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Wayne's Old Computer Gets Vista | |
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| Time: 14:05 EST/19:05 GMT | News Source: eWeek | Posted By: Andre Da Costa | ||
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Opinion: Will a 2-year-old, but high-end, workstation run Microsoft's new operating system? When Microsoft brings out a new operating system, it's always nice to know that you can actually take advantage of it. Sure, you're used to whatever you currently have, which is most likely Windows XP, but you also know that sooner or later, something new will come along that requires the new OS. So when Vista finally shipped, I decided that the time had come. I'd upgrade one of the machines in the back room. | ||
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| #1 By 2960 (24.254.95.224) at 2/9/2007 2:19:42 PM |
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Well, I know my 1 year old ThinkPad T42 is dead meat. Yeah, it installs with a green-board in the device manager, but it scores a whopping 1.0 on the vista scale.
TL |
| #2 By 32313 (72.27.2.168) at 2/9/2007 2:43:21 PM |
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May its just the brand PC thats the cause of so much problems with Vista. I am running Vista Ultimate on a Dell Dimension 8300 I purchased in March 2004 and its not that bad, I don't get certain visual effects such as the Slide Show Themes and my WEI rating is 2.0.
Overall it performs well. For someone into PC's and probably has upgraded to past versions of Windows many times, I would expect him to know some basics such as, uninstalling an incompatible AV before upgrading. The NERO software is a suite of tools for burning music, videos and photos. You own that computer for so long and you don't even know whats installed on it? Tsk, Tsk! My nVidia Geforce FX 5200 128 although old by today's standards runs the AERO visuals just fine, although I got 2.6 GBs of RAM to thank for the acceptible performance. Overall, upgrading to Vista is not such a big deal, but if users follow the Upgrade Advisors recommendations, you tend to not be in a lot trouble. I recommend removing AV's and burning utilities before upgrading for sure. I am having a lot of issues right now removing Sonic's DLA software after upgrading my brothers laptop to Vista Business. |
| #3 By 2332 (66.92.78.241) at 2/9/2007 2:58:31 PM |
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I have Vista installed on a T42P. The only major difference between the T42 and the T42P is the video card.
My score on the T42P is 3.8. |
| #4 By 415 (69.245.184.81) at 2/9/2007 3:15:20 PM |
| Jeez, what a choad. I think when you write an article you should prove to the reader that you know what you're talking about. It shouldn't be an execise in slowly finding out how little the author actually knows. |
| #5 By 8556 (12.210.39.82) at 2/10/2007 3:37:13 AM |
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TechLarry: I've played a lot with Vista, including different new PC configurations. A Vista rating of 1.0 is meaningless, as an Athlon 64 3200+ with 512-MB of DDR2-800 RAM and a 320-Gb Seagate SATAII hard drive scores a 1.0 with shared onboard video in use. However, the actual performance, non-aero, is about the same as XP is on the same machine. The 1.0 rating means little to nothing, as a five year old 1-GHz Athlon with 512-Mb of PC-133 RAM gets the same rating but runs far slower. Adding a 256-MB GeForce 7100 PCIe card brought the rating up to 3.6. Again, big deal. Aero was now in use, but the overall performance was subjectively unchanged.
Let's not let this arbitrary "Vista Experience" number get to us. All it means is that throwing extra money into a new PC can buy a higher "experience" number. The damn thing is still Windows and it will have the same driver issues and bugs until the kinks are worked out. 2-cent comment: I find that AVG Free AntiVirus works great in Vista, much like it did in XP. I will avoid Norton and McAfee like the plague and advise my customers to do so also. The bloat is excessive and the performance mediocre. AVG, that's a winner. |
| #6 By 23275 (68.17.42.38) at 2/11/2007 1:52:27 AM |
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I saw this thread and it inspired me to do an experiment today - upgrade my oldest, and perhaps, dearest machine, to Vista Ultimate and see if all the press about the "nightmare" that Vista is to install and configure on old hardware had any shred of truth to it, or not - and also to see how well the new OS would run on a machine that is quite old - at least according to some pundits.
