[SLO-BOB]

Originally posted by Halm
It has a 1.7 GHz Centrino processor, 1.5 Gb of RAM and a new 80Gb 7,200rpm hard drive. I think this combo meets the official minimum requirements but is a bit short of what many in the industry would want.

I tried 2 Vista machines. The 1st was an underpowered Sony Vaio that had only 1g of RAM. THey shouldn't even be allowed to sell a unit configured like that. The second was a speedier Compaq Duo-core with 2g of RAM.

The security “nanny” was a real PITA so I just turned that off.

Same here. Major PITA.

It also seems to run a bit warmer. Since I can’t use the Glass video feature I am not sure why that is. . . Or if it is just my imagination.

Probably not your imagination.

There are other differences to be sure but nothing a few minutes of poking around couldn’t overcome.

To me it was somewhat like going from Windows to OSX. Different, but easy enough to figure out.

All in all, I really like Vista. Internet browsing, for example is much faster. Pelican BB in particular performs much, much better. Office 2007 takes some serious getting used to but again with a little patience it is fine.

So, what were you problems with Vista that made you send it back for XP? I would like to try to recreate them so I will know what to expect when working next week. Also, we have a Latitude D500 too and it is a great box so I bet you will like the D520.

I'll reitterate that my criticisms are offered from the perspective of the average user. I am not a computer wizard - just a guy that has used computers for a number of years both for business and pleasure. That said, I too liked the "packaging" of Vista and it's speed on boot-up. I didn't find it any better or worse than XP for internet browsing, however. The problems I had were:

-The 1g Ram machine wouldn't work with Photoshop- at all.

-both machines occasionally would not do a restart when asked. I can't imagine why this would be. They would just sit there in the "Windows is shutting down" mode-forever. That is until I just held down the start button and forced a shutdown.

-Neither machine would accept some of my old (1 year old) software that I rely on. Roxio Media Creator 7 would not load at all.

-Roxio 9 is a dummed down version of 7. It sucks.

-The Nero version of my Roxio that was supposedly "Vista Ready!" was not nearly as comprehensive as the Roxio 7. Also, despite the claim that it is compatible with Vista, alarms went off when I loaded it stating that it has "known compatibility issues with Vista." Once loaded, it did not do half of what Roxio 7 did.

I didn't try to load Office 2003. I like it and feel no need at this point to go to 2007. Call me a ludite, but if it works, why fix it?

-Never did figure out how to network Vista with my home network, but admittedly, I didn't try too hard because the above were deal breakers anyway. Besides-should it be so hard?

I believe that Vista should have been an intuitive, easy to use upgrade from XP. Why change everything around so much? A simple improvement of things that are imperfect about XP would have made far more sense and been a bigger success. And again, I'm far from the only critic of Vista. As told to me by the Best Buy sales personel, Vista machines are being returned in droves. They don't even try to stick people with the 15% restocking fee.