It’s been a little over six months since I installed Vista on one of my machines. I thought this would be a good time to re-visit Vista and let you know how it’s going. I’ll sum it up for you: pretty screen-savers.

Next time I’ll try not to sugarcoat it so much. I have two machines with Vista installed, one is a home built machine with an E6600 core duo processor and 4 gigs of RAM. The other is my laptop with a a T6600 and 2 Gigs of Ram. I was using the laptop for writing blogs etc… but have switched back to my desktop for that. The home-built machine is used for playing video games.

My gaming machine has a NVIDIA Geforce 8800 GTX video card. This has been somewhat problematic for me. They did not release their vista video card drivers until the end of January. Even then the drivers were beta. There were a lot of driver releases trying to fix crashes etc…. NVIDIA appeared to have problems meeting the WHQL certification from Microsoft. It even appeared they dropped it for a time.

It’s pretty frustrating to have your computer crash all the time. Now, I seem to have passed most of that difficulty and moved on to getting various software to work. This was not very problematic, except on my gaming rig. Many of my older favorite games don’t really like vista. I continually have to start an application by right clicking on it and saying run as administrator. Most will work this way and only crash occasionally but it adds two mouse clicks to starting any application.

I’ve temporarily given up on Vista. To use a technical term, it’s a pig. On my laptop I have two gigs of RAM and often run out when doing anything moderately intensive. I looked at rolling my gaming machine back to Windows XP and needed to pick up a licensed copy. Here is the really telling find…. XP SP2 costs more on ebay than Vista. Apparently a lot of people have come to the same decision as I did and supplies of XP and running low driving the cost up.

If you’re building a new machine you don’t really have a choice unless you feel like making the Linux jump (ouch) or switching to a MAC. Make sure, that you order any new Vista machine with no less than 2 gigs of ram and I would really recommend 4 for back-office staff that are using many cpu intensive applications at the same time.