Anilrgowda

Can't Afford Vista Hardware/Software? Think again
By Jeff Rosado
November 20,2006
It has been said by many people that Windows Vista is just too expensive in terms of the cost of the OS software, and the hardware needed to run it. If you have an older machine and want to upgrade it, this may be true when you figure in the cost of a retail copy of Vista, and the needed hardware upgrades. However, why spend all that money upgrading, when you can easily get a new computer that runs Vista for less than cost of upgrading your old machine?
Case in point - I recently bought a budget laptop for my wife (at Walmart of all places), the cost was $398 USD, and it came with an AMD Sempron 3300, 15.4" Widescreen, 60 GB Hard Drive, 512 MB RAM, and integrated ATI Express 200M graphics. It had MCE 2005 preinstalled, and came with an upgrade coupon for Windows Vista Home Premium.
Now, I was a bit skeptical of how well this machine would upgrade and run Windows Vista Home Premium, and as I have access to Vista RTM, I decided to put it to the test. Before starting, I threw in an extra 256MB stick of RAM from an old laptop I had lying around, but even a new stick could have been purchased for $30 or less. Not wanting to mess with having to reinstall drivers, I decided to go ahead and upgrade the MCE 2005 install, and since I had already removed the pre-installed garbage (ie: Nortons etc.), there were no major software compatiblity issues.
Suprisingly, the upgrade completed without any problems and all devices were installed (the only device that had issues was the synaptics pointing device, which works, but occasionally hiccups - a new driver is promised by retail release time.) Upon booting into Vista, I was happy to see that all the settings and programs had been correctly transferred, and that the integrated graphics easily ran full Aero Glass. Both the integrated NIC, and Wireless worked without problem, and I was networked with full Internet access in no time. Even my Microsoft Wireless mouse installed and worked without any problems




Although the system is not a screaming performance machine, it easily handles multiple programs, I was able to stream video from my other networked machines, and generally performance was as good or better than what it had been in MCE 2005. Wondering how Vista would rate the performance of the system, I decided to run the system assessment tool, and was pleased to see an overall score of 2.6 (the lowest scores being the graphics and memory, although the low memory score was probably due to the fact that the 256 MB stick I put in was PC-2100 compared to the PC-2700 of the main 512 stick.)


Considering the price, the fact that I got a new computer with Vista Home Premium (I cheated and used my own copy of RTM instead of waiting for the free upgrade release), and the fact that this system runs the full features of Windows Vista, I feel that it was certainly a bargain. I think that this definitely puts Windows Vista well within the affordable realm for many people.