Windows Vista...

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Originally Posted by nathanledet

The reason I don't have a Mac is because I spent half the money on a PC that runs twice as fast as any Mac on the market. With Mac's..ya get what ya get...not to completely shun Macs...they do have their pros and cons, just like PC's..but the 'pc vs mac' debate is old and endless....it's our 'f/t vs live' debate...

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There's a lot more to it than simply processing speed. It's all about how it's used by the underlying system. Windows has been famous since 3.1 for it's terrible use of available resources. Besides that, clock speeds aren't particularly good identifiers of the "speed" of computer either. The SPARC architecture used clocks speeds WAY lower than x86, but the underlying systems were a great deal faster than anything made to run Windows.

I'm stuck dual-booting Linux and Windows, and a Mac on top of it. Although, with Mac's change to the x86 arch that won't be for much longer (woohoo). I still think as far as speed and optimization goes, BSD and Linux reign number one, Mac as number 2 and PC/Windows as a distant third. And of course, they go in reverse order for hardware and software compatibility.

I personally won't touch Vista until I can only run must-have software on it.

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Originally Posted by TekWarren

I can tell you this is NOT the case. There is absolutely no "standard" that notebooks come with 512mb of ram. Of the laptops I purchased for my staff in the last year or two I have never placed an order with the specs of less than 1gb of ram.
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9 times out of 10 their dislike is not even formed by their own opinion but by someone "who knows computers" or the like and really have idea about the underlying platform improvements.

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Well I am glad that your company/customers have the cash to buy laptops with good specs. However, the company I work for is very cheap -- and our laptops come with 512 mb ram standard, period.

I installed MS-Dos with 5.25 inch floppys at Walter Reade Institute of Research in 1982 -- that is my credentials for saying that I don't like Vista.

I haven't heard great things about Vista--and I'm leery about it. I'm probably going to run this PC into the ground (or until XP is so outdated that I'll need to upgrade) and then buy a Mac.

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Originally Posted by AkivaSmith

Well I am glad that your company/customers have the cash to buy laptops with good specs. However, the company I work for is very cheap -- and our laptops come with 512 mb ram standard, period.

I installed MS-Dos with 5.25 inch floppys at Walter Reade Institute of Research in 1982 -- that is my credentials for saying that I don't like Vista.

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I was not disputing what your place of employment chooses to purchase but rather clearing up the fact that it is not a global "standard" like it sounded like in your post. Also nearly all of my years in IT has been with schools and educational organizations so no its not like money is falling off the trees here.

-I'm not sure what your trying to tell me about your credentials, Vista is a long ways away from DOS :P But sounds like an cool experience from the "old school days" (no disrespect meant). After installing Vista one of the first things I found myself doing was looking for the command prompt! :rofl:

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Originally Posted by TekWarren

IVista is a long ways away from DOS :P But sounds like an cool experience from the "old school days" (no disrespect meant). After installing Vista one of the first things I found myself doing was looking for the command prompt! :rofl:

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No offense taken! I have been installing new software, so much lately that I wonder why everyone needs to be on the bleeding edge. What do you really get from Vista any way. Except giving Microsoft more money...

It looks pretty! Seriously there are some big improvements/changes but I think the best experience to be had with vista at this point is on the most recent hardware as it is more demanding. I'm finally breaking down and will probably install it this weekend on my macbook pro, some things I do at work I still need windows for...that and gaming when I actually do game.

post back with what you think of it, really think your gonna regret putting it on such an awesome mac though.

I've used vista some before putting it on my mac tonight (as dual boot with OSX). I have yet to regret it. Installation didn't take long at all, most of the time was setting up boot camp and creating the partition.

I haven't installed anything besides firefox, and hardware drivers. I have yet to see my memory usage hit 512mb even with firefox open and a few other various windows and menus open. At this very moment its sitting at a cool 506mb of memory in use and I'm showing that firefox is a little over 30mb of that. This is with both firefox and task manager open, so if firefox was closed I would be using a mere 466mb of ram. That is far from "memory hog" range if you ask me. I also have all the default eye candy turned ON, if I changed over to the "classic mode" theme I would bet I could shave off another large chunk of used memory. I like to disable my virtual memory or pagefile on machines with 2gig of ram. There is a slight performance increase forcing the system to use RAM only as well as keeping the hard drive from getting fragmented as much or as often. The only other "optimizations" I have done is turned off the indexing service and run a defrag. These two things are a given for any machine I touch, the more maintenance you do the better the system will perform. Even after a fresh "clean" install these things need to be done.

There are several other little things I can think of off the top of my head to free up even more system resources but the above should give most people the general idea of how much ram is used "out of the box".

Vista reports that my Windows Experience Index score is 4.7 based on the lowest score:

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T7600 @ 2.33GHz Score: 5.2

Memory (RAM) 1.98(2GB actual) GB Score: 4.7

Graphics ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 (Microsoft Corporation - WDDM) Score: 4.9

Gaming graphics 1016 MB (256mb actual / 256mb shared system ram) Total available graphics memory Score: 4.9

Primary hard disk 31GB Free (41GB Total on this partition) Score: 5.0

I'm going to do the other "tweaks" I mentioned and if they make a significant difference I will post with the results as well as a list of what I did.

This mornings memory usage report (LOL):

Ok here is a list of things I did that disabled or changed in favor of recovering overall system resources:

Services disabled:
-windows search
-windows defender
-automatic updates
-firewall
-remote assistance

System changes:
-Theme set to classic mode/Adjust for best performance
-user account control set to off
-installed all current windows vista updates
-ran disk clean up and defrag again

At this moment system memory used is at 489mb with both firefox and task manager open. Firefox is showing that it is currently using just over 49mb. If firefox was closed the system would be sitting at about 440mb used at idle. Task manager in both cases uses only about 1-2mb so you can subtract that also as it wouldn't normally be constantly running visibly.

This is decent difference from the "out of the box" memory usage readings. When your looking at general system resources used every little bit helps. These are just a few things I changed off the top of my head there are more things I chose not to mess with and not being a vista expert yet I'm sure there even more things I don't even know about.

This is just one of the ways Vista can be evaluated and in my opinion at idle "out of the box" resources used is no "worse" than windows XP. Yes I do have a fairly new system with some pretty beefy hardware in it but this was one of my comments earlier. This is a newer more robust OS and in most cases users will not get the most enjoyable experience out of it if using it on older hardware. However I see no reason why it could not still run on less than current systems. I think someone mentioned 512mb of memory being the requirements or maybe I read that somewhere. This yes I would say is a load of crap I would personally suggest no less than 1gb of ram -although this has always been my recommendation with windows XP systems also. To beat memory headaches (and when money allows) 1.5-2gb of memory is just about perfect if you want to keep performance at its peak. Performing regular maintenance tasks such as those that I mentioned before also will really keep your system running smooth.

"Thanks for watching another episode of TekWarren's Technology Review! Tune in next week when Heath tries to get a life!"

:rofl: :P

I would wait till it has been out for one to two years then all the bugs will be fixed.
I bought a new computer from Dell with vista sad to say multiple crashes and anytime U used any program that utilized the video card the driver for the video card stopped responding. Which resulted in screen going black. then coming back when it recovered.
After multiple uninstalls of the driver and re-downloading and installing the most up to date driver I still had the problem
After 5+ hours with tech support still wasnt working, random crashes of windows of the computer just locking up.
No was I returned the computer and forked out $400 more for the xps700 gaming system because it had XP on it.

wait from what I have heard they are supposed to have a big update in October.

Of course I could just be lucky and have a anti-technology virus that makes anything that can go wrong go wrong.
I think technology is allergic to me.

Forgot to say its very sytem resourse intesive so I would make sure you have at least 2gb of ram memory