[Mr. Sandman]

I have been a big Unix (many flavors) guy for a long time. Always had windows machines too though just to communicate with the rest of the world. I was involved in the computational Fluid Dyamics world for a while and still dabble now and again...all on unix. That OS is just better for hard core computation as the OS is much smaller and cleaner. Multi-threaded apps run much better under unix. But even with todays linux, IMO it will never be really adopted by the home user. But it is free and they cloned/stole all the MS office stuff as well so it is possible to use unix.


I just replaced my windows office desktop last week with a new intel dual-core dell with vista. I got 4GB of mem and a plenty of disk and a higher end graphics board (just a single board not a dual graphics setup). My overall impression of vista is that is is more polished and more secure but the problem is IT IS FRIGGIN H U G E . The OS alone takes at least a GB of memory!!! I thought something was wrong with my memory, with windows reporting it only had 3 GB, I pulled the memory and re-seated it and it still came back with 3GB....then I went into the BIOS and it reported 4GB is installed. with noting running the OS ALONE takes a full GB. As nice as it is IMO it is a bit bloated. Windows is also not good at dealing with timesliceing when the demand gets heavy. You don't want to run several batch jobs in background and then click on a desktop ap...it will come to a stop. Unix is much better at this.

That said, it works fairly well, is pretty fast but my advice it don't upgrade unless you get a NEW machine. Don't upgrade a sub 3GHz machine with vista. I have to say I am not ***that*** impressed with this performance of the dual core intel, it is snappy but not as lighting fast as I was hoping for. A few months back I upgraded my home server with a fast AMD (with XP) and I think that is snappy, apps jump, the bottleneck is disk speed. And it is inaudable...super quiet.

One thing that annoyed me was that vista what calls "broadband" . Upon setup it was trying to dial-out on its "broadband connection" I have a GB ethernet card and I had to force it to use it by deleting the "broadband connection" and then reconfigure it to use the GB card. Once that was "fixed" things went more smoothly. Overall I like it but what a memory hog!

I am probably going to try the 64bit soon ( on a different workstation platform) and kick the memory up to 16GB to run a couple of larger jobs. I think Vista was made more for 64 bit.

One thing I do like a lot is office 2007. IMO this is much improved and a much more polished look and feel to it. Much more mature esp between office aps. Have not tried everything yet but the basic look is very comfortable. With just the OS and explorer running total memory usage is 1.17 GB, 977 threads and 80 processes...that really is insane. If you get vista on a 32 bit system...go max memory 4 GB you will need it. Running something like Photoshop and Indesign aps which are memory hogs in their own right on top of the OS will gobble up everything you got. If you put it on a 1 year old+ computer and it is not a screamer beware, you will be disappointed.

BTW these Nvida graphics board fans are noisy and need a separate power feed to the board. They are fast and the graphics are great but if you don't need it step it down to a fanless graphics board and you will be happier without the noise.