late last year, i took delivery of my dell precision m90 laptop. i ordered it with xp pro. i had a legit oem copy of vista ultimate. my plan was to dual boot vista and xp.
after 3 weeks, i deleted the vista partition. and installed xp as the sole operating system. i did this because
explorer was running too slowly
vista was eating too much ram - i use resource monitors in my task tray, and vista was eating up 1.1 - 1.2 gb of my 2gb of ram., while on xp, only .5gb of ram was being eaten up.
the real final straw was an issue with MS office that was actually my fault. i was trying to get a legacy excel addin to run. . .but thats another story.
anyway, with the release of sp1, i decided to have another go.
based on my previous experiences, i resolved that i require the following
1) the biggest hard drive i can get
2) an extra 1 gb of ram bring my system to 3gb.
3) a readyboost compatible memory card (4gb)
i ordered the hard drive 320gb western digital scorpio, the ram 2gb kingston, at ebay.
i got the hard drive last week friday.my original plan was to partition the drive into 3, 70(xp)/150(documents, files)/80(vista) and clone my xp partition . i got hold of norton ghost, acronis true image, and three other drive cloning apps. the cloning went alright, but the drive would not boot. after 3hours of cloning and reformatting, i simply inserted the hard drive, my windows cd, and did a fresh install. this took up the better part of saturday and sunnday, as i had to reinstall my apps etal.
i installed vista. on monday, i got my 2gb ram, swapped a 1 gb stick, and installed sp1.
believe it or not, right now, my visat is running faster than my xp. at a point explorer was dragging, but that was because of dreamscene. ( bloody vaporware- evertyone kept blathering about how it uses minimal system resources, unlike third party video wallpapers) i teried enough of these on xp, and the performance cost was unacceptable. dreamscen led to explorer using up 30% CPU while doing nothing.
as before, i turned off UAC. the wahala that comes with UAC is way too much - i often tweak stuff in my program folders and system 32, and restrictions were extrememly annoying.
the only problem is a video thing, my screen sometimes distorts. i'm running a temporary workaround, as long as nvidia control panel is open, and i can view it on a second monitor, i can reset the screen. i think the problem may resolve if i download the vista chipset drivers for my laptop motherboard( i hope so, anyway)
one definete bonus - my autocad is running fast!!!!and i mean fast. i could never figure out why, under xp, autocad 2008, 2009 ran so slowly, i employd all sorts of tweaks to try to resolve this - but no dice. on vista fo some reason, my autocad runs much faster. and more options are available under 3dconfig's manual tuning.oddly though my 256mb quadro card's memory shows as 1512mb. . .
right now, vista is looking like a keeper. of course, that could change. . .
now lets get that 4gb sdcard (its on its way) and see how much of a boost ready boost will provide.
in summary, i guess vista has gotten more of a bad rap than it desrves. i realize now that some of my issues with its slowness before were due to some other apps i had installed - eg dbpoweram, which i use to convert music. if its tooltips ate enabled( they provide enhanced music file info) explorer will slow down, and will crash if browsing through a folder with unrecognized video files.
sometime this year, i took delivery of a laptop for my oldman - a compaqwith vista home premium. straight out the box - it was slow. in large part because of all the bundled hp bloatware and trial ware - noron antivirus, aol, etal. less than 300mb of 1gb ram free. i disabled /uninstalled 90% of them, and the fre ram rose to like 500mb or so, and performance improved.
anyway, keeping my fingers crossed. . .
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