I have an old Dell Dimension 8200 (original P4 2.26Ghz, 512MB Rambus RAM,
nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB, 2 HD one 80GB and one 60GB), bought in Aug
2002 with WinXP Pro.

Suddenly I realized that I would like to test drive Vista Ultimate so I was
getting prepared, one month ago I bought a new 80 GB hard drive to replace
my older primary one, with eBay helps I could find 1GB of hard to find
Rambus memory, but since they only work with pairs I had to remove 256 MB so
now my computer has 1.256 GB Ram, and finally a couple of days ago I bought
a Diamond Stealth ATI Radeon card with 256 MB ram.

I ran the Vista Upgrade advisor and told me that will be issues with my
network and sound cards (I thought the network card would be a mistake, that
card is almost a commodity, it would be odd that would work in a new OS like
Vista.

So I was ready (or so I thought) and made a clean install of Vista (that
install was smooth, I must add), but after it reboot by the last time I had
no sound and no network (damn!) although Aero work pretty good and the
sidebar looked great (the first gadget I put what the CPU and ram monitor),
because I was very concern about the performance of my computer with Vista.
I got winxp-vista compatible drivers and the network was on again (one
problem over). But to get the SoundBlaster Live 5.1 work on Vista was a real
pain in the .... I had to use 3rd party drivers that only restored 2.1 sound
and no microphone input and since I used Skype a lot that is no good for me,
and they even didn't installed ok, since I recieve an error message
everytime windows starts.

Eventhough I installed my main apps: Office 2007 and Creative Suite 3 Design
(yes, the whole enchilada with Photoshop Illustrator, Dreamweaver and so
on), Pccillin Internet 2007 and I stopped there even I still have to install
Nero 7, just to check the performance.

In the couple of days that I've been using this system I noticed a very high
CPU usage (almost or 100% when I am using apps as basic as IE7), eventhough
a very adequate ram usage (less than 50%). My network connection is very
slow (I have to click several time is a link to reload the page because it
takes a long to load it), I have a DSL 1Mb. and sometimes it stops and
starts again.

Right now I feel dissapointed, bored and tired of Vista and I probably will
go back to XP, but I am wondering if upgrade my memory to 2GB will improve
something since I can not upgrade the CPU nor want to. Maybe I could also
buy an audio card approved by Vista but if my Vista performance won't
improve even with 2GB ram, then better go back to XP and stay that way until
I buy a Mac.

Any hints to improve the performance with Vista or do you think better stay
away from it?

Thx.

There are a lot of ways to improve Vista's performance. I turned off the
Sidebar on my laptop - that saves some percentage of CPU cycles, especially
if you have the slideshow applet running. I also disabled the Windows Search
service - so it would quit hitting my hard disk all the time. I downloaded
Microsoft's utility, Autoruns, to see exactly what gets run on startup and
turned some of it off. I also downloaded TweakVI and used it for some misc.
tweaks.

I'm sure there's more I can do. In your case, don't those Rambus sticks have
to be a _matched_ pair? If so, see if you can find another 1gig stick to
match what you have. Which Radeon card do you have?

I'd also suggest hitting ATI and Creative every week to see if there's new
drivers. I had no idea Creative didn't have drivers for this board...

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

"javier" wrote in message
...
I have an old Dell Dimension 8200 (original P4 2.26Ghz, 512MB Rambus RAM,
nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB, 2 HD one 80GB and one 60GB), bought in Aug
2002 with WinXP Pro.

Suddenly I realized that I would like to test drive Vista Ultimate so I
was getting prepared, one month ago I bought a new 80 GB hard drive to
replace my older primary one, with eBay helps I could find 1GB of hard to
find Rambus memory, but since they only work with pairs I had to remove
256 MB so now my computer has 1.256 GB Ram, and finally a couple of days
ago I bought a Diamond Stealth ATI Radeon card with 256 MB ram.

I ran the Vista Upgrade advisor and told me that will be issues with my
network and sound cards (I thought the network card would be a mistake,
that card is almost a commodity, it would be odd that would work in a new
OS like Vista.

