OK, so Vista is now out the door and manufacturers are now trying to push their systems with Vista only and no XP option. So how fast does your system have to be to make a good job of running Vista? I'd like to share my two experiences of Vista so far and I would be interested to hear your opinions based on what you've seen.

Minimum specs for Vista Home Premium are a PIII 800MHz with 512MB RAM - recommended specs are a PIII 1GHz or higher and 1GB RAM or more. Personally, I wouldn't be keen to put it on anything less than a P4 2.0GHz but I haven't had enough experience of it to say that with any authority.

For comparison, I've had 2 experiences of Vista in the last fortnight. The first was an Acer laptop with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. It was a Core 2 Duo 1.66GHz with 1GB RAM and I was very disappointed. Of course, as with any other manufacturer, Acer had bundled it with loads of other applications, utilities and overweight drivers to slow it down! My other experience was when I did a clean install of Vista Business on a Pentium D 2.8GHz with 2GB RAM for a customer last week. I was really impressed with that .... but it was literally only running Vista, drivers and Symantec Anti-Virus.

I recently bought a Asus G1 laptop which has 2.0GHZ Intel Core Duo and 2 gb RAM, 512 vid card and 160 GB 5400rpm hard drive. It runs the Vista (Home Premium) perfectly fine right now seems that I haven't installed much programs to it, and Asus doesn't put any "commercial programs" in their system as the others do. (AOL, Taxcut, Sonic, etc) So its running fine for now.

For my conclusion, only buy computers with a good spec if you want to use Vista. People who doesn't want to pay a big money for a new comp and still wish to have Vista, most probably you will get dissapointed afterwards. Unless your those who built ur own PC. But buying branded computers, you definitely have to choose a high spec PC or notebook.

P.S. NEVER UPGRADE VISTA, you won't have all the feature thats stated at the back of the software case.

The only experience I've had is the RC1 beta version

I've got semperon 2500+ (1.75 Ghz) with 1.75 Gb of RAM, 256Mb graphics.

I liked it seemed very good it ran OK installed Quicktime and CA antivirus. It found all the drivers no problem.

when all the bugs etc are ironed out and I build my next machine I'll go with it.

I've heard on the local radio of people having problems with USB modem drivers.

Originally Posted by DJNafey

The first was an Acer laptop with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. It was a Core 2 Duo 1.66GHz with 1GB RAM and I was very disappointed.

Someone made a bad choice here (Acer in my opinion). That processor is slow at 1.66GHz per core. Even the quads ship at 2.66GHz or 2.68GHz which is still slower than many P4 single cores.

In a standard PC you can overclock these CPU's up to 3.4GHZ to 3.7GHz easily but I don't know about a laptop.

The idea was to spread the CPU usage over multiple cores but these cores run slower than a standard single core. Unless the software is geared to split itself on the cores your programs are going to run at 1.66GHz which is a very slow processor in today's terms.

I am just experimenting with my first quad core and it is quite tricky to set them up even when you can overclock.

Of course just my salty opinion.

I am running Vista Ultimate and I have no issues at the moment.

As a general purpose desktop it is fine if the machine is high spec enough.

My machine details are in my sig and these appear to be fine for now

I have had any personal experience with vista, but I have had techs tell me that hardware drivers afew and far between. I do know that i have looked at alot of different brands of new computer with it installed, that only have 512meg of memory installed . Microsoft recommends 1 gig of memory.

The trend in this thread at the moment seems to be that we're happy with it on systems that have 2GB RAM. Keep your feedback coming in so we can get a bigger sample and work out more averages :-)

I have been running Vista since a week after it hit the shelves. I am running 64 bit Home Premium and had no trouble with it at all and think it is a inprovement over XP. My pc is home built and had 1 meg of ram I have upgraged the ram to 4gig and runs as sweet as a nut. The only problem has been Creative Driver support and my favorite anti spyware software Spyware Doctor they only support 32 bit and will only support 64 bit when they there is a market for it so they said in a mail to me. I am changing the sound card and wont purchase another Creative, so many people have been complaining on other sites as well.

Alex

Acquired a copy to see what all the fuss was about, I'd heard about instability issues and fancied a looksee. Installed Ultimate on a 20gb partition I'd created, and with 2gb RAM it felt nice and snappy. Had no hiccups with installing drivers and the like, and I tend to be using vista more and more, even CS:S feels more responsive with it. Overall I'm very impressed, a fair bit more than expected tbh.

Test: Reopen thread.