I was able to run RC1 & RC2 on a Pentium 4 1.7 Ghz Thinkpad with 512MB of RAM but no way would I try that with the RTM version. For one, the Aero interface would kill that system (I know it can be turned off). The thing to consider here is that Vista like XP before it, was written to take advantage of the new hardware out there like dual-core processor, DDR2 memory and nextgen graphics cards so naturally there would be performance issues with older hardware.
For what I do it doesn't matter what hardware I choose. XP offers superior performance and lower latency which, for me, can mean the difference between being able to work comfortably or working with higher latency which absolutely kills my workflow. I'm not being overly dramatic. It will be different for different users but when you are trying to achieve the lowest latency possible in order to have a more natural feel when triggering something like a piano via software every little bit makes a huge difference. A 6ms difference is very noticable to me (in regards to buffer settings - the overall system latency is of course slightly greater than that). If you are more of a video or graphics person (or gamer) and latency/cpu/ram isn't as important to you then I'm sure Vista will be ready for you sometime in 2008. For audio folks I doubt it will be before a completely different operating system is available but we'll see. Regardless, for now, there is no way I would suggest Vista for anyone. I don't care how snappy it is, XP is snappier. For now.
On my dual core , 64 bit, 4 GB RAM system at home, I've noticed much better performance in Vista vs when I had XP loaded on it. I use it mostly for gaming, but also some graphics design work.
I can accept that. If I were into graphics as opposed to audio I imagine I might be tempted to switch. Unfortunately for us audio folks Vista is right out at the moment.
Have anyone of you guys tried readyboost in Vista? I haven't checked out Vista yet but supposedly you can use your pen drive as RAM. It's aimed to help more for notebooks because it has expensive memory and slower HDD.
Vista is just a resource hog. If you have a nice computer with a good processor and plenty of ram vista will run nice and fast. I have used about 5 different computers with Vista on it and some are slow and annoying but 2 of my friends laptops with Vista are just sick fast. It all depends on how good your hardware is. If you have one of the bare minimum laptops your always gonna get some sub par performance. Get a good computer with a processor, ram and video card made for it and you will get some nice speed. Of course that doesn't fix your compatibility issues with hardware that doesn't have drivers
I already gave up looking for the XP drivers. I'll just settle with this VISTA crap. It's not too bad only that everytime I use the mouse, because of its slow performance, I feel like my mouse is as heavy like a dumbell. I thought I already saved 200 bucks on this laptop but I'm going to spend a hundred more to get 2 1gig RAMs. Sux!