This post is being written on the subject machine, named BBAMF, because in her day, she was certainly that. The machine is pretty special - it is based upon the Intel 850E chipset and the first P4 to reach 3 GHz [3.06] with hyper-threading. It was significant because it was the first machine in its time to catch up to the then faster AMD processors for things like gaming and it dominated video editing for a good while. It's also the first time that Intel and RAMBUS were able to match the FSB frequency so well - at 1066 MHz, which would not be so well matched again until mid 2006 - so from 2002 to mid of last year, Intel/P4 machines really didn't "feel" smooth, or nearly as good as this machine did, or modern Core 2 Duo machines with PC5300 do now. When built, I used a Promise SX6000 6 channel RAID controller and 200GB WD drives, which about drove me nuts until WD published a utility to shut the idle parity bit off - a manual drive by drive process with a boot floppy. Being only AGP 4X, about the best card I could use was the ATI 9800 XT with 256 MB DDR - updated when that card came out. The case is custom, lighted and features more fans than I'd care to ever wire on a regular basis - all of which have been replaced over the years. Aside from that, only the original DVD drive died and was replaced with a Sony that sucks. The machine is my morning machine, running hot and heavy from just before 5 AM to about 9 AM each day - lot's of servers to check on and usually a lot of mail as the day is lined up and checked against what we planned - of course that always becomes adjusted as new requests and requirements come in. I thought of simply retiring this machine, but so much time and work had been spent on it, it seemed wrong to let it go, or designate it for some lesser purpose - it will likely end up as a MS Home Server one day - a role I hope it will like. In its day, its 1.2 TB of disk space was unheard of and today, few machines ship with as much disk space and fewer can match the aggregate throughput of its array. It has always been a smooth machine - always seeming to feel somehow better suited to heavy work than many machines fitted with much more modern hardware. Cont... |
| #7 By 23275 (68.17.42.38) at 2/11/2007 1:53:48 AM |
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The Vista Ultimate upgrade, was interesting - using W2K3's SX6000 driver, and working around the video card's need to set one monitor only - stumbling badly for a few minutes until it was sorted out. Other than having to retire its ancient gaming port - no longer supported in Vista, all original hardware was retained and despite only having a GB of RDRAM and a much older video card, BBAMF still pulled a 4.2 - owing to its older CPU. The rest of the numbers are better, 4.6 in gaming graphics to a 5.9 in drive I/O - all in all, not bad.
Windows Vista runs as smooth on it as any version of XP ever did - it still drives like a well made car that likes to run. I've tested a lot of apps and every MS Office 2007 application in the suite as well as some games - all run better than any previous version of Office - even OL2K7 in online mode across the Internet is as fast as ever. I don't know what machines the press are speaking of, or what procedures they have followed when they update and I frankly wonder if they are using RTM versions of Vista, or if they have done anything at all. All I can say is that on hardware bought in late 2001 and through 2002, Vista runs better than XP ever did - smooth, consistent, and without any hesitation or failures - even the original SB Audigy is running OpenAL like it was designed for it. |
| #8 By 15406 (216.191.227.68) at 2/12/2007 8:52:43 AM |
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#7: Before I even started reading your post, I knew how this would end. You could have been installing Vista on a Commodore64 and, at the end, you would have told us it was a pleasure in every way and it makes your C64 run faster than ever.
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| #9 By 23275 (68.17.42.38) at 2/12/2007 2:27:38 PM |
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#8, Latch, no matter what I write, you'll find fault with it. That's fine and I respect that you have an opinion.
For those that are interested in upgrading to Vista, and you are considering using older hardware and you do run multiple monitors, part of what you might consider from my posts as at, #6 and #7 above, is to use only one monitor at set up - where, and if you have an older dual head card that has one DVI and one Analog output port, set your primary display in Windows XP SP2 to the DVI port - even if you use a DVI to Analog adapter and use a monitor, or LCD with an Analog input. Do this and reboot once, before starting the update process. Once updated, and you have installed the latest Vista drivers, then go ahead and attach your second/third displays and extend your desktop as desired. If not, Vista may have a very difficult time enabling acceleration and the system will appear to crawl. However, once you have it installed and running, attaching more displays will be fine and it will run normally. Finally, like anything that is worth it, installing and configuring Vista can be a small amount of work - certainly not so much work that it is a show-stopper, and like any work on anything that is worth it, the results are often very good - that Latch, was the reason for my post. |
| #10 By 15406 (216.191.227.68) at 2/12/2007 3:47:55 PM |
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#9: That would be true if everything you wrote was a glowing thumbs-up of all things Microsoft. Er, wait a minute...
I find it hard to take you seriously when you come off like another MS Pollyanna, an uber-Parkkker if you will. Considering the general problems people have with Windows, and the specific glitches that are present for those trying to run Vista, I absolutely knew you would have no problems and everything would be wonderul in every way. |
| #11 By 23275 (68.17.42.38) at 2/12/2007 5:14:50 PM |
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#10, Latch, "Any" reasonably capable person who can read and who exercises even a small amount of patience, can succeed using Microsoft software - as easily as they can secure a computer running Windows. It is not especially hard, and it can be rewarding. Pretty smple and predictable stuff. I and many people here are proof of that.
I mean take the alleged expert - who knowingly did an update install of a PC and left Norton Anti-Virus running on it? I mean, good lord... and he expected it to run once he was done? I maintan he did that intentionally - which is better than simply assuming the man is an idiot. |
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