- Average user rating: 1.5 stars out of 74 reviews Back to product review
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Full user review
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17 out of 18 people found this review helpful
2.0 stars
"Not worth it. Wait until the SP for vista comes out and make sure you have a powerhouse of a machine"
Pros: Not many. Eye candy if your hardware can handle it
Cons: Unstable Beta drivers for a lot of hardware, IE7 is just unusable, "feels" slower than XP. Tries to "fix" itself too much for its own good.
Summary: I have vista ultimate so basic is probably even less worth it. I had medium hopes for vista but even with low expectations, after using it for about 2 weeks now I am still disappointed. My machine is a P4 3.2Ghz, 1GB RAM and Radeon X800 128. One of the most basic things, the start menu is just terrible. When you click on "Programs" in XP, it pops up in an instant. In vista there is a very noticeable and annoying delay. When playing counterstrike the OS blue screens (yes, blue screens) on me and of course restarts. Sure, this is probably due to the beta ATI drivers but come on, why a complete OS crash?? Same thing when testing the webcam from my pinnacle video capture card (to be fair, also non-vista drivers). Vista has a "self-fixing" feature which tries to determine when a program has stopped responding and then tries to "find a solution" for this problem and, of course, never finds a solution for it and just kills the program. Most annoying is that it pops up an alert telling you it is trying to find a solution and my windows sidebar constantly has this problem and thus I constantly get popups. I'm not even gonna talk about IE. Just use firefox. I'm gonna stay on vista since slowly better drivers are coming out and I'm still hopeful it will improve. I understand that a lot of the problems are due to vendor drivers and MS is not fully responsible for that but the native vista features also just don't perform acceptably.
If you are buying a new computer, of course, get vista. All the hardware will likely work fine. If you are just looking to upgrade XP, hold off until you see a lot of good user reviews. You are not missing anything from vista.
- 3 replies to this review
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I am glad to read your last paragraph, because I just ordered a new Notebook and it comes with Vista preinstalled. After reading all the reviews, I was already worried that I had made a big mistake.
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I know Microsoft had said you need 1 GB of RAM for the minimum requirements for Ultimate, but, windows will run EXTREMELY slow and there will be a very big lag when opening applications. Your computer must have at least 1.5 GB to stand a change at running Ultimate and 2 GB to run smoothly. But you should get Home Premium as your computer should run that with ease!
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If you're using Vista Ultimate you need more memory, the min system req is 1 GB.
Where to buy
Microsoft Vista Home Basic:
$89.29 - $199.99
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$199.99 | Yes |
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$119.99 | Yes |
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$119.98 | Yes |
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$93.46 | Yes |
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$89.29 | Yes |
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