Microsoft Vista
01 October 2007
Vista is settling in nicely after a shaky start.
The story so far...
The first Vista Service Pack (SP1) is available through the normal updates or from MS support and has been installed on the two Vista machines.
SP1 consists mainly of a gathering of all the existing patches.
The main lesson learned so far seems to be that the quoted RAM requirements can do with being increased by 50 to 100%, i.e. 1Gb should be raised to 1½ or 2 Gb. Certainly if you are using Vista 64, 3GB should be the minimum.
We still maintain that if your existing XP PC is working OK, don't risk an upgrade to Vista. In many cases, your existing utility software might not work; in particular DVD writing software has been hit hard and at the club we have had to buy a new DVD writer as the cheapest way to obtain Vista-compatible software. (The software that comes with DVD writers is usually dedicated to that particular drive.) In our case, we transferred the drive to an XP machine so it wasn't wasted.
The lesson is simple, if you really want Vista, buy a new PC.
The other side of the coin is that if you need a new PC, Vista is hard to avoid, although XP based systems are available from suppliers on the internet.
