No way. Windows 7 Beta is much better than Vista.
My Vista also has 4G and I’m happy with its performance generally. Heck, even my old one which I upgraded to 2G from its original 512M is fine for most apps, and for playing DVDs–even downloading such content from the internet. But when I work with programming tools and software like Ruby, SQL Server, and Visual Studio, I see why, after more than two years, Vista has failed to gain a foothold in the enterprise market.
I give MS some credit. Windows’ dominance in the home computer market, oppressive though it may be, has served to enforce a high degree of similarity on software across a dizzying array of different domains and applications. When I use a Windows program, I always know where to go to copy, paste, or create something. But damn! Where else is it standard business practice to take away functionality from a product? For example, Write, the word processor that shipped with Windows 3.x, was great for most written documents; certainly those that a student would be expected to produce. Wordpad today has far less capability, although they do generally give you Microsoft Works, which does not work well with Office, or any other damn thing
Another vote for clear the bloatware.
That and try to keep in mind, performance and laptop are generally mutually exclusive, or extremely expensive.
I have Vista installed on my old PC. It has an ancient socket 478 Pentium 4 @ 2.6GHz with 2GB RAM and an ATI X1800 AGP graphics card
It has absolutely no difference in desktop and office applications performance from my other more modern dual-core computer.
I have found that Vista is pretty much happy for me on anything with more than a single 2.4Ghz core and 2GB of RAM.
By the same token, I’ve found that Dell Studio laptops are dogs from the factory but a fresh install perks them right up–except for a run of really shitty internal bluetooth adapters.
Thank Og I didn’t order bluetooth.
I only have 2G RAM and have zero problems at this point for what I do. I uninstalled McAfee by going to the website, then bought AVG and installed it. It’s almost completely unobtrusive.
Blow it away, reinstall.
Avast AV is pretty good, you only have to register it.
If you want, Windows Firewall is pretty good in Vista, or you can go for a free one also like Camodo.
What’s UAC?
User Access Control.
It’s the thing that pops up that asks you to concel or allow a files to run.
AV will always be necesary though, UAC has been exploited in the past, and some people even turn it off completely. UAC + Firewall + AV really is the best defence.
User Account Control. Basically, the thing in Vista that pops up and asks you to confirm when you decide to do anything dangerous (run an executable, delete certain things, etc. etc.). Unfortunately, they made it waaaay too intrusive, and the majority of people who know how simply turn it off.
Microsoft are caught in a trap of their own making, really. Ideally they would move to a model where no-one ran with admin rights all the time. Unfortunately, so much software out there requires the user to be an admin (including Microsoft’s own Visual Studio) that migrating to such a model is proving really rather difficult. Points for trying though, I s’pose. Apparently they’re dialling down some of the UAC annoyingness in Windows 7 (which is pretty much Vista + a bunch of interface improvements).