Review: A week with Vista on a slower PC

[riahc3]

I ran Vista Beta 2 on a P3 800mhz 256 133mhz ram and a 5200 and I can say it was useable. I was VERY impressed that it accually was just about 1-2 seconds slower than XP.

[P.M.K]

Why is everyone so concerned with the amount of time their machine take to boot up??

[david13lt]

My PC:

AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (Few times burned)

768 RAM 400Mhz (512MB) and other 256MB I can't remember, but it's lower.

40GB Maxtor SATA or ATA, can't remember.

And GF440SE 64MB

I could say boot for me is about 10-20 secs. After booting, ram usage is about ~300MB. After turning few services I think you would be able to be in rage of 200MB to 300MB.

But I installed Windows XP, because work with Vista it's just terrible. I should buy new hardware. And I am willing to get Core 2 Duo 2+Ghz with L2 4MB and 2GB DDR2 RAM in coming months.

One more thing, for Vista I would advice wide-screen monitor.

[AMDMEFX-55]

I had Vista ultra on my Laptop in my sig it ran fine It even played Bf1942 the same as xp. I will buy vista for this laptop cause it runs fine.

[Tom B]

I don't think we're all talking about the same thing when we say "It runs great" or "It's slow". As I said in my post, if you have a decent video card, the interface runs very fast. The windows open and minimize very fast. Transparency effects are beautiful and have no speed disadvantage. That's because they run solely on the video card and have very little to do with the rest of the system.

However, anything that involves RAM and long hard disk access is much slower than XP.

I've turned almost every service and security system off. I'm using a bare bones Vista now. I don't think it can go any leaner. Even so, my RAM usage right after boot is 480MB! That's physical RAM usage, not cache. You can see these on the task manager. So on a 512MB PC, you'd have around 30MB physical RAM left for programs. On XP, you'd have around 300MB left.

I'm not talking out of my ass here. I'm giving numbers and statistics. I'm telling you exactly how I setup my system and how I got the numbers that I'm getting. So please do the same instead of posting "No, Vista runs great on my Pentium 100Mhz."

As I said in my post, I can run many CPU/Memory intensive programs and it doesn't effect the responsiveness of the operating system at all.

After logon I am running all the default services, along with: TightVNC Server, Apache2.2, mysqld, Avast Antivirus, ATI Catalyst control centre Daemon tools and the memory usage is 460mb.

Right now i'm running all of the above + uTorrent (with 4 torrents going), Visual C# 2005 and Firefox. The memory usage is 562mb.

However, despite the much larger memory usage, I can run Oblivion as well as it does on XP. Oblivion is a very memory heavy game and I expected it to be slower, but it's not.

In XP with similar programs running I got about 320mb usage on boot, yet opening programs is quicker on Vista. XP took over a minute to become responsive after logging in. Vista takes less than 10 seconds. I can launch Firefox as soon as the taskbar loads and it'll be launched within 10-15 seconds. On XP it was much much longer.

One more thing, for Vista I would advice wide-screen monitor.

Why? I'm using a 19" CRT at 1600x1200 and vista is fine. I guess a larger resolution is better for vista, but it really doesn't matter that much.

[franzon]

My computer:

Athlon XP 2400+

768 MB DDR333 RAM

Radeon 9700 PRO Video Card (256MB)

:no:

your review is bad, because I have a computer older than your and Vista RTM runs very fast. It's faster than XP

P4 1.7GHz

768 MB RAM

I use the basic interface, because I have an old graphics card.

[Linkinfamous]

Neverwinter Nights 2 is slow anyway.....

I tried it on both Vista and XP on my Core Duo machine, and there wasn't a noticable decrease from XP to Vista in terms of speed.

[AltecXP]

i have run Vista on a:

3700+ @ 2.5GHz

2GB DDR500

74GB raptor

nVidia 7600GS 256MB

20.1in widescreen lcd

runs amazingly

I have also run vista and it ran VERY WELL on:

(laptop)

1.7ghz P4m

512mb DDR266

30GB HDD

integrated vid card

(laptop)

1.6GHz Pentium M

1GB DDR333

integrated vid card

80GB 4200RPM

(laptop)

3200+

1GB DDR400

80GB 5400rpm

ATi XPRESS200M 128MB video card (runs aero)

aside from some not running Aero....i have had NO problems on any of them speed wise.

[null_]

I have Windows Vista Ultimate running on the following configurations:

- Intel Pentium 4 CPU, 3.0GHz with HyperThreading

- 1.50 GB of RAM

- ATI Radeon 9600 PRO 256MB (with Aero and transparency turned on)

- 250 GB Western Digital HDD (ATA)

- 80 GB Maxtor HDD (ATA)

How does it run on this machine? - Better than Windows XP. And, if I were to turn Aero off, it SMOKES Windows XP.

- Intel Pentium 4 CPU, 2.80GHz with HyperThreading

- 512 MB of RAM

- Intel Onboard GMA 915 (No Aero)

- 160 GB Western Digital HDD (SATA)

How does it run on this machine? - A little slower than Windows XP, but not enough to classify it as unusable.

I also have Windows Vista Home Basic running on an Intel Celeron 2.40GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, 40 GB Western Digital HDD (ATA), and onboard graphics (No Aero) - it runs about the same as Windows XP, and that's with all the stuff turned on.