@Insulin: hahahaha, I don't doubt they have a room in microsoft with a 100 acolytes all praying while virgins are sacrificed to the darkness below. oh and tortilla tuesdays.
the thing that gets my eye twitching is when people refer to their lousy home version of vista as "vista." microsoft has even admitted that the home and some other version a little higher up are pretty lousy, but it gets better as you go up. whether that's because you spend more on hardware or not, who knows. when I bought my new PC, my old PC sat dormant. this thing had a gig of ram and a 2.66 ghz pentium 4, with a 40GB hard drive. I installed vista on it, and it ran happily. opening folders and such took a little longer, but we're talking only just noticeable. I've put vista's usage of memory to between 22-33% of memory(on a REASONABLE RAM size, 1-2GB), and as you add programs, so the figures climb. with XP it was recommended you format and re-install every 6 months or so to maintain performance. I recently had to re-install my vista (new mobo gave my bootsect.bak crap), and there is possibly a second or two difference between my old install and this one. My grandad's PC battles to start up XP, and it has had an upgrade 0_0.
a few of my suggestions for when running vista:
installing it on any machine that has an integrated graphics chipset is not going to help you. integrated graphics is the biggest gimmick ever, and I would personally like to shoot the person who decided it was okay to steal RAM to act as "graphics."
most basic graphics cards these days will give you a boost. I would liken the difference between using integrated graphics and moving up to a DDR2 256MB card as putting a turbo on. if the rest of your machine is a "1.4" or lower, it doesn't make an astounding difference. but if you're running a "1.6" or up, it can be seen.
DDR2 is the name of the game. 667Mhz and up. 2GB is GOOD, 4GB is BETTER, anything above that is AWESOME.
don't buy a celeron. ever. don't even look in their direction. celeron M for laptops I'll wince and maybe give you the okay if it's above 2.0GHz, but otherwise no.
vista ultimate. nuff said.
when buying a PC it is extremely difficult to put a value on how it is helping your business. it's obvious that you don't need a high end super machine when all you're doing is writing emails to the customers. but what I do know is that frustration and waiting means your time isn't optimised.
some clear signs you need an upgrade:
you can switch your PC on, go make a cup of coffee, come back, maybe wait, maybe start a quick game of cards while your hard drive light blinks to oblivion.
you often open up a document twice because you think you didn't double click it the first time.
you wait more than 2 seconds for a folder to open.
you have to shovel coal in every 15 minutes to keep it running
these go for either of the OSes.
XP doesn't require the memory that vista does, runs older programs and has a simpler interface. But vista optimises more efficiently, has an awesome search and built in speech recognition(that sort of software normally costs a pretty penny anyway).
I'm not going to bullsh*t you and say get vista just cos it's the new thing. if you're doing emails, word processing, basic day to day functions, then it may be worth more to you to be operating something that doesn't require massive resources because you won't be using them most of the time anyway.
But if you're constantly puzzling about where that one file is, have a program that needs to be run, but needs a fair chunk of resource *cough visual studio cough cough* and want something shinier (yes, I know, I'm a whore for the good looking 'uns), then go vista. ultimate.
Reply With Quote
Sponsored By: 
(some death metal bands are actually pretty good, my particular favourite would be dimmu borgir). oh and with less than 1%, unix is the "black sheep" of the family.
Originally Posted by twinscythe12332
Did you like this article? Share it with your favourite social network.