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So for the last month or so I’ve been running Windows Vista RC1, trying things out. My primary reason for installing Vista was the installation process. I’m so freaking sick of the crappy Windows XP installer that it’s difficult for me to blog about it without dropping my rating from a PG-13 to NC-17.

Suffice it to say that I’m offended at an installer that doesn’t support years old technology (SATA) without requiring ancient technology (a floppy drive). Vista’s installer has resolved that problem in both ways, first providing full SATA support and second by allowing drivers to be loaded from floppy drives, CD-ROM, and USB storage devices. They’ve also done a few other nice things, like ask almost all of the questions at the beginning so that you can go have a donut while the installation finishes. Review of the installer? Two thumbs way the hell up.

Things start to fall apart a little after installation though, the crux of the entire situation being memory usage. Freshly booted, nothing running, idle, Windows Vista uses about 650 megs of RAM. We’re talking a fresh installation as well, so there’s nothing else running. It’s offensive. My relatively nice computer with a gig of CAS 2 latency RAM was upgraded to a sporty new video card… and game perforance went down after upgrading to Vista! Down!

Simply put, Vista uses too much RAM. Even after disabling every single internal service I could disable without crashing the box: the Defender, the nice new UI, absolutely everything; it still used 430 megs of RAM. Is Vista worth the sticker price? Maybe… I guess… depending on how much you pay. Since I’m a student in the Computer Science department, it’s free, so yeah I guess. However, is Vista worth buying a new computer (or at least a butt-ton of RAM) for? Definitely not!

In fact, I was previously offended enough by the installer that I refused, on all counts to install a floppy drive just to install XP. However, I’ve been having a huge amount of fun raiding in WoW lately, and that is enough. I’m currently downloading SCSI drivers for my SATA controller to copy using a freshly installed floppy disk drive to disk.

Before I had experienced Vista, there was nothing that was going to make me go through the additional work to install crappy ol’ XP. After experiencing Vista… turns out it’s worth the extra work just to stick with XP and not use Vista. How’s that for an ironic turn around? I just got owned.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Reviews, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.