G
Guest
If anyone with an old(er) Dell is still wondering whether kicking the tires
on Vista is worth it or not I hope to shed some light on it here.
I finally downloaded a good ISO while tired of waiting for the DVD to arrive
in the mail, and installed Vista. I was really apprehensive about it
especially after finding out, through the Vista advisor program that I would
need to find manufacturer's vista drivers for my Samsung multi-function
printer, CNet Pro 200WL Ethernet card and SB Live! Sound card.
Of course, these three manufacturers have no Vista drivers for my devices
nor do they plan on making any according to emails I received. But I went
ahead and installed Vista anyways just to see what the fuss was all about.
The install went smoothly (thanks to all the people here for their tips,
esp. Andre, for checking the MD5 hash and burning at slowest speed) and
before too long I was logging into Vista. Having an older GeForce Ti4200 64MB
video card does not allow me to have Aero Glass or Flip 3D so I'm stuck with
what looks like a crappy visual interface - I hope MSFT will change the Vista
Basic look to something better.
Here is where my fears started to get realised. I had hoped that even
without vista drivers, my Ethernet card would at least install under some
kind of generic (emulation) vista driver to get online and fix everything.
Didn't happen. So I started searching for CNet Pro 200WL XP drivers and
finally found them here
http://www.cnetusa.com/newwebsite/techsupport/driverdownload.htm
I simply unzipped the driver file to a folder on my desktop and then added
the driver manually through Vista device manager. It worked like a charm.
Secondly, a tip from someone here mentioning Creative NGO modified drivers
for Vista also worked great with my old SB Live Value card however the game
port did not get recognised - very minor issue as I don't even use the port
for anything.
And finally, once online, Vista searched and installed drivers through
Windows update for my Samsung multi- function printer and that also worked
great.
After that I installed some of my applications to see how far I can get, and
I must say I'm very impressed. WinRAR, RoboForm, as well as Foxit Reader (PDF
reader replacing the bloated Adobe Acrobat Reader) all worked flawlessly.
I installed PhotoShop Elements 4, despite getting a warning during install
for incompatibility issues, along with Noise Ninja plug-in for it and both
seem to be working fine so far. I've done some photo editing work for the
past day or so without any issues.
AVG anti-virus free version gave me a big flag not to install due to known
issues with Vista so I skipped it in favour of Avast (as recommended by some
here) and that worked great.
My only few issues so far have been a couple of instances where a program
stopped responding but its very infrequent and I haven't been able to
reproduce it at will. Also, my ipod which I occasionally use as a removable
storage, when I click the Remove USB device in the system tray to disconnect
it, it does not disconnect even though it shows it as disconnected in Vista.
I was a little concerned too about speed. It seems very sluggish overall
compared to XP. At times it would take 10 seconds just to open Computer (My
Computer in XP opens in 1 sec). Also, it has 44 or so services running at
start up and about 450MB-500MB of memory being used compared to XP - 20
services and 140MB of memory at start up.
I am however completely impressed by Vista Beta 2 and I'd like to take back
my earlier comments about it being unpolished and too early for public
consumption. Given the way it’s running on my four year old Dell, and its
code not being optimized yet, I'd like to take my hat off to MSFT. I'm
eagerly awaiting its release.
Sorry for the lengthy post.
on Vista is worth it or not I hope to shed some light on it here.
I finally downloaded a good ISO while tired of waiting for the DVD to arrive
in the mail, and installed Vista. I was really apprehensive about it
especially after finding out, through the Vista advisor program that I would
need to find manufacturer's vista drivers for my Samsung multi-function
printer, CNet Pro 200WL Ethernet card and SB Live! Sound card.
Of course, these three manufacturers have no Vista drivers for my devices
nor do they plan on making any according to emails I received. But I went
ahead and installed Vista anyways just to see what the fuss was all about.
The install went smoothly (thanks to all the people here for their tips,
esp. Andre, for checking the MD5 hash and burning at slowest speed) and
before too long I was logging into Vista. Having an older GeForce Ti4200 64MB
video card does not allow me to have Aero Glass or Flip 3D so I'm stuck with
what looks like a crappy visual interface - I hope MSFT will change the Vista
Basic look to something better.
Here is where my fears started to get realised. I had hoped that even
without vista drivers, my Ethernet card would at least install under some
kind of generic (emulation) vista driver to get online and fix everything.
Didn't happen. So I started searching for CNet Pro 200WL XP drivers and
finally found them here
http://www.cnetusa.com/newwebsite/techsupport/driverdownload.htm
I simply unzipped the driver file to a folder on my desktop and then added
the driver manually through Vista device manager. It worked like a charm.
Secondly, a tip from someone here mentioning Creative NGO modified drivers
for Vista also worked great with my old SB Live Value card however the game
port did not get recognised - very minor issue as I don't even use the port
for anything.
And finally, once online, Vista searched and installed drivers through
Windows update for my Samsung multi- function printer and that also worked
great.
After that I installed some of my applications to see how far I can get, and
I must say I'm very impressed. WinRAR, RoboForm, as well as Foxit Reader (PDF
reader replacing the bloated Adobe Acrobat Reader) all worked flawlessly.
I installed PhotoShop Elements 4, despite getting a warning during install
for incompatibility issues, along with Noise Ninja plug-in for it and both
seem to be working fine so far. I've done some photo editing work for the
past day or so without any issues.
AVG anti-virus free version gave me a big flag not to install due to known
issues with Vista so I skipped it in favour of Avast (as recommended by some
here) and that worked great.
My only few issues so far have been a couple of instances where a program
stopped responding but its very infrequent and I haven't been able to
reproduce it at will. Also, my ipod which I occasionally use as a removable
storage, when I click the Remove USB device in the system tray to disconnect
it, it does not disconnect even though it shows it as disconnected in Vista.
I was a little concerned too about speed. It seems very sluggish overall
compared to XP. At times it would take 10 seconds just to open Computer (My
Computer in XP opens in 1 sec). Also, it has 44 or so services running at
start up and about 450MB-500MB of memory being used compared to XP - 20
services and 140MB of memory at start up.
I am however completely impressed by Vista Beta 2 and I'd like to take back
my earlier comments about it being unpolished and too early for public
consumption. Given the way it’s running on my four year old Dell, and its
code not being optimized yet, I'd like to take my hat off to MSFT. I'm
eagerly awaiting its release.
Sorry for the lengthy post.