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Which is why I had steeled myself for pitiful performance when I yanked all but 512MB out of my test system last week and downgraded to Vista Home Basic. With a 2002–vintage CPU and Microsoft’s minimum recommended RAM, running the most basic of Vista retail editions on a 30GB partition, surely this would be a painful experience.
Or not.
You shouldn’t believe everything you read. I was expecting to need Valium and vodka and an on-call therapist to handle Vista Home Basic on this low-end system. Instead, I found a snappy, responsive OS that did everything I asked of it.
* The system booted two seconds faster than it had with all that extra RAM. On average, Vista’s boot time was less than 30 seconds.
* Menus popped up instantly, with no lag or delay.
* My favorite DVD, Blade Runner, played flawlessly at full resolution, in surround sound. (I had to install a DVD decoder first – Vista Home Basic doesn’t include DVD playback capabilities out of the box.)
* I was able to rip a CD, check my Google Mail account on Mozilla Thunderbird, and play a full-screen slide show, all at the same time, without a single skip or hiccup.
* Even installing Norton Antivirus 2007 couldn’t slow things down. The Norton software added 7 seconds to my startup time, but after it loaded, everything worked exactly as expected.
Or not.
You shouldn’t believe everything you read. I was expecting to need Valium and vodka and an on-call therapist to handle Vista Home Basic on this low-end system. Instead, I found a snappy, responsive OS that did everything I asked of it.
* The system booted two seconds faster than it had with all that extra RAM. On average, Vista’s boot time was less than 30 seconds.
* Menus popped up instantly, with no lag or delay.
* My favorite DVD, Blade Runner, played flawlessly at full resolution, in surround sound. (I had to install a DVD decoder first – Vista Home Basic doesn’t include DVD playback capabilities out of the box.)
* I was able to rip a CD, check my Google Mail account on Mozilla Thunderbird, and play a full-screen slide show, all at the same time, without a single skip or hiccup.
* Even installing Norton Antivirus 2007 couldn’t slow things down. The Norton software added 7 seconds to my startup time, but after it loaded, everything worked exactly as expected.