So I was ready (or so I thought) and made a clean install of Vista (that
install was smooth, I must add), but after it reboot by the last time I
had no sound and no network (damn!) although Aero work pretty good and the
sidebar looked great (the first gadget I put what the CPU and ram
monitor), because I was very concern about the performance of my computer
with Vista. I got winxp-vista compatible drivers and the network was on
again (one problem over). But to get the SoundBlaster Live 5.1 work on
Vista was a real pain in the .... I had to use 3rd party drivers that only
restored 2.1 sound and no microphone input and since I used Skype a lot
that is no good for me, and they even didn't installed ok, since I recieve
an error message everytime windows starts.

Eventhough I installed my main apps: Office 2007 and Creative Suite 3
Design (yes, the whole enchilada with Photoshop Illustrator, Dreamweaver
and so on), Pccillin Internet 2007 and I stopped there even I still have
to install Nero 7, just to check the performance.

In the couple of days that I've been using this system I noticed a very
high CPU usage (almost or 100% when I am using apps as basic as IE7),
eventhough a very adequate ram usage (less than 50%). My network
connection is very slow (I have to click several time is a link to reload
the page because it takes a long to load it), I have a DSL 1Mb. and
sometimes it stops and starts again.

Right now I feel dissapointed, bored and tired of Vista and I probably
will go back to XP, but I am wondering if upgrade my memory to 2GB will
improve something since I can not upgrade the CPU nor want to. Maybe I
could also buy an audio card approved by Vista but if my Vista performance
won't improve even with 2GB ram, then better go back to XP and stay that
way until I buy a Mac.

Any hints to improve the performance with Vista or do you think better
stay away from it?

Thx.

Rambus RAM, matching pairs are required. if you have 2 - 1gig sticks it'll
make a huge difference with Vista, not sure how you're getting what you got
down there. I would go back to your 2-256mb sticks for now.

Vista is gonna run slowly, so turn off Aero, sidebar, etc. Your video card
is pretty last gen, not sure if it'd be worth the investment to upgrade it
at this point as you'll have to get an AGP card and if you ever decide to
get another PC chances are good it won't have a AGP slot in it. Maybe if you
can find a used last gen card like a 7900 GS AGP for cheap you can snatch
that up.

SBLive 5.1, I haven't tried to use my Audigy 2 in Vista yet, but I know
Vista will accept Windows XP drivers. So pretend you're in Windows XP when
downloading drivers, you might have to right click on the driver files and
set compatibility mode to WinXP SP2. I've heard SB cards just aren't quite
ready for Vista, not sure what to suggest as an alternative, but I know Best
Buy sells a generic sound card for $30 (Dynex label) and has a 30 day return
policy.

As for your Geforce card, go to nvidia.com (not ati) click download drivers,
and follow the prompts.

As for your Apple desires, good for you, given what you want to do, OS X is
a good choice. See if you can hold out til Leopard.

-a.

"Dana Cline - MVP" wrote in message
...
There are a lot of ways to improve Vista's performance. I turned off the
Sidebar on my laptop - that saves some percentage of CPU cycles,
especially if you have the slideshow applet running. I also disabled the
Windows Search service - so it would quit hitting my hard disk all the
time. I downloaded Microsoft's utility, Autoruns, to see exactly what gets
run on startup and turned some of it off. I also downloaded TweakVI and
used it for some misc. tweaks.

I'm sure there's more I can do. In your case, don't those Rambus sticks
have to be a _matched_ pair? If so, see if you can find another 1gig stick
to match what you have. Which Radeon card do you have?

I'd also suggest hitting ATI and Creative every week to see if there's new
drivers. I had no idea Creative didn't have drivers for this board...

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

"javier" wrote in message
...
I have an old Dell Dimension 8200 (original P4 2.26Ghz, 512MB Rambus RAM,
nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB, 2 HD one 80GB and one 60GB), bought in Aug
2002 with WinXP Pro.

Suddenly I realized that I would like to test drive Vista Ultimate so I
was getting prepared, one month ago I bought a new 80 GB hard drive to
replace my older primary one, with eBay helps I could find 1GB of hard to
find Rambus memory, but since they only work with pairs I had to remove
256 MB so now my computer has 1.256 GB Ram, and finally a couple of days
ago I bought a Diamond Stealth ATI Radeon card with 256 MB ram.

