My Portland Event (again)

One of the other discussions which occurred at my Portland event was around Vista.  As always, there were some lovers and some haters.  I started the discussion and then let the audience go at it.  And, as usual, I was impressed by the different experiences people had to discuss.  While those who don't like Vista were (as they always are) the most verbal, those who liked Vista were (as they have been at all my events) the more numerous.  But, I wanted to point out a blog post that I just finished reading entitled, "Why I suddenly like Vista."  The actual post is, in my opinion (which does not reflect Microsoft's opinion in ANY way), precisely the kind of ignorant drivel I run into every day which seems to be so prevalent with regard to Windows Vista.  The author claims that he can "finally" run Vista because he has a quad-core machine with 8GB of RAM.  The reason I bring this up in relation to my Portland event is because this was one of the questions -- "What hardware is REALLY needed to run Vista well?"  My answer was (as it often is), "it depends."  :)

I have a machine at home which was running Vista Ultimate with 3GB of RAM, which was a very good experience.  I took 2 of those out to upgrade my mom's PC and ordered myself two more.  While those were in the mail, I was running with 1GB of RAM in my system.  Did it work?  Absolutely.  Was it as fast as it had been?  Not always.  It depended on what I was doing.  But, overall, it was still a fine experience.  In fact, it was fine enough that those other sticks of RAM sat on my desk for weeks after they arrived before actually making it into my system.  The only problem I ran into was the inability to launch my virtual machines in Virtual PC.  (This is expected, though, since I had those machines allocated to use 1GB of RAM each.  If you only have 1, you can't really allocate it multiple times.  And this is what finally got me off the couch and forced me to open the new RAM and put it in my machine.) 

So, back to the blog post I mentioned earlier.  Here is a link to the post.  As I said, it's drivel.  Why, then, am I sending you there?  Because of the comments.  Clearly, I am not the only one who finds this article laughable.  Nor am I the only one who finds Vista to be a good OS.  I think the comments are worth reading.  Why take my word for how great Vista is when you can take the words of complete strangers from the Internet?  ;)

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