I have Vista running on:
Mrs. Garrett’s Dell Notebook (lower end Inspiron) – it came installed
My new desktop (Intel E6600, 2GB RAM, 512MB video, 2 500GB SATA 3.0 drives)
I also have XP running on:
An older Dell Precision Workstation 530 (1.5GB RAM, 18GB 15K SCSI drive, 2x1.7GHz Xeon Processors)
My work PC (Dell Dimension 9150 Dual Core w/4GB RAM)
I also have a MacBook Pro 17" – brand new. 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD.
The Mrs. has no issues with her notebook. She opens it up and it finds the Internet within a couple seconds. It runs Word. She’s happy.
I have some weirdness with my new desktop running Vista.
[ul]
[li]Office Visio 2007 is constantly updating.[/li][li]After a while, things started running SLOW and the hard drive is churning away constantly. A reboot usually fixes this.[/li][li]Can’t do more than two things that read or write to a disk and expect them to be quick. E.g., I can only unRAR 1 archive at a time and expect it to be reasonable.[/li][li]Certain programs prevent me from using Windows Aero – anything produced by Apple.[/li][/ul]
I run the entire Adobe CS2 suite, MS Office 2007, several diagnostic programs (Everest, MBM), Firefox, and others. No compatibility problems to report here.
But Vista is a dog, and for functionality’s sake, I don’t see it being a marked improvement over XP – especially for a technical type. The thing requires like 20GB of disk space just to install.
Other negatives: The new Resource Monitor (found under Task Manager) doesn’t show me anything particularly useful beyond the normal task manager. The easily-accessible MS firewall dummy interface is useless as well – to find the more advanced one was a chore (under Administrative Tools).
Positives: It’s pretty.
(The Mac on the other hand kicks ass. It’s my first Mac and I’m digging its simplicity and intuitiveness.)
The two XP machines I have fly – no problems whatsoever.