Feek
16-12-2007, 23:05
This afternoon, I made a snap decision which could have been either good or bad.
I decided to install Vista on the PC which the rest of the family use.
Recently it had started doing silly buggers with some applications, some games would no longer run and an OS rebuild was the only realistic fix, I did one of the things I do sometime which is to just bite the bullet, say "what the ****" and go for it, just like Joel Goodsen in Risky Business. No eggs here though ;)
The system is an AMD XP3000+ 32 bit CPU with 1Gb RAM and an ATI 9600 graphics card. Not high spec at all.
I removed the 80Gb drive and fitted a spare 120Gb jobbie. Threw the DVD in and booted.
40 minutes later the OS was on. The first thing I did once it booted was to add a 2Gb USB key as a readyboost cache because I was expecting the performance to be utterly dire on a machine with 1Gb.
I patched it, set up user accounts, installed Office and set up email (copying back each users .pst file from the old drive), threw Diskeeper on and added Avast.
So now the AV is running the three weekly scan it does to checksum all the files (or whatever it does), the indexing service is running it's initial scan and diskeeper is trying to defrag the drive whenever the CPU is idle.
It should be running like an absolute dog.
But it's not.
Even with all this disk activity going on in the background, it's perfectly usable. Aero is running and it looks fine.
The lowest figure on the Windows Performance Index thing is 2.2 and that's the graphics performance due to the old 9600 but the CPU, disk and memory are all hitting between 3.2 and 3.9 which is perfectly acceptable.
I tried updating the graphics driver but no matter how I do it, whether I download the full package or do it through Windows Updates, it screws the driver completely and the graphics drops to 1.0 and it crawls so there's a problem with that somewhere but it's working fine and well with the driver that Vista ships with so I'm leaving it at that.
I installed all the SIM2 packages for LMF and they work well, I install the game that Mrs. Feek was having problems with (Vampire Masquerades Bloodlines) and that's working well. Firefox is in and running, as are a few other utilities.
I checked task manager and even with a fair bit open, it's only using roughly half the physical RAM. I'm quite surprised by this, the x86 version seems to have a much smaller memory footprint than the x64 version.
So I'm currently happy. The family are happy. I've left UAC turned on so that they hopefully can't break this particular OS build.
I'm also surprised at how well it's running, I was expecting to be hunting around trying to find more memory for it this evening.
Lets hope it continues to work well.
I decided to install Vista on the PC which the rest of the family use.
Recently it had started doing silly buggers with some applications, some games would no longer run and an OS rebuild was the only realistic fix, I did one of the things I do sometime which is to just bite the bullet, say "what the ****" and go for it, just like Joel Goodsen in Risky Business. No eggs here though ;)
The system is an AMD XP3000+ 32 bit CPU with 1Gb RAM and an ATI 9600 graphics card. Not high spec at all.
I removed the 80Gb drive and fitted a spare 120Gb jobbie. Threw the DVD in and booted.
40 minutes later the OS was on. The first thing I did once it booted was to add a 2Gb USB key as a readyboost cache because I was expecting the performance to be utterly dire on a machine with 1Gb.
I patched it, set up user accounts, installed Office and set up email (copying back each users .pst file from the old drive), threw Diskeeper on and added Avast.
So now the AV is running the three weekly scan it does to checksum all the files (or whatever it does), the indexing service is running it's initial scan and diskeeper is trying to defrag the drive whenever the CPU is idle.
It should be running like an absolute dog.
But it's not.
Even with all this disk activity going on in the background, it's perfectly usable. Aero is running and it looks fine.
The lowest figure on the Windows Performance Index thing is 2.2 and that's the graphics performance due to the old 9600 but the CPU, disk and memory are all hitting between 3.2 and 3.9 which is perfectly acceptable.
I tried updating the graphics driver but no matter how I do it, whether I download the full package or do it through Windows Updates, it screws the driver completely and the graphics drops to 1.0 and it crawls so there's a problem with that somewhere but it's working fine and well with the driver that Vista ships with so I'm leaving it at that.
I installed all the SIM2 packages for LMF and they work well, I install the game that Mrs. Feek was having problems with (Vampire Masquerades Bloodlines) and that's working well. Firefox is in and running, as are a few other utilities.
I checked task manager and even with a fair bit open, it's only using roughly half the physical RAM. I'm quite surprised by this, the x86 version seems to have a much smaller memory footprint than the x64 version.
So I'm currently happy. The family are happy. I've left UAC turned on so that they hopefully can't break this particular OS build.
I'm also surprised at how well it's running, I was expecting to be hunting around trying to find more memory for it this evening.
Lets hope it continues to work well.