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Eric Griffin's Blog

Technical Strategist
Vista on Old Hardware

Its getting tiring hearing about Vista performance on old hardware. Especially when my whole family ( all six of us) are running Vista without issue or complaint.

With a 14, 11, 10 and 8 year old computer savvy, game hungry, Internet enabled children, and a wife that is not too far behind, I can't get away with a poor performing operating system. Microsoft family or not. We wouldn't be going to Vista if it was slow. 

I am happy to say that all my children are very satisfied with the performance of Vista. Our machines are not close to new and were performing nicely with WinXP. 

Here's my setup:

Comcast High Speed 6mbs D-Link 8011.g wireless network. All machines with wireless cards.

2 Vista Basic Machines
HP Pavilion 551w, P4 1.6, 631MB (Yes you reading are right)
Dell Optiplex GX260, P4 1.99,  512MB (No duel cores here)

2 Vista Home Premium
eMachines W4685, P4 2.6, 1 GB (Wife wanted more memory)
Toshiba Satellite, P4 2.4, 512MB (I run Halo on this machine frequently)

All of these machines run very well. No one is trying to develop software on these machines, but believe me, they are being heavily utilized. I have Encarta loaded and several games installed on each machine.

My kids fly all over the Internet running games (Club Penguin, Runscape etc..), but now with Vista usage reports I know a lot more about where they are going. And with school just out I am all over the Parental Control feature. I also share files an music when I set up my Vista home network.

So I guess I haven't experienced the old hardware performance problem with Vista. I am living with Vista on old hardware and I have four satisfied users. What has your experience been with Vista on old Hardware?

Posted: Thursday, May 31, 2007 5:53 PM by ebgriffin1968
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Comments

vasudev said:

I am running Vista Ultimate on AMD Athlon XP 2000 (1.67GHz), 512 MB RAM, 32 MB shared for Graphics, without any problem.

# June 1, 2007 5:24 AM

Korn1699 said:

I think a lot of the people that complained either didn't even try Vista or the only other machines they saw it on were the laptops microsft employees were bringing to events, which had 4GB of Ram...  I have Vista x64 on my machine at work, and the 32 bit version on my laptop and desktop at home.  I did notice a performance increase when I upgraded my Ram on both my home computers recently, but that would have been the same way with XP.  The only time it was really slow has been when I had memory leaks related to firefox and addons installed, but that also happened in XP.

# June 1, 2007 9:11 AM
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