The machine had a 3 GHz Pentium IV with Hyperthreading enabled, 1 GB
RAM, 60 GB HDD, DVD+RW, an nVidia GeForce Fx 5300 with 64 MB VRAM,
PCI-WLAN, and the other default interfaces.
We had the Vista pre-RC1 build installed on it that was released by
Microsoft abour a week ago before they made the "official" RC1
available. I guess the main difference between the two builds is that
the pre-RC1 does not require a product key for the installation; it
will run for two weeks without a key. We installed the "Ultimate"
flavor of Vista, which resulted in a 9.7 Gigabyte (!!!) install for
the plain operating system.
As you know, Vista has a "performance meter" that scores the machine
it is running on. You need a score of at least 4 to get to see the
new Aero Glass interface. Well, according to Vista, the GeForce Fx
card in this notebook only scores at 1.8 and was insufficient to run
Aero Glass. And, according to Vista, the performance of that graphics
card for gaming was a 1.0.
I have to say that according to Doom 3 and FarCry, this machine is
very well capable of running those games at decent enough frame
rates. I leave it to you to judge the level of finetuning the
Microsoft developers have put in their shiny new user interface that
it requires more hardware than high end 3D computer games.
Anyway. Vista only ran with the "basic" Aero user interface, which
does not have transparent windows and other eye candy. It
nevertheless is extremely resource hungry and even with nVidia's 3D
drivers Vista is -not- able to move Windows with contents without
showing artifacts and annoying rendering delays.
The responsiveness of Vista also is painfully slow - even though the
computer had 1 Gigabyte of RAM (of which Vista claims to use 600 MB
as system cache), every user interaction results in longer hard disk
activity. Opening the Control Panel no longer gives you an immediate
result - you have to wait a few seconds before all the icons have
appeared. The icons themselves are now much bigger than they used to
be, and on a 1024*768 display, you immediately begin to ask for a
bigger screen resolution. Opening the Control Panel became a screen
filling task, not leaving much room for anything else.
[...]
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