this is keznews, not
myspace, let zdnet keep it to themselves, don't lower the quality of this page.
what do we care what perlows wife is using her computer for ?
i have a amd based machine with slightly better spec's than yours. i run vista ultimate
x64, and xp pro x86.
vista out performs xp in every respect, it boots in about 30
seconds. if i did'nt play old games i would'nt even be using xp anymore. it sounds to me
like you just are just another one of those moronic vista bashers. if you don't like
vista stop using it, and stop complaining about it!
let her write the artices and you be the unpaid assistant. i've been running vista for
more than a year on a 2160 with 2gb of ram and it's fast. so if the quad core was a slug,
pretend to have some technical acumen and figure out what non-ms crapware is killing
performance.
a quad core might perform like a slug unless you have a beast of a video card to match
it. i'd be interested in knowing the author's vista performance rating. it'll only
perform as well as the weakest link in the hardware. at any rate, why would you want to
run with all of the eye candy anyway? i like running with aero on, but i turn off the
animations and fade ins and fade outs. these do nothing but artificially slow down the
interface. my dual core opteron and 8500gt is smokin' fast on vista...performance rating
of 5.6.
just looked at the blog - the author fails to mention which video card he is using with
his new vista box. since he saw fit to omit this information, one might conclude that he
has crappy integrated graphics.
my bad...he says that he had integrated graphics, but updated to a pny 8500gt,
i would suggest that if the author wants to really experience a sluggish system, that he
load linux on that box.
my performance rating is the same as "imperator", 5.6. my rig has a amd x264 both at
2.3 ghz, 8600gt with 1 gig of on board ram and 4 gig of system ram. my question is, does
he have vista x86 or x64. x86 cannot properly utilize all of his horsepower. i strongly
suggest that he switches to a x64 version, then he should have a machine that will run at
its full potential
keep any praise toward vista quiet, or the bashers will tell you you stink and your mom
dresses you funny. we should invent a codeword for vista here....then they won't know
what os we are talking about...now whats a good codeword? iknow! mojave!
i own a q6600/4gb mushkin / abit ip35/ 8600gts / ... multiple hdd
and the
experience with vista ultimate is perfect
you are either a noob, or you are
full of virus ans spyware
maybe somebody wanted to make fun of you and set the
q6600 with eist and dropped the ghz to something very low
.\ 95% of time my
q6600 is running at 1632 mhaz cause of eist ...and the % of use in task manager is
ussually 25% ..at 30% is clocking back to 2400
i'm running a quad with the exact same amount of memory with vista and i haven't had
any issues or "slowness" as you described. what it sounds like to me is your vista needs
some tweaking or your having hardware/driver issues....
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By Douche on 13.08.2008 - 00:08