jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Sat Apr 12 22:34:29 CDT 2008
For about 5 days now I have been working with Vista Ultimate, obtained from the Microsoft 2008 product rollout event the other day. The experience has been a mixed bag but all in all I am pretty impressed with it which to tell the truth I did not expect to be saying. It is "pretty", and if you turn off all the slide outs and fade ins it responds reasonably well. My Dell M90 handles it "OK", with a mid level graphics processor, a dual core cpu and 2 gigs of RAM. The Vista Experience Index is 4.5, which is certainly not stellar but also not too bad, and breaks down as follows: Processor 4.9 Memory 4.5 Graphics 5.9 Gaming Graphics 5.7 Disk 5.4 I am also using the BitLocker full drive encryption and I am amazed at the speed of that. I was expecting a fairly hefty speed hit on the hard drive but it certainly appears not to be so. I can also say that the addition of 2 gigs of a thumb drive for ReadyBoost made a definite difference, things just feel snappier. So much so that I am going to buy a dedicated 2 gig SD flash card to stick in the flash card reader and just leave there. So all things considered I give a cautious thumbs up to Vista on this machine. Vista can be a pain to work with, probably mostly just the learning curve thing but all in all, I like it. -- John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com