Field Testing Vista

[landbeforetimelover]

It's been a long time since I've taken a look at vista.  The last time was the initial release of SP1, nearly 2 months ago.  I'm going to see if Microsoft has made any decent improvements.  I'm going to field test vista for a while and see how it goes.  Now, I am formatting my master machine with xp lite sp3 so it'll be out of commission for a while.  Here is the computer I'll be testing vista on:

2.2ghz amd athlon64 x2 processor

3gb of ddr2 800mhz ram

200gb hard drive


I'll be using this computer as my master for a while.  Probably not long.  I can't live with only 200gb of space and I'm currently out of HDs (It's even less than that since stupid vista takes 20 gigs of space).  I'll report back the results of my test.  Let's just say that I'm not optimistic in the slightest.  I've tested all of the windows vista versions except for home basic.  This is the version I'll be testing.  Let's see if this computer can handle Microsofts least resource-hoggish OS of 2007.

[Tails_155]

I haven't torture tested it or anything, but it seems to work fine for me (home ultimate or whatever, 1 step down from ultimate)

[Kor]

The results will be interesting for some here.

[landbeforetimelover]

Results After 3 Days:


Well, I haven't run into any major problems except for my photoshop not working correctly and my wifi adapter didn't want to set up.  I shouldn't expect big problems from this thing though.  It is a very nice (not to mention brand new) computer.  Despite these lack of problems however, I am constantly using 1.5gb of ram, which is unacceptable.  Yes, I've turned pre-fetching on and off, but it still doesn't change.  It looks exactly the same as my customized XP pro lite SP3 (except for the LBT desktop theme) so I haven't really noticed a difference.  Boot time used to be really quick (about 79 seconds, which is slow as heck for xp but pretty standard for vista), however since installing photoshop, office 2007, firefox 3, AVG free, and a few other minor programs, my startup time has increased to well over 2 minutes.  This is unacceptable.  I won't ever be switching to vista, that's for sure.  Remember that this is windows vista HOME BASIC!!!  I still can't run the thing decently on this awesome computer.  In addition, the HD is constantly thrashing doing god knows what.  When I look in the task manager, there's nothing running and it stops thrashing.  XP lite is going back on ASAP.  I've learned enough.  This is just dumb.  XP lite will boot in 40 seconds or less even with all my crap on it.  I can't even imagine the horrors of booting vista with the HD loaded with all of my stuff.

What incentive do I have not to "upgrade" back to windows xp?  The cool taskbar?  The sidebar?  #1 who gives a crap and #2 you can get that stuff on xp quite easily.  There's no reason to have vista.  It's buttloads of security garbage and slowness.  No thanks!  I'll have my nice secure xp lite sp3 thank you very much! :

[Petrie.]

Sorry it didn't go well, but I think you knew what to expect all the same.

[landbeforetimelover]

Yeah.  I didn't even make any new files.  I just put some stuff on there and installed some programs and it all went to crap. -_-