I successfully installed Windows Vista on a 4 year old machine

My expectations were not high.

I have installed Windows Vista on all kinds of machines - from my tiny Ultra Mobile PC (with just an 800Mhz CPU) through to quad core 8Gb of RAM beasts.I've also installed on machines of various vintages. Every machine has accepted Vista quite happily. Sure some of the machines weren't powerful enough for the fancy translucent windows (Aero) effects but they worked well nonetheless.

THIS machine however was both old (4.5 years) AND the vendor went bankrupt two years ago. It was quite a powerful machine when I purchased it (with a 3Gig CPU and DirectX capable graphics card) and has been my main media centre since I bought it.

Before going out to dinner with friends on Saturday night I took the plunge.

Note: I'd already taken a full backup of the machine before commencing the installation.

I was pleasantly surprised that after a 30 minute installation the machine came up in Vista with fancy graphics and everything AND IT WASN'T EVEN CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET therefore the ancient video drivers were on the DVD. The only problem was that the audio drivers weren't present.