Tuesday, 12 September 2006

Vista-bility

I've been thinking about getting a new pc for along time now, the trouble is the one i've got despite being ~3 years old works just fine.  The current configuration i have is :

CPU:                Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz
Memory:           1GB
Hard Disk Drives:  30 GB
Graphics Card    Rubbish.Realtek AC'97 Audio


To get Vista's full array of graphical geegaws, you need a Premium Ready PC that has to have a 1GHz 32- or 64-bit processor, 1GB of memory, 40GB of hard drive capacity with at 15GB free space, a DVD-ROM drive and internet access, Microsoft said.   So i'm pretty much there, but i just ran this Vista Upgrade Advisor Tool and it told me i'd be okay to install the new operating system but half the new features will be missing.  Hmmm.  The new features being the "Windows Aero user experience", and everything would run pretty slow.    What to do.

Talking of slow pc's - PCSpy have an article on what programs slow down an operating system the most. 


The author installed several popular applications into a Windows virtual machine in order to determine the slowdown each app added to the system. Each new application was installed on a totally fresh machine, and the tests were repeated 3 times each. The results?

It came as no surprise that antivirus software (in this case, Norton) created the biggest system drag. Beyond that, lots of installed system fonts was the second biggest slowdown, followed by Yahoo's and AOL's chat programs. Obviously you shouldn't get rid of any old program just because it is on this list, but if you want to speed up your PC and you see an application or two you could do without, it never hurts to spring clean abit.

 




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