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Friday, July 11, 2008

Windows Vista Thoughts - Year 2

Now that MS is forcing vista on us. Here is what I have found.

I use vista on several systems, every day in fact. My wife has a brand new windows vista laptop. For the most part, those work fine. However, I have several that do NOT work very well. Here is what I have found.

Old Hardware

For the most part, just say no. The systems I have had the most trouble with running vista were either XP systems that were upgraded, or they were some of the first "low end" vista systems.

New systems

For the most part, these work. As usual though, MS's minimum hardware requirements, and reality are not the same. Here is what you need to actually run vista.

2GIG ram (Minimum)
A SEPERATE video card, even in a laptop with at least 128 meg of ram
Dual Core processor, either AMD or Intel
Vista Home Pro or better. - Don't bother with home basic.
NO INTEL VIDEO .. It's just funky

Every system I have run vista on with at least that, has run pretty well. The biggest issue I still run into is printing problems. Vista seems to HATE network printers, and I have no idea why. I have seen it just refuse to install, all the way to having to reload vista from scratch just to get printers to work. Also, there are still a ton of printers that just have no drivers for Vista. Also, once vista is broken... it's broken. Save yourself some time and just reload and quit trying to fix it. Keep good backups of your documents and nuke it.