I ran the Vista Upgrade advisor and told me that will be issues with my
network and sound cards (I thought the network card would be a mistake,
that card is almost a commodity, it would be odd that would work in a new
OS like Vista.

So I was ready (or so I thought) and made a clean install of Vista (that
install was smooth, I must add), but after it reboot by the last time I
had no sound and no network (damn!) although Aero work pretty good and
the sidebar looked great (the first gadget I put what the CPU and ram
monitor), because I was very concern about the performance of my computer
with Vista. I got winxp-vista compatible drivers and the network was on
again (one problem over). But to get the SoundBlaster Live 5.1 work on
Vista was a real pain in the .... I had to use 3rd party drivers that
only restored 2.1 sound and no microphone input and since I used Skype a
lot that is no good for me, and they even didn't installed ok, since I
recieve an error message everytime windows starts.

Eventhough I installed my main apps: Office 2007 and Creative Suite 3
Design (yes, the whole enchilada with Photoshop Illustrator, Dreamweaver
and so on), Pccillin Internet 2007 and I stopped there even I still have
to install Nero 7, just to check the performance.

In the couple of days that I've been using this system I noticed a very
high CPU usage (almost or 100% when I am using apps as basic as IE7),
eventhough a very adequate ram usage (less than 50%). My network
connection is very slow (I have to click several time is a link to reload
the page because it takes a long to load it), I have a DSL 1Mb. and
sometimes it stops and starts again.

Right now I feel dissapointed, bored and tired of Vista and I probably
will go back to XP, but I am wondering if upgrade my memory to 2GB will
improve something since I can not upgrade the CPU nor want to. Maybe I
could also buy an audio card approved by Vista but if my Vista
performance won't improve even with 2GB ram, then better go back to XP
and stay that way until I buy a Mac.

Any hints to improve the performance with Vista or do you think better
stay away from it?

Thx.

.... and turn off the cpu sidebar gadget ! running a memory hog all the
time to monitor memory usage is very counter productive.


"Andy" wrote in message
...
Rambus RAM, matching pairs are required. if you have 2 - 1gig sticks it'll
make a huge difference with Vista, not sure how you're getting what you
got down there. I would go back to your 2-256mb sticks for now.

Vista is gonna run slowly, so turn off Aero, sidebar, etc. Your video card
is pretty last gen, not sure if it'd be worth the investment to upgrade it
at this point as you'll have to get an AGP card and if you ever decide to
get another PC chances are good it won't have a AGP slot in it. Maybe if
you can find a used last gen card like a 7900 GS AGP for cheap you can
snatch that up.

SBLive 5.1, I haven't tried to use my Audigy 2 in Vista yet, but I know
Vista will accept Windows XP drivers. So pretend you're in Windows XP when
downloading drivers, you might have to right click on the driver files and
set compatibility mode to WinXP SP2. I've heard SB cards just aren't quite
ready for Vista, not sure what to suggest as an alternative, but I know
Best Buy sells a generic sound card for $30 (Dynex label) and has a 30 day
return policy.

As for your Geforce card, go to nvidia.com (not ati) click download
drivers, and follow the prompts.

As for your Apple desires, good for you, given what you want to do, OS X
is a good choice. See if you can hold out til Leopard.

-a.

"Dana Cline - MVP" wrote in message
...
There are a lot of ways to improve Vista's performance. I turned off the
Sidebar on my laptop - that saves some percentage of CPU cycles,
especially if you have the slideshow applet running. I also disabled the
Windows Search service - so it would quit hitting my hard disk all the
time. I downloaded Microsoft's utility, Autoruns, to see exactly what
gets run on startup and turned some of it off. I also downloaded TweakVI
and used it for some misc. tweaks.

I'm sure there's more I can do. In your case, don't those Rambus sticks
have to be a _matched_ pair? If so, see if you can find another 1gig
stick to match what you have. Which Radeon card do you have?

I'd also suggest hitting ATI and Creative every week to see if there's
new drivers. I had no idea Creative didn't have drivers for this board...

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

"javier" wrote in message
...
I have an old Dell Dimension 8200 (original P4 2.26Ghz, 512MB Rambus RAM,
nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB, 2 HD one 80GB and one 60GB), bought in Aug
2002 with WinXP Pro.

Suddenly I realized that I would like to test drive Vista Ultimate so I
was getting prepared, one month ago I bought a new 80 GB hard drive to
replace my older primary one, with eBay helps I could find 1GB of hard
to find Rambus memory, but since they only work with pairs I had to
remove 256 MB so now my computer has 1.256 GB Ram, and finally a couple
of days ago I bought a Diamond Stealth ATI Radeon card with 256 MB ram.

I ran the Vista Upgrade advisor and told me that will be issues with my
network and sound cards (I thought the network card would be a mistake,
that card is almost a commodity, it would be odd that would work in a
new OS like Vista.

So I was ready (or so I thought) and made a clean install of Vista (that
install was smooth, I must add), but after it reboot by the last time I
had no sound and no network (damn!) although Aero work pretty good and
the sidebar looked great (the first gadget I put what the CPU and ram
monitor), because I was very concern about the performance of my
computer with Vista. I got winxp-vista compatible drivers and the
network was on again (one problem over). But to get the SoundBlaster
Live 5.1 work on Vista was a real pain in the .... I had to use 3rd
party drivers that only restored 2.1 sound and no microphone input and
since I used Skype a lot that is no good for me, and they even didn't
installed ok, since I recieve an error message everytime windows starts.

Eventhough I installed my main apps: Office 2007 and Creative Suite 3
Design (yes, the whole enchilada with Photoshop Illustrator, Dreamweaver
and so on), Pccillin Internet 2007 and I stopped there even I still have
to install Nero 7, just to check the performance.

In the couple of days that I've been using this system I noticed a very
high CPU usage (almost or 100% when I am using apps as basic as IE7),
eventhough a very adequate ram usage (less than 50%). My network
connection is very slow (I have to click several time is a link to
reload the page because it takes a long to load it), I have a DSL 1Mb.
and sometimes it stops and starts again.

Right now I feel dissapointed, bored and tired of Vista and I probably
will go back to XP, but I am wondering if upgrade my memory to 2GB will
improve something since I can not upgrade the CPU nor want to. Maybe I
could also buy an audio card approved by Vista but if my Vista
performance won't improve even with 2GB ram, then better go back to XP
and stay that way until I buy a Mac.

Any hints to improve the performance with Vista or do you think better
stay away from it?

Thx.

Cal Bear '66 just posted this. Soundblaster drivers available today:
http://us.creative.com/support/downloads/

"KDE" wrote in message
...
... and turn off the cpu sidebar gadget ! running a memory hog all the
time to monitor memory usage is very counter productive.


"Andy" wrote in message
...
Rambus RAM, matching pairs are required. if you have 2 - 1gig sticks
it'll make a huge difference with Vista, not sure how you're getting what
you got down there. I would go back to your 2-256mb sticks for now.

Vista is gonna run slowly, so turn off Aero, sidebar, etc. Your video
card is pretty last gen, not sure if it'd be worth the investment to
upgrade it at this point as you'll have to get an AGP card and if you
ever decide to get another PC chances are good it won't have a AGP slot
in it. Maybe if you can find a used last gen card like a 7900 GS AGP for
cheap you can snatch that up.

SBLive 5.1, I haven't tried to use my Audigy 2 in Vista yet, but I know
Vista will accept Windows XP drivers. So pretend you're in Windows XP
when downloading drivers, you might have to right click on the driver
files and set compatibility mode to WinXP SP2. I've heard SB cards just
aren't quite ready for Vista, not sure what to suggest as an alternative,
but I know Best Buy sells a generic sound card for $30 (Dynex label) and
has a 30 day return policy.

As for your Geforce card, go to nvidia.com (not ati) click download
drivers, and follow the prompts.

As for your Apple desires, good for you, given what you want to do, OS X
is a good choice. See if you can hold out til Leopard.

-a.

"Dana Cline - MVP" wrote in message
...
There are a lot of ways to improve Vista's performance. I turned off the
Sidebar on my laptop - that saves some percentage of CPU cycles,
especially if you have the slideshow applet running. I also disabled the
Windows Search service - so it would quit hitting my hard disk all the
time. I downloaded Microsoft's utility, Autoruns, to see exactly what
gets run on startup and turned some of it off. I also downloaded TweakVI
and used it for some misc. tweaks.

I'm sure there's more I can do. In your case, don't those Rambus sticks
have to be a _matched_ pair? If so, see if you can find another 1gig
stick to match what you have. Which Radeon card do you have?

I'd also suggest hitting ATI and Creative every week to see if there's
new drivers. I had no idea Creative didn't have drivers for this
board...

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

"javier" wrote in message
...
I have an old Dell Dimension 8200 (original P4 2.26Ghz, 512MB Rambus
RAM, nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB, 2 HD one 80GB and one 60GB), bought
in Aug 2002 with WinXP Pro.

Suddenly I realized that I would like to test drive Vista Ultimate so I
was getting prepared, one month ago I bought a new 80 GB hard drive to
replace my older primary one, with eBay helps I could find 1GB of hard
to find Rambus memory, but since they only work with pairs I had to
remove 256 MB so now my computer has 1.256 GB Ram, and finally a couple
of days ago I bought a Diamond Stealth ATI Radeon card with 256 MB ram.

I ran the Vista Upgrade advisor and told me that will be issues with my
network and sound cards (I thought the network card would be a mistake,
that card is almost a commodity, it would be odd that would work in a
new OS like Vista.

So I was ready (or so I thought) and made a clean install of Vista
(that install was smooth, I must add), but after it reboot by the last
time I had no sound and no network (damn!) although Aero work pretty
good and the sidebar looked great (the first gadget I put what the CPU
and ram monitor), because I was very concern about the performance of
my computer with Vista. I got winxp-vista compatible drivers and the
network was on again (one problem over). But to get the SoundBlaster
Live 5.1 work on Vista was a real pain in the .... I had to use 3rd
party drivers that only restored 2.1 sound and no microphone input and
since I used Skype a lot that is no good for me, and they even didn't
installed ok, since I recieve an error message everytime windows
starts.

Eventhough I installed my main apps: Office 2007 and Creative Suite 3
Design (yes, the whole enchilada with Photoshop Illustrator,
Dreamweaver and so on), Pccillin Internet 2007 and I stopped there even
I still have to install Nero 7, just to check the performance.

In the couple of days that I've been using this system I noticed a very
high CPU usage (almost or 100% when I am using apps as basic as IE7),
eventhough a very adequate ram usage (less than 50%). My network
connection is very slow (I have to click several time is a link to
reload the page because it takes a long to load it), I have a DSL 1Mb.
and sometimes it stops and starts again.

Right now I feel dissapointed, bored and tired of Vista and I probably
will go back to XP, but I am wondering if upgrade my memory to 2GB will
improve something since I can not upgrade the CPU nor want to. Maybe I
could also buy an audio card approved by Vista but if my Vista
performance won't improve even with 2GB ram, then better go back to XP
and stay that way until I buy a Mac.

Any hints to improve the performance with Vista or do you think better
stay away from it?

Thx.

Touché! :-)

"KDE" wrote in message
...
... and turn off the cpu sidebar gadget ! running a memory hog all the
time to monitor memory usage is very counter productive.

According to Creative, my card SBLive 5.1 is under No Future Development
plans to make Vista drivers.

So my question is: Do you think it would be worth to get one 1GB ram more to
make vista work better or because of my P4 2.26Ghz processor Vista won't
work no matter what?

"Charles W Davis" wrote in message
...
Cal Bear '66 just posted this. Soundblaster drivers available today:

I'd say your CPU is fine, but it would definitely be better to get a matched
pair of Ram sticks...

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

"javier" wrote in message
...
According to Creative, my card SBLive 5.1 is under No Future Development
plans to make Vista drivers.

So my question is: Do you think it would be worth to get one 1GB ram more
to make vista work better or because of my P4 2.26Ghz processor Vista
won't work no matter what?

"Charles W Davis" wrote in message
...
Cal Bear '66 just posted this. Soundblaster drivers available today: