«  
  »

Another Testimonial on Vista

Got a hand-me-down laptop from work.  They “cascade” computers with new models and toss the old ones in a closet until they decide what to do with them.  I usually beg for the good boxes to use at home and cascade my own setup.  So this time I got a laptop instead of a desktop.  A Dell Latitude C-610.  1.2 GHz CPU, with a 30GB drive, 1GB RAM, a CD/RW drive, and the usual trimmings.  No built-in wireless.  No DVD drive.

I first loaded XP SP2 on it and Office 2003 and some typical crap like WinZip, Acrobat Reader, etc.  The results were typical: slow as hell.  Everything was slow.

I plugged the LAN cable in again and pointed over to a shared DVD drive on another computer with the Vista DVD in the tray.  Ran the upgrade setup.exe and let it rip.

Oh my God. The results are incredible! The speed of boot-up, launching apps, shutting down, hibernating, even surfing the web, are all noticably faster.  It also doesn’t act quirky like it was with XP (IE7 kept hanging and I’d have to do a hard shut down).

I bought a Linksys Wireless-G network PC card for it and plugged it in.  The Linksys CD-ROM driver setup went fine, but Vista didn’t let it work when it was done.  Everything looked fine, but all the options were grayed out.  Couldn’t change or set anything.  Then I pulled that driver and let Vista find it’s own.  Works perfectly!  I’m sold.

December 7th, 2006 | Category: Microsoft, techy-geeky

2 comments to Another Testimonial on Vista

  • Dan
    February 12th, 2007 at 8:26 am

    Did you have any joy finding graphics drivers for the laptop? I can’t find any Vista Radeon Mobility drivers :(

  • sKatterBrainz
    February 12th, 2007 at 10:30 am

    Actually, no. I heard from MS beta team that an additional 11,000 or so drivers had been posted the day after the official launch. That brings the total certified driver count to almost 2.5x that for XP when it launched. The bigger problem for me was that the motherboard on the laptop died. I’m waiting on a semi-new Dell to try again. I’ll let you know. On another note, my HP inkjet multifunction printer (PSC 1315x) works fine, but the HP Desktop Manager app does not. That means I cannot scan using the HP interface. Kind of sucks, but I don’t scan very often.

You must be logged in to post a comment.