Executing Vista - we hardly knew ye
Yesterday, I realized that one of my Linux boxes died. When I purchased it years ago (for $200), it was barely adequate, even for running a bare bones Gentoo-powered home server.
As a replacement, I ended up purchasing the cheapest desktop PC I could find -- the Compaq Presario SR5110NX. As you might now, the Compaq Presario is the closest thing to an advertiser supported computer platform (with the notable exception that you pay for it and the adware). The computer comes pre-loaded with lots of crap-ware that I don't need or want.
The PC came with Windows Visa Basic Home Edition pre-loaded. Since I have one desktop running Windows XP (for Quickbooks and for devices that don't have Linux support), I thought briefly about replacing my windows box with the new arrival. After 15 minutes, I decided I was better off with my stable XP box.
After an hour of playing around with Vista, I can say is that the graphics are nice, but I pity those of you who are tortured by having to actually use it. Vista requires so much computing horsepower that the AMD Athlon64 coupled with 512MB of memory was just simply not enough.
However, since Microsoft is pushing OEMs to install only Vista, there really isn't a choice to go back to XP. I can only imagine the number of returns of lower-end hardware.
The mouse kept skipping around the screen (the mouse cursor would become unresponsive for about 500ms to 1sec, then catch up and be transported to the new screen coordinates). Also, when I tried to kill processes to make the system more responsive, I saw that it had a cpu-sapping 55 processes running. Judiciously killing various processes left the system that was bouncing from 20%-75% CPU bound with an skittish mouse movement. In a word-- it was totally unusable.
That is, until you repartition the drive and install Linux, which is exactly what I did. I'm in the finishing stages of installing Gentoo, Apache, TRAC, subversion, MySQL, and various utilities.
