Wednesday, February 07, 2007 11:06 AM Brian S. Tucker

Vista will Require Some to Upgrade Hardware

A lot of people are complaining about how they will have to upgrade their hardware to run Vista properly. I think the answer will depend on how you currently use your computer. You can find the minimum requirements for Vista here. For most, I think RAM will be the biggest hurdle as people will want to take advantage of the Aero Glass functionality. Aero Glass will require you to have a minimum of 1 GB of RAM. Not everyone has that much RAM, but RAM is cheap these days and I think most people will know how to install a memory chip.

 Aero Glass Color Scheme

My dilemma is more common in the IT field. I have a HP laptop that I bought 14 months ago. It has a Pentium 4, 2 GB RAM, 128 MD video RAM, 100 GB hard drive (4200 RPM) and it came with XP. I use my laptop every day and have traveled with it from one side of the country to the other and never had a problem with it. I use Virtual PC to run several images on my laptop at once and can run up to six which gives me a fairly decent lab environment to test products.

I upgraded to Vista Ultimate and have been pleased with the system. However, because of the RAM needed by the laptop and the RAM needed in my Vista VPC images, 2 GB of RAM is no longer enough. Now I can only run 3 VPC images rather than six. Hey - that's a big change! The laptop now uses 98% of the RAM while the images are running and the processor utilization spikes as well. What's the solution?

I bought a new laptop last night and should not have this issue anymore. I bought a fully loaded and customized Dell XPS M1710 with 4 GB of RAM, the best overclocked Core Duo 2 processor, 512 MB video RAM and a 7200 rpm hard drive all running on Vista Ultimate. This one should keep me running smooth for years to come. I figured my current laptop was going to last for years too, but things change right?

I think that the majority of home users won't need a system like the XPS, but for IT professionals, we're going to have to buck up the money and get a system that will perform. I'm not really too upset with the fact that I have to buy a new system. I'm going to have a super fast machine that will simply run the new technology.

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Comments

# re: Vista will Require Some to Upgrade Hardware

Wednesday, February 07, 2007 4:40 PM by wisemx

Does software give birth to hardware or hardware to software nowadays? I'm eager to install Vista Ultimate on my Dev machine, a 3.6 Intel Duo with 2GB, and the only piece of hardware the Upgrade Advisor 'rejected' is my brand spanking new Creative X-Fi, but I'm hoping it was mistaken about that. ;-)

# re: Vista will Require Some to Upgrade Hardware

Wednesday, February 07, 2007 4:58 PM by Brian S. Tucker

Only one way to find out... :)You can always put XP back on.. been there done that myself.

# re: Vista will Require Some to Upgrade Hardware

Thursday, February 08, 2007 9:32 PM by Matt Broadstock

I'm thinking video cards will be more of an issue than RAM. I have a test Dell Optiplex SX280 (1 GB RAM, P4 2.8ghz, 128MB of Video RAM) and it gets a 1.0 perf score on the "Gaming Graphics" and a 1.9 on the normal "Graphics". Apparently those are low enough to make Aero an impossibility. Maybe I just need to get new drivers or something though. Tried DLing 'em from Dell and they must be jacked up or something b/c the Zips don't have the right files in them.

But that is a fairly decent corp machine..if that fails I can only imagine what others fail as well. Installing more RAM is cheap and easy....installing a new video card usually isn't worth the $$--replacing the system makes more sense a lot of times. Aero may be a bad idea in a corp environment anyway though...

# Dell XPS M1710 & Vista Ultimate

Wednesday, February 14, 2007 1:17 PM by Brian Tucker

I posted a few days ago about my Vista experience on my HP Pavillion laptop. I received my new Dell XPS

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