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We got an upgrade copy of Windows Vista Business at work, so I decided to take it for a spin on my rarely used laptop.  The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 600m which is going on three years old…  not exactly new but not exactly obsolete either.  It’s got a 1.4 Ghz Pentium M, 512 MB DDR RAM, and a 32MB ATI Radeon Mobility 9000. 

Anyway, I’m telling you all this because Vista runs like crap on this system, which was a pretty big shock to me.  When it’s idle it uses 2/3 of my available physical memory.  I decided to drop $95 on a new 1GB DIMM to try to remedy the issue… I can tell that the machine is constantly hitting virtual memory which is painfully slow because of the cheap laptop drives that Dell uses. 

Also, despite my best efforts I could not get the Windows Update version of my ATI driver to install.  ATI in their infinite wisdom has decided not to provide Vista drivers for my card via their website, and the WU version would timeout before the installation finished.  I had to boot into safe mode just to get it installed.  In safe mode, Vista uses the old-school Windows theme and performance seemed much better, so I may give that a shot… although it is painful to give up all the cool new features.  I haven’t been able to check out Aero (the 3D flashy features of Vista) because my graphics card doesn’t support it.

All the performance issues aside, Vista seems pretty cool.  There’s a bunch of new software included and the look and feel is definitely much cooler.  I really enjoy the changes around the control panel… so much easier to actually control and monitor your PC and its processes.  The new Resource Monitor is fantastic… that was something that was definitely needed… Task Manager’s Performance tab was never robust enough for people like me who obsess over performance.

Screenshots below…