Review: Windows Vista Ultimate - Part deux

Ok, as a glutton for punishment, I had to explore what other machine (i.e. types of hardware) I had laying around that might allow the Vista experience to install. DW's old case was still sitting there as her desktop was upgraded from to a ASRock motherboard running a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 CPU. As always, a gig of RAM, two drives bigger than 250GB, the Lightscribe LG drive, built-in sound and the AIW 9700 Pro. This unit kept freezing during the install and simply refused to allow Vista anywhere near it so I had to start over and it sits content (mostly) with Microsoft Windows Media Center 2005.

So, her old box, a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 was sitting socketed into a Soyo P4X400 motherboard with a gig of 333MHz RAM, a US Robotics fax modem, a Sound Blaster Live! sound card, but without an optical drive, a hard drive or a video card (as these were all transferred to the aforementioned new desktop). I decided to see just how bad Vista would run on this unit, if at all. First, I added a hard drive to the removable tray, added our old Pioneer DVR-104 (a 2x DVD writer unit), and a positively ancient nVidia MX400 32MB AGP video card.

The install actually went better than I thought it would; better than anyone looking at the spec sheet would have imagined. Vista Ultimate installed without so much as a single hiccup!! It did not freeze once. It never spontaneously rebooted. It just plain worked as advertised! Yeah, my jaw was on the floor too. Surely there had to be some negative thing I could slam it for, right?

Well, yes and no. Creative Labs has decided, like many other manufacturers have, that it will not support certain older hardware under Vista. Pretty much, than means all non-Audigy chip owners are being told by Creative to either use the on-board audio chipset attached to their motherboard (which I ended up doing) or to upgrade to an Audigy-based card. Uhm, spending more money? Not. So, with sound installed, I just need it to recognize the "PCI input device" which turned out to be the modem. I did not even have to search the net or 3Com for the drivers; Windows found them and updated the system and that was that.

Everything installed and working right and all available drivers installed properly, I started to add items and check out what worked well, what was slow as ass and what, if anything, was broken. If you install Vista, there is a simple and effective method to point you to where you may find issues. Remember that performance indicator from the first system where I had a 4.9? Well this system has a 1.0!! And when I went in and checked the details, it was the graphics subsytem that had produced the pathetic score. The performance rating is based ont he lowest subscore so even if the CPU on this box produced a 3.9, the overall system rating is still a 1.0. I expected this in any case because the system requirements tell you that the grpahics treats (i.e Aero, Flip, Flip 3d, etc.) will be turned off if the card is deemed to not be able to handle it. Thus, no visual toys are working on this box. That would be upgrade number one.

While a gig of main memory is basically okay for operating, I think that any system running Vista (any flavour) will benefit from a second gig of memory as the first necessary upgrade. Memory is cheap these days so don't skimp on it. Video cards that can run Vista's visual treats are also cheap if you buy realistic to what you want to do. Any AGP or PCIe video card with 128MB of memory or more should run Aero and the other graphical items. If you want to run many windows, the visual treats and the Media Center component, I would recommend at least 256MB on the card. And, if you want to run games (do I need to say this?) you are going to need a modern video card to get the best textures, fluid motion and rich colours at the high resolution that new snazzy monitor you bought delivers.

I know, I know. You are being freaked out by me complimenting and giving props to the evil empire's latest devil spawn. I cannot help it though. I find myself not wanting to work on any other machine in the room (except for the Mac mini, naturally). I think a lot of the criticism comes from unrealistic promises made by Microsoft and their partners. If they had marketed with some realism (i.e. not all your shit is going to work with this new OS so stop your whining and upgrade the components as necessary) and they had put in a better price point, I think this would have been as much a success that Windows 95 and 98SE were when they were launched.

No, you do not have to go and buy a brand new machine unless the technology and speed represented by such a purchase warrants the cash outlay. Yes, if you go the Vista route with your crappy, hoopdie system, you may find some things broken and you will have to pay to fix it. Such is life in the progress lane. Live with it and move on. As the old adage says, if it aint broke, don't fix it. So, if your XP install is running stable and doing the job, stop watching the commercials and reading the "WoW" ads and continue on as usual.

But if you are one of us who just gotta have it, be prepared: research, read forums and reviews, ask a friend (like me) and download and run the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. It will tell you where your current system is lacking and will suggest where improvements may be required or is desired. Oh, one thing I read about is a sensitivity to bad memory. You might want to run Memtest86+ to test your current system's memory (a good test for all our systems). Also, run chkdsk /f on all your hard drives and do a defrag of them as well. Best to avoid any kid of hiccups during the install. Finally, with hard drive prices so freaking low now (i.e. Canada Computers has 500GB drives for $160 and the 750GB drives are dropping close to the sweet spot of 32 cents per GB as more Terabyte drives enter the market), make your life easy and install Vista on a clean, new drive. You can transfer your old files (but not old applications, those have to be reinstalled IF they are compatible in Vista) and use the old drive as a backup or secondary storage drive (i.e. for media only).

Enjoy.