I know everyone’s getting ready for Windows 7, but I wanted to share an experience that I had with Vista.
A while back I gave my father-in-law my old socket A system to use to watch DVDs and videos that I brought to him. Recently, I got it back from him to do some work to it…upgrade it a tad with a little more RAM, a bigger hard drive (up from the 9gb he was using), and add a tuner. It now has a Sempron 2800 (2.0ghz) cpu, 768mb RAM, 160gb hard drive, and a 6600GT video card. This time I installed XP Media Center instead of regular XP, in the hopes that I could use the Media Center. After I got MCE set up, I was trying to view ATSC channels. A couple would play fine, but some would lock the entire PC up. The only way to fix it was to restart. I didn’t figure a new install would fix anything, so as an experiment I installed Vista. To my surprise, Vista installed all the correct drivers for all the onboard stuff of the socket A motherboard. And it runs surprisingly well. I’ve heard all of these stories about Vista not working with this or that and how sluggish it is. But I found the system to be quite responsive. Clicking on stuff opened things right up. I got VMC set up, and I was able to view ATSC channels. Even all the guide data and sub-channels were correct. I even tested things out by recording from the analog input and watching ATSC and tried recording from both. Still the system went along just fine. CPU usage was a little high at times, but that’s what I expected. While watching HDTV it would be anywhere from 40% up to 80%. I was quite surprised to see how well Vista performed on this old machine after hearing others’ experiences with much better PC’s.
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