fazaal24
05-08-2007, 08:53 PM
I got this in an other forum....
I am a Vista owner now
Well, I finally got my first real experience with Vista. Bought a PC with a 3.46-something GHz CPU and 512MB RAM. Runs Vista Home Basic. It is for my 7 year old's birthday, so didn't need the 64-bit processor, or Core 3 Triple. http://www.neowin.net/forum/style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif However, my 'out of the box' experience was rather surprisingly unpleasant. While the parental controls settings were a great idea, and seemed easy to find and use, when I enabled them with the weak content filtering (only lower step was "none"), no connection could be made. Not to Google.com. Not to Microsoft.com. Turned it back off, and the kid accounts would go online again. Left myself as the first (administrator) user with password. Kid accounts are just click and go, but are restricted users. The UAC prompts were much more obnoxious than what I was used to with my Linux box, where I could authorize myself and perform the tasks, then relinquish my assumed authorities. I should have counted all the prompts I had to deal with in initial setup, but I really didn't think it would be that annoying. Granted, when everything is all set up, I don't think that I would be running into all those prompts much. But initial impressions of that feature matched Apple's "Cancel or Allow" commercial very much.
I also see that 512MB is a Microsoft-recommended (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx) minimum for a reason! Vista was not very peppy at all, and on a CPU over twice as fast as my AMD 1600+ (running at stock 1200MHz), I guess my expectations were a bit... more. I don't doubt that adding another stick of RAM to bring it up to 1GB RAM would boot performance an awful lot, but I didn't buy a $200 discount box. It was $500 for the CPU tower, and we did not need the monitor (I have plenty of extras at home). A good low end PC, without scraping the bottom of the computing barrel, I think. Something many cost conscious buyers would get for themselves, or for a young kid. At that price point, I felt that the performance should have been a bit better.
But this isn't my PC. It is for my 7 year old. Does he like it? I don't know. He is spending his play time with his new Nintendo DS, and has only looked at the PC and said "cool", before running off to play some Pokemon game. http://www.neowin.net/forum/style_emoticons/default/ermm.gif
At least this will keep him from using my wife's PC when he wants to play one of his online games...
I am a Vista owner now
Well, I finally got my first real experience with Vista. Bought a PC with a 3.46-something GHz CPU and 512MB RAM. Runs Vista Home Basic. It is for my 7 year old's birthday, so didn't need the 64-bit processor, or Core 3 Triple. http://www.neowin.net/forum/style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif However, my 'out of the box' experience was rather surprisingly unpleasant. While the parental controls settings were a great idea, and seemed easy to find and use, when I enabled them with the weak content filtering (only lower step was "none"), no connection could be made. Not to Google.com. Not to Microsoft.com. Turned it back off, and the kid accounts would go online again. Left myself as the first (administrator) user with password. Kid accounts are just click and go, but are restricted users. The UAC prompts were much more obnoxious than what I was used to with my Linux box, where I could authorize myself and perform the tasks, then relinquish my assumed authorities. I should have counted all the prompts I had to deal with in initial setup, but I really didn't think it would be that annoying. Granted, when everything is all set up, I don't think that I would be running into all those prompts much. But initial impressions of that feature matched Apple's "Cancel or Allow" commercial very much.
I also see that 512MB is a Microsoft-recommended (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx) minimum for a reason! Vista was not very peppy at all, and on a CPU over twice as fast as my AMD 1600+ (running at stock 1200MHz), I guess my expectations were a bit... more. I don't doubt that adding another stick of RAM to bring it up to 1GB RAM would boot performance an awful lot, but I didn't buy a $200 discount box. It was $500 for the CPU tower, and we did not need the monitor (I have plenty of extras at home). A good low end PC, without scraping the bottom of the computing barrel, I think. Something many cost conscious buyers would get for themselves, or for a young kid. At that price point, I felt that the performance should have been a bit better.
But this isn't my PC. It is for my 7 year old. Does he like it? I don't know. He is spending his play time with his new Nintendo DS, and has only looked at the PC and said "cool", before running off to play some Pokemon game. http://www.neowin.net/forum/style_emoticons/default/ermm.gif
At least this will keep him from using my wife's PC when he wants to play one of his online games...