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Vista-word of warning
Submitted by crivon1 on Wed, 08/29/2007 - 15:35.
Without asking my advice, two days ago, my daughter in Boston bought a Sony Vaio laptop 12 inch, 1.3 GHz Intel Core Solo, 1024 Mb Ram with Vista Business edition. She brought it with her to Ireland yesterday, and I thought this was going to be a great opportunity to try installing ViaVoice on it.
As far as speed was concerned, it was like going back to the Stone Age (my 1.8 Semperon XP laptop is much faster!). It took almost two minutes to boot up, and every process took an age to come on-screen.
She was unable to connect to the net wirelessly, and her technical adviser in Boston told her that she would have to replace her Linksys with a more modern one to have it work in Vista. Fortunately, after playing around, I located where the wireless settings are in Vista, and was able to connect her to my identical Linksys.
After playing around with it for a short time, my general impression is that Vista will only perform satisfactorily with a fast CPU, and probably not less than 2048 Gb Ram.
I might try installing ViaVoice in it (if she and Vista lets me!), and will report back if that happens.
She is arranging to replace Vista with XP!
Therefore my warning is if you are going to get Vista, you will need a fast CPU and not less than 2048 Gb Ram.
Quentin
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Plus anyone who voluntarily
Plus anyone who voluntarily adopts Vista is ipso facto a candidate for experimental brain transplantation
Bruce
As far as the situation here
As far as the situation here in Italy is concerned, it seems virtually impossible to walk into your local computer store and find a machine running XP.
Following problems with an Acer laptop that has spent the last year going backwards and forwards to the repair centre without ever being fixed, we were given a replacement, an Acer TravelMate with a decent processor but fitted with just 512 MB RAM.
As Quentin says, initially it is dead slow, almost unbelievable. The owner of this machine doesn't use speech recognition and will only be doing very basic things, therefore the memory situation is less worrying. Fortunately I had some spare RAM from another laptop so I increased to 1 GB. After reading up on the web, I adopted some of the suggestions for speeding up Vista (you can Google up hundreds of hits and they all say more or less the same thing, in particular programs starting automatically and over-zealous security features) and this certainly seems to have made a difference, the machine boots much quicker and programs open after just a few seconds.
Clearly, the average user should not be expected to spend hours or even days tweaking all these bloated features and unsuitable settings in order to get anywhere near an acceptable level of speed.
Based on what I have seen, 2 GB of RAM is the minimum comfort level for an average user and I would guess barely sufficient for speech recognition, my own laptop has 2 GB of RAM and I shall be happily sticking with XP for the foreseeable future.
Graham
And people write me asking
And people write me asking why anyone would want an operating system other than Windoze!
If they'd learn assembler coding it might be a LOT faster and smaller! Someone once told me that Windows 95 and later was written in Visual Basic. Sometimes I believe it